Life at The Ledge: Skateboarders Soar, and Wait for New Park

By JULIA WELLS

It's a weekday afternoon in downtown Vineyard Haven, and the
sounds of early autumn are all around. On Centre street, a narrow side
lane that angles steeply west of Main street, a light breeze ruffles the
canopy of venerable old shade trees. But on this day there is also
another, more distinctive sound in the air. It's the whack of
composite hitting pavement, followed by the low thunder of wheels
rolling.

Welcome to The Ledge - a bumpy patch of sidewalk where
Vineyard skateboarders gather to practice their occult craft of
kickflips and ollies, railslides and fakies.

It's an unlikely bunch.

Nate Sprague is 16 and a junior in high school. Fair-skinned, with
an unruly thatch of brown hair, he has a slow, disarming smile. His
sidekick and star student is Ben Luckey, an 11-year-old with a long
blond mop and a twinkle in his eye.

Nate is sparing with his words; Ben is quite the opposite.

"So it's not much of an exciting story," Ben tells
a reporter who wants to know about skateboarding on the Vineyard. The
remark carries a hint of challenge.

Travis Myers is 13, sawed-off and wiry, built like he was born to
play second base. He wears a baseball cap pulled low on his head. Chris
Conklin is 16, tall and dressed in baggy jeans and a long gray T-shirt.

Nate is the undisputed master. Ben is Nate's disciple. Travis
and Chris are buddies and still learning, but among all four there is a
clear atmosphere of support. Like anything else, skating is all about
practice, and the kids give each other a lot of space. When a trick
doesn't work, that's okay and when it does - even part
way - there are whoops of support all around.

"Sick line, dude," Ben says. It's an observation
he makes frequently.

For the uninitiated, a line is a bunch of tricks in a row. An ollie
is a jump performed by tapping the tail of the skateboard on the ground.
A kickflip is this amazing move where the skater flips the board
underneath his feet during a brief second of being airborne, and then
lands on the board right side up - well, hopefully right side up.

Ben and Nate play a game called skate - it's like the
basketball game of horse - where one person does a trick, and the
next person must match the trick or take a letter.

The scene is punctuated by cars driving up Centre street, but the
skaters have constant car awareness and an intuitive ability to
incorporate traffic into their flow.

"Car," one calls out to another, and the skater moves
aside between two parked cars to let a small burst of traffic go by.

Maybe it's the easygoing Vineyard attitude, maybe it's
because the street is so narrow that cars are forced to crawl, but
somehow it all works and the passing motorists do not appear perturbed
at sharing the street with the skaters. Some even smile.

Ben shares the geography of a few secret spots after exacting a
promise that this information will not appear in the paper.

"We've been kicked out of a lot of places," he
says.

But there is happy news for the burgeoning population of Island
skaters: A new skate park is under construction across the road from the
Martha's Vineyard Regional High School.

It's been a long time coming.

"Now we are finally able to say that it's months, not
years away," says Elaine Barse, president of the Martha's
Vineyard Skate Park and the owner of the Green Room, a Vineyard Haven
shop that caters to skaters, surfers and snowboarders.

Skateboarding first began as a California fad in the 1960s when
surfers began to skate in empty swimming pools.

In the 1970s skate parks were built all over California, but by the
1980s many parks had begun to close, in part because of liability
problems. Skaters were forced onto the streets and soon skateboarding
was cloaked in an image of urban punks on dope.

Today there is a new image for skateboarding as a healthy and
creative activity for young people - insurance liability laws are
more sophisticated and skate parks are now a fixture in communities
throughout the country.

On the Vineyard the work to build a skate park has been a grass
roots, Island affair.

It began several years ago when Sean Welch, an Edgartown resident
and avid skater, built a ramp for skateboarding at the Edgartown
Boys' and Girls' Club.

The ramp got a lot of use, but then one January it was destroyed in
a storm. The budding group of Island skateboard enthusiasts decided it
was time to look for a permanent home.

"What we needed was someplace with no neighbors, centrally
located, accessible," Ms. Barse recalls.

They went to the regional high school committee and asked for a
piece of land.

It took a couple of years, but persistence paid off and in the end
the skate park group got what they needed: a small piece of land
adjacent to the ice arena. The regional high school committee gave the
land to the town of Oak Bluffs, which will own and manage the skate
park.

But the land was just a start - the park also needed money.

Two years ago voters in five of the six Vineyard towns agreed to
collectively put $20,000 toward the skate park. Vineyard Haven,
Edgartown and West Tisbury each kicked in $5,000; Chilmark voted to
contribute $3,500 and Aquinnah put in $1,500. (Oak Bluffs was not asked
for money because it is the host town for the park).

The money was to be funneled through the county, but because of a
bureaucratic logjam, the group still has not received the funds.

Along the way there were bake sales and concerts, and money began to
accumulate. But not enough.

Then recently an anonymous donor gave the group $20,000.

It was a gift from heaven.

"Without it we wouldn't have been able to open,"
Ms. Barse says.

"It's all really exciting  - you spend so much
time doing bake sales and sometimes you think you are never going to get
there. We are definitely the unsung charity," she adds.

"We've been under the radar," agrees Rich Hammond,
treasurer for the skate park.

"But the amount of enthusiasm for this thing is absolutely
incredible - everyone is going, ‘Oh boy, it's about
time, it's so cool.' I think it's great because there
isn't a whole lot on the Island for kids who are interested in
sports but don't want to play on a team," he adds.

Mr. Hammond's son began to skate at the age of eight and is
now a freshman in college. He says skating has a new following on the
Vineyard among the eight to ten-year-old set.

The total cost of the skate park is pegged at about $160,000. Ms.
Barse and Mr. Hammond say about $60,000 more is needed - so the
money from the towns, when it comes, will give the group a good boost
toward the finish line.

Yesterday the giving streak continued when the Permanent Endowment
Fund for Martha's Vineyard announced a gift of $5,000 for the
skate park.

At the new park site, the trees are down and work is well underway.
The park will include a halfpipe, a custom concrete pyramid with waves
and a street course. Josh Flanders is the general contractor for the
project, and other Vineyard contractors too numerous to name have
donated time in a variety of ways. Many of the young skaters have also
done work at the site, helping to shovel dirt and do other jobs.

Back at The Ledge, the skaters gather again after school. Lance
Fullin, 17, and Adam Downing, 15, join the group (Adam says he's
really a biker). A photographer arrives. Travis pulls his helmet out of
a backpack with a quick grin and a confession - his mother has told
him he can't have his picture in the paper without a helmet on.

An empty trash can is turned on its side in the street, and the
skaters begin to practice doing ollies over the can.

Later they take a break and sit on the low wall that gives The Ledge
its name. There is a brief discussion about gender. Why don't
girls skate?

Ben's response is developmentally correct.

"Girls are lame," he says.

Next subject.

The group decides to move to the Tisbury School, where there are
concrete steps and they can practice jumps.

Nate and Ben begin to practice jumping off the steps, but there is
sand on the landing pad. A snow brush from the back seat of a
visitor's car becomes a makeshift broom. Sand is the enemy of
skaters. "Gives you holes in your hands," Nate says.

Soon the skaters have attracted a small audience, mostly
neighborhood kids on bikes. Passing cars slow down to catch a glimpse of
the tricks.

The afternoon wears on and the sun sinks low in the western sky, but
the skaters are unflagging. Nate has torn his pants, he's got
holes in his hands, and still he can't stop trying to perfect a
kickflip off the steps. He goes for it one more time, lands on the board
- almost perfectly - and then rolls softly onto the pavement.
Now he's on his back, smiling and talking to the sky.

"Man, am I going to sleep well tonight."