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."