alternative hippopotamus

Today was about as nice as things get on an early winter day in our fair city. I had made up my mind after an exploratory trip yesterday that I couldn’t let the Christmas break go by without skateboarding on the bike path from Roslyn, VA.

The original concept was to take the path out to Roosevelt Island, come back to Key Bridge, and skateboard into Georgetown. The point being that Metro to Roslyn, and then skateboarding over Key Bridge is probably the simplest way of getting into Georgetown. (It’s a long story. But getting into Georgetown is a pain in the neck.)

What should be the simplest way is taking Metro to Dupont Circle, skateboarding down P St., and then through Rose Park. The reason that this doesn’t work is that bike paths in DC proper are in very poor condition. Which is an understatement. Saying that DC bike paths are in poor condition, is like saying Dick Cheney has problems with openness.

I’ll just emphasize here that we’re not talking about parts of DC that are often victims of neglect. If the Rose Park bike path were in Anacostia, we’d uniformly shake our heads and say “This isn’t right. I demand Mayor Fenty make it his business to get this fixed. ”

Amazingly, we’re talking about Dupont Circle going into Georgetown. Why this part of town has bike paths in a state of neglect I can only call post-apocalyptic is beyond me.

Anyway, I ended up bagging Georgetown this trip. Here’s what happened. I took the path to the Roosevelt Island turn-off, and thought “Man, oh man, this is pretty sweet.” So, I kept going. The path gets a bit rougher after Roosevelt Island, though, and soon, I was looking for the nearest spot to get off the path. So, I high-tailed it across the Parkway, taking the Arlington Memorial Bridge to the Lincoln Memorial. By the deep ruts in the grass, I could tell I wasn’t the first to take this shortcut.

For those of you not familiar with the local geography, there are three bridges crossing the Potomac from Virginia into DC: Key Bridge, Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, and Arlington Memorial Bridge. (Okay, there are other bridges, but they don’t figure into this post.) The bike path on the Virginia side has a fork in it south of Roosevelt Island. The branch to the right goes over the Roosevelt Bridge to the Kennedy Center. The branch to the left goes under Memorial Bridge, past the airport, and into Old Towne. There may well be some official way of getting from the bike path to Memorial Bridge, I’ve just never found it.

Here, a note on equipment is in order. I use a standard skateboard, but with longboard wheels (Kryptonics 62mm, 78a). A better match for the bike paths would be a longboard with, say 70mm wheels. I’ve got my eye on this Sector 9 longboard, as an example. Because the terrain along the Potomac is flat, a larger wheel is definitely worth looking at.

Standard skateboard wheels, on the other hand, would be a total drag on the bike paths, and problematic on the bridges. I would not recommend it at all. On the other hand, a 56mm/medium hardness skateboard would work just fine on Pennsylvania Ave or thereabouts. Freedom Plaza is another thing, entirely. It’s totally made for skating. I mean real skateboarders who can do the shape-shifting required of the sport. What I do is better described as “urban longboarding.”

Back to the bike path. Once you cross Memorial Bridge (kind of rocky, but still fun) you’re at the Lincoln Memorial. The sidewalks here were resurfaced recently, and consequently, are very sweet. The angle from the Lincoln Memorial down to Constitution Ave is just right for a leisurely downhill gait. It’s moments like this when a skateboard feels just like a magic carpet, with occasional bumps as it goes over the cracks in the pavement.

Also worth noting here is that there’s a stretch of asphalt sidewalk on Constitution between 23rd st and 19th st that’s been recently repaved. You step on the magic carpet, push off, and effortlessly, you’ve moved 4 blocks.

Because the knot of visitors today was so, well, knotty, I walked up a couple of blocks to E St. and took that to the White House. I don’t normally visit this part of E St., but you know, it’s nice. I took a breather on a park bench, looking at the local park and the buildings, and I’ve got to say this is a pleasant part of town.

There was a huge crowd around the White House and the Corcoran Gallery (there’s an Ansel Adams exhibit that’s about to close) so I hoofed it up to Pennsylvania Ave., skateboarding near the White House and through Lafayette Park. I wasn’t sure if I could skate on the closed-off section of Pennsylvania Ave, and there may be some kind of laws against it, but I saw an in-line skater with a hockey stick, and thought I was probably less threatening an apparition than him.

So, I skateboarded in front of the White House today. That’s something I should put in my scrapbook.

All, in all I travelled about 3 or 4 miles. Over a 2 hour period. So, I didn’t set any land-speed records. But, it was a superb trek through our fair city. I have the weary old bones to prove it.

There’s an old saying: When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. I think it may be from the Torrah. At any rate, it wasn’t from anyone who’s been Christmas shopping recently.

Waiting in line yesterday at the Best Buy a woman burst into the store. She apparently had bought a stove with the promise it would get installed by Saturday. Since it was Sunday, and she still had no stove, I gathered Best Buy had let her down. So, she was understandably upset. She ranted for a while at the top of her lungs, and everyone tried to ignore her, but it was no small feat.

I’m saying this to introduce a painful subject, the story about how House and Senate Intelligence knew about our government torturing prisoners, but kept quiet about it. This is from people who should have known better. At the highest elected level in our government. Obviously, I expect nothing from Bush, Cheney, or anyone on their staffs. But, I do expect better from Pelosi, Rockefeller, Harman, etc. The going that got tough in this case, was my understanding of the nature and ethics of our political leaders.

What do you do when the going gets tough? Going shopping just doesn’t seem like the answer in this case. Not in the two weeks before Christmas, anyway.

I go skateboarding. Maybe that’s how Lloyd Kahn got into it:

Above is Lloyd Kahn with his skateboard. If you don’t recognize the name, Kahn popularized the use of geodesics in home-building, particularly in the Whole Earth Catalog. His work came up last night on Tom Brokaw’s show on 1968. The show reminded me about reading an article about how he had taken up skateboarding (actually, longboarding) at age 65.

While I’m younger than 65, I’m no spring chicken. So, stories like Kahn’s inspire me. His life appears to be of the sort that Thoreau once wrote: Why are we in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music that hears, however measured, or far away.

You can find Lloyd Kahn’s blog here.

(The title of the post is an allusion to the Tony Hawk: Proving Ground computer game set partly in DC. I’m just saying it would be kinda fun if it extended to the DC urby-suburbs such as Bethesda and Silver Spring.)

Above is a picture of the sidewalk you’ll find for a stretch of about a mile north and south of Bethesda center on Wisconsin Ave. This has to be one of my favorite surfaces for skateboarding/longboarding anywhere in the District. I’m guessing it’s actual brick, but it could be a synthetic surface, as the ride is a lot smoother than cobblestone typically is. Note also that grain of the brick is at a 45 degree angle to the direction of motion. That means you don’t get that “ka-donkadong,ka-donkadonk” sound that you get on a sidewalk with standard-issue cracks. That also means that it’s less-likely you’ll get your front wheel caught in the flotsam and jetsam of urban debris. Not to mention the sad state of our area sidewalks.

I should also mention that my skateboard is using the same wheels I have on my longboard, 62mm/78a Kryptonics, so my ride is smoother than standard skateboard wheels, at the cost of the 180 degree spins I never plan to do.

What I really appreciate about the good people of Bethesda about for putting in this surface is that part of the fun of urban skateboarding is being able to use it to do every day things. Like getting from the Metro to shopping. And, to do it in style.

Which brings me to Silver Spring, that other great urban outpost of Montgomery County, MD. The refurbished city center of Silver Spring has something similar to Bethesda’s brick pavement, except they put some goop on top of it. I’m pretty sure that it’s to protect against the weather, but the effect is that it’s fantastic for skateboarding. Indeed, my earliest efforts at skateboarding were on these very sidewalks. The only drawback is that downtown Silver Spring is crowded pretty much all the time. So, you have to get your nerve up a bit, lest you wipe out on a downhill taking out hand-fulls of nearby pedestrians like so many bowling pins. That could be a bummer.

Alas, Elsworth Street, the one with all the shops and restaurants on it, forbids skateboarding. One day I hope that when skateboarding in DC becomes as organized as WABA, we’ll fight to take back streets like Ellsworth. Until then, I plan to stay bitter about it.

Yet, there’s some great places for skateboarding/longboarding in Silver Spring and its environs.

Before I go any further I want to thank the folks that put together silverspringtrails.org. Their site explained a number of things that had confused me for a number of years. While the trails they describe were probably put together with bicycling in mind, in many ways they’re better for skateboarding. The important thing is they put together a very useful and informative site. From across the internets, a hearty Thanks!

If you traipse across the vast expanse of the Silver Spring downtown from the Metro, you may have noticed that there is an asphalt path along with the faux cobblestone that I’m so fond of, going from Colesville Road up to Whole Foods. As I now understand, that’s the Green Trail, and eventually it will go out into the suburbs for another .7 miles where it will hopefully meet up with another trail.

Here, I really have to ask: whose idea was it for the Green Trail to pass in front of the entrance and exit to the Wayne Street garage? For the uninitiated, the Wayne Street garage is a 7 story lot shared by the shops, businesses, and Marriot Hotel of Silver Spring. It’s huge. And constantly busy. I’m just saying that if you haven’t seen anyone biking the Green Trail lately, it’s because it’s a suicide mission.

Now that I’ve got the Green Trail out of the way, I want to highlight a more vast project: the somewhat in progress Metropolitan Branch Trail. Here’s the concept: a refurbished transit center, described in this Washington Post article. Then, a bike (i.e., skateboarding) trail going from the transit center, mostly following the Red Line Metro into Union Station.

(I’ll pause here only to note that the current bus station, a major terminus in the Metro/Ride-On/MARC system, is the kind of thing that urban planners across the planet use as a bad example. It’s not really anyone’s fault, it just evolved over the years, as more people used the transit system, and as Georgia Ave., Colesville Road, 16th Street, and East West Highway became a substantial route for commuters, that the disaster unfolded.)

That’s right, before the long parenthetical I said a bike path going from Downtown Silver Spring to Union Station.

If you ride the Red Line, you can even see fits and starts of the path. The most substantial is the bit going from Montgomery College, Takoma Park to the Takoma Metro. That’s the path that I wiped out on last Spring. And, I’d do it again. It’s a really nice downhill stretch lasting, maybe, half a mile. There’s also a bit close to the New York Ave Metro stop that the homeless are starting to camp out on.

Here I’ll point out that as a skateboarder, I’m very excited by all this. As a bicyclist, I’m puzzled. Let me explain. The big problem, speaking as a bicyclist, is getting from Silver Spring to 14th Street. 14th Street has a very nice bike lane which takes you through U Street (very nice, indeed), close to Adams Morgan (again, very nice), and eventually to the Mall and environs (perfect for a weekend jaunt.) Getting from Silver Spring to Union Station would be very nice if I were a Supreme Court Justice who lived in Silver Spring. Of which there are none. It would also make sense if I could take my bike on Amtrak. The fact that I can’t, is just a bit of a sore point, by the way.

As a skateboarder, on the other hand, I want to be able to take the Metro somewhere, and then skateboard to places not well served by the Metro. So, as I say, I’m pretty excited.

Above is a pic of Montgomery College, Rockville MD campus taken this afternoon. I understand if it doesn’t seem particularly auspicious. Let’s see if I can make it more interesting.

There is a minor piece of trivia about this campus: this was the fictitious home base of the mock-documentary/horror flick “The Blair Witch Project.” But that’s not why I’m bring it up. It’s the best location for longboarding I’ve found anywhere in DC.

The wide berth of the parking lot allows me to get fairly impressive speed on my longboard without bailing out. Instead I can carve uphill and regain control. Then I can pick up speed on a successive run without worrying about going so fast that my brain explodes.

Roughly speaking, my brain explodes around 10 mph. That’s the point that I start to panic, wave my arms around and start swearing. On a narrow downhill run I’d try to jump off the board. At ten mph it’s pretty tough to hit the ground running, which means that you’ll scrape the pavement with your kneepads for a few yards. Assuming you were wearing knee pads. Again, that’s the beauty of lots like this, you turn uphill, regain composure and take it up a notch.

It’s like snowboarding without the price of a lift ticket. At some point I hope to get proficient enough that my brain will explode at 15 mph, 20 mph, etc. I have no doubt that the lot allows for speeds in that neighborhood.

I wanted to take a moment and review how I got here. I wasn’t trying to take up a new hobby, or live out some middle-aged fantasy. I just thought it would be funny. And maybe something I could make a documentary about.

Next: How I got here.

Commuter Dudes Mount Skateboards:

Fred Mahe, a 36-year-old software salesman, twists his tie into a neat knot while riding his skateboard up Madison Avenue from his home in the Financial District to his office at 42nd Street and 3rd Avenue. “It’s like a magic carpet,” he said of his trusty transport. “You just kind of stand on it and it goes.”

Mr. Mahe doesn’t ride to work every day (“Some days it’s all you can do to find your way to the train,” he said), but he has joined a contingent of late–20-something and 30-year-old skateboarders who are riding the concrete waves of New York and Brooklyn on planks of wood atop polyurethane wheels.

These aren’t the young skate punks of Union Square, grinding on railings and clattering down concrete steps at bone-breaking speed. These are guys with mortgages, iPhone bills and maybe wives and children, who find time to skateboard to and from work or cruise through Central Park on the weekends. They’re indulging in nostalgia for a childhood pastime (Hello, Peter Pan? It’s Wendy calling!) while convincing themselves it counts as cardio.

Yes, the tone is a bit snarky. But the line about riding a magic carpet is right on. The article also makes a distinction between longboard riders (older) and shortboard riders (annoying kids). I have a long board, but it’s use is limited to long bombing runs in Montgomery College. (If you’re reading this and are in the FBI, “bombing” refers to a run where you’re picking up as much speed as possible, preferable on a hill where you can turn back against gravity to slow down, instead of crashing at 35 mph into the nearest dense object. No WMD are involved, whatsoever.) My board of choice is a shortboard with the softer longboard wheels. The tail gives you options for maneuvering that you just don’t have on a standard longboard.