It was my first time not only away from
home, but away from adults as well. My friend Chris and I packed a
few things into his utility van that his father used for his
carpeting business, and we drove to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It is
what we called a skate trip. The weekend before summer ended and
school began, we grabbed our boards and fled the state. We had no
plans of purchasing any kind of hotel or motel room, and would not
have been old enough to do so anyways. It was just the two of us in
a van headed into the unknown. Perfect.
When we arrived in Portsmouth, we
immediately headed straight for the epicenter of our skateboarding
fantasies. It was an indoor skate park named Rye Airfield. Twenty
thousand square feet or so of skate park glory. We spent the rest of
the day there, treading every inch of the park that we dared to grind
or kickflip on and sweating our butt off. As the day wore on, funds,
or rather a lack thereof, pushed us back onto the streets. And the
streets are where we spent the rest of our trip. It was the freedom
of going and doing whatever we felt like that dilated our pupils. We
were free for once, and it was awesome. Even if free, and awesome,
meant no bed in which to sleep.
We realized soon after that all that
freedom had made us stink to high heaven. With no place to stay but
the back of Chris' van, we searched for an alternative. We settled
on utilizing the Holiday Inn's pool as our personal bath tub. But we
had not brought any swimming trunks, so we searched out a local
Walmart. The racks of the store yielded little, however, as the only
trunks we found were the left-overs from summer. A rack full of XXXL
swimwear. Now I am a guy of about 5 feet 8 inches, and Chris was
only a few inches taller. Yet here we were pulling up the largest
shorts we had ever seen.
We went to the front desk and asked for
a couple towels. They had no idea that we were camping out in their
parking lot, not their rooms. We then made it to the pool and
descended into the waters. Our shorts expanded with air like
hovercraft pillows, taking on the shape of giant lily pads. It was
truly one of the most hilarious moments of my life. The pool was
more than an adequate bath.
The rest of our journey was just as
memorable. The next day we ate lunch with a local rapper and his
baby at their house in Lynn, MA. We grabbed the train into Boston
and got kicked off the City Hall grounds. And we had a great time
skateboarding all over downtown. My love of history allowed me to
see our adventure as a clash of modern culture with the distant past;
our skateboards rolling over refurbished, two hundred year old
cobblestone streets.
We rolled into my driveway after two
days of freedom with a fuel needle down in the basement below “E.”
It was a journey I will never forget. An adventure that shaped who
I am.
Yeah, but no--this is the story of a trip without it being a real story. You string together a lot of things that happened in chronological order, so so far, so good. But a story has to do more. It has to offer a problem, a challenge, a struggle, a triumph or a failure. There has to be a stake on the table.
ReplyDeleteThe closest you come to that here, I'd say, is the thread of money and how you finessed that with the XXXXL trunks and the pool, but that really isn't the central thing here, so while you do well what you intend to do ( a straightforward recounting of events), I don't think you do well what the week asks for: a narrative.