Sometimes our feelings of doom and gloom about modern life are exaggerated. I learned this years ago when I was a teacher. I’d hear people complain about how the kids are illiterate, overly sensitive, and addicted to their digital devices—how America has become the land of the risk-averse eunuch. However, this was contradicted by my experience in the classroom. Kids still read books, are social and active, and have strong and passionate desires, romantic and otherwise.
They can also do beautifully idiotic, dangerous, gloriously graceful feats of risk and fun that swells you with delight about the greatness of America. Such is the case with the “Halloween Hellbomb,” the annual Halloween video posted by the skateboarding media company Thrasher. Here we have a cavalcade of young dudes, most of them in Halloween costumes, shredding, jumping, rail sliding, doing Ollies and defying gravity as they launch themselves off ramps one wild afternoon in California. Most stick their landings. Many don’t.
It’s a euphoric and erotic dance. The star of the show is a guy dressed up as the Joker. His model is the Heath Ledger version, and he embodies the character’s anarchic glee and athleticism as he dances on air and slides down the rails in his makeup, green hair and red suit. In one hilarious segment he sticks his trick only to be instantly followed by a guy dressed up as Batman, who also nails his landing. Other riders who’d been watching from the sideline spill down dirt walls to join the action. When daylight fades, torches are brought out. It’s like some wild pagan festival.
What Norman Mailer called “the shadow life of the nation” still lives. “Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life,” Mailer wrote in Esquire in 1960, “and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical, and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.”
In his recent book The Amphibious Soul, filmmaker and journalist Craig Foster offers a remedy for depression, anxiety, resentment and loneliness that plagues modern life. We must regain some of our wild side. Foster grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. While filming the documentary My Hunter’s Heart (2010), he traveled to Namibia to film the traditional nomadic life of Khomani San tribe. The tribe hunted giraffe over several days, and at the end, he participated in a ritual dance lasting “through the night and into the following day as the people sang and celebrated the success of the giraffe hunt.” That spirit is with the Halloween Hellbombers as torch light illuminates their flights of defiance. Skateboarding is an American original creation. We still have what Winston Churchill called “a wildness in the blood."
A bleak moments in American history came in 2020, when the city of Los Angeles filled the San Clemente and Vent skate parks with sand to prevent the spread of Covid. It was a bummer and crazy bureaucratic overreach. Yet the best reaction came from Jaime Owens, a writer for the website Skateboarding. “Having your local skatepark filled with sand is a bummer, I feel you,” he wrote, “particularly when you have no clue when it’s going to get cleaned out. But the moral of the story is, I don’t really give a shit and neither should you. San Clemente is my local park, and I want to skate it as badly as all the skaters who freaked out about the sand, but it’s still there. They didn’t bulldoze the damn thing, and one of these days it’ll be skateable again (no, Johnny, sand can’t hurt the concrete).”
I’ve always been a street and neighborhood skater more than a skate park rider, and Owens’ final point is inspired: “But, more importantly, when did we let our skateboarding get regulated by whether some skatepark is open or not? There’s so much other shit to go skate, and skateparks are a luxury, not a right. Where I grew up in the sticks, we didn’t have a park within a half-day’s drive for the first 15 years I skated. So we skated every hill, curb, and parking lot we could find. We even—wait for it, kids—BUILT OUR OWN RAMPS. With wood and nails and stuff; sometimes we even procured that stuff legally!” He reminds riders that “skateboarding is about freedom, but it’s also about three key letters: DIY. Make what you want to skate if it’s not out there already. It’s easier than you think and it may not be perfect, but that’s kind of the point.“