David Jasper sig.jpg

The suggestion for this weekly column’s new name, “Dropping In,” came from longtime Bulletin music contributor Ben Salmon. Ben doesn’t skate, but it’s a fitting suggestion for two reasons:

The first is that because that’s pretty much my approach in writing this column week to week. Since the column quietly launched in the spring, I’ve dropped into subjects including roundabouts, the conditions that cause our streets to form cracks and why the hell do people in the right lane speed up in passing zones? I have also written about things besides cars, but don’t count them out: I’ve yet to write a treatise on the way white cars flourish on Bend’s roads. (Really. Sometimes I’ll see, like, five or six white unrelated vehicles driving in a row. Conspiracy? California transplants? Are white cars really easier to keep clean, as my friend insists? In what universe? Doesn’t everything make white paint look dirty? What the heck am I talking about? Exactly!)

Second, and the real reason I think “Dropping In” is so apt, is my lifelong love of skateboarding. Dropping in is what we call beginning a run on a ramp or a bowl. The first time I tail-dropped from the top of the first of several increasingly large homemade vert ramps friends and I built in my yard when I was a kid, I compared the feeling to dropping in on a wave at Waimea Bay.

Never mind the ramp was only 8-feet tall and I could barely stand in 2-foot choppy shorebreak on a surfboard. It was a thrilling downhill descent, nonetheless.

I’ve been clinging to that feeling for much of the past 40 years, though my skate roots reach back even farther, the 1970s when it was a big fad and everyone had a plastic board to play around on. I consider my real start to be when I got my first modern board in May 1983.

So much has been said and written about the merits and benefits of skateboarding. I can’t think of an activity that is so equally divided between exercise, play, personal limit-pushing and socializing. Agility, cardio, reflexes, strength, balance, flexibility and impact — God, the impact — all come into play with skating. Is it a sport, activity or lifestyle? It’s all of those things, I suppose.

Just landing a new trick can be like a microcosm of a major creative project, with a whole story arc and setbacks and, hopefully, breakthrough and accomplishment. You may go home empty-handed, but even then, you at least rolled around with your friends and laughed a bit.

Skating even provided me an entry point to writing. In the ’80s, skate zines were a critical means of communication among the skateboarding underground, a way to broadcast news from our local scenes to others whose zines we sent away or traded for. When my friend Rodger, an artist and skater, decided to put together a skate zine — The Grim Ripper — I said I’d gladly write something for him to run in it.

Rodger, like my Bulletin editors, thought the column could use a name. I tended to write about things germane to our local subculture (read: my pet peeves in rant form), so he called it “Dave’s Page of Rage.” He even ran a 2-year-old yearbook photo of me for an accompanying headshot. With my unflattering haircut and generic shirt from The Gap, it functioned like a caricature.

I loved writing my rants and liked seeing the fruits of my typewriting labors in print. Sometimes people read them and had responses, an aspect I also appreciated.

The Grim Ripper didn’t last long, but it was a great experience. I never really stopped writing, just like I never stopped skating. In college, a psych professor in my final quarter took a shine to an essay I’d written and told me I should keep writing “whether in psychology or wherever,” which I came around to thinking didn’t sound like a bad idea at all.

As for skating, I still do that, too, albeit not on a professional basis. However, I expect my phone to ring any second now with an offer from some skate company offering to turn me into a professional.

Let me just turn my ringer up a little.

Oh, I know! They probably sent an email, but Gmail deemed it spam.

Sigh. I must have accidentally deleted it.

Anyway, while that pro skateboarding career is buffering, I think I’ll heed my long-ago psych professor’s words and just keep writing.