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Planet Interview: Taking it to the Streets, the Hills and the Pit Bulls Urban Adventurer Talks About his 25-Year Skate Through the Urban Wilderness of Oakland (Page 2 of 6) As I continued this task, it slowly occurred to me to try to achieve some sort of completeness. I would say that about 10 years ago I began entertaining the idea of IP: So as the end came into view, you started skating more? TM: Exactly. In the beginning I would go skating maybe once a week. Remember, just for exercise. Toward the end, it got up to 3 or 4 times a week. IP: So is it the sheer mileage that’s the real achievement here? TM: No. 3,000 miles in 25 years is nothing. Any of your readers could do that. Your speed skaters probably do that much in a year of training and competition. I dunno. For me, there are two noteworthy aspects to the achievement. First, there is the elevation factor. Almost half of Oakland is moderately to extremely hilly. (Remember the big Oakland hills fire about 10 years ago? It’s those hills. ...) So half the time, I was coping with some fairly significant slopes. Up hills, down hills, that sort of thing. A typical skate might involve something like 1200 vertical feet of climbing and descent. That, I think, is what I’ll remember most about this quest. The second noteworthy aspect is that some of the neighborhoods in what’s called East Oakland are fairly rough. Economically depressed, rampant unemployment, gangs, drug dealers, prostitutes and pimps, all the standard urban ills. Going into those neighborhoods was a fairly daunting proposition. IP: How did you manage that? TM: Good question. Keep in mind that I was skating in areas that I had not previously skated. So I was, to put it mildly, concerned about skating those rougher neighborhoods. The breakthrough came when it occurred to me that a friend of mine who is a public defender probably had clients in some of those areas. So I asked him how he managed the task. He told me that he usually went there in the mid- to late-mornings, while the "baddies" were still hung-over or sleeping off the excesses of the previous night. So I arranged always to hit the streets in these areas about 10 a.m. That seemed to work. IP: You were never hassled? TM: Thankfully, no. I did of course see groups of youths hanging around, but — to be perfectly honest — a guy whizzing by on skates is really not a threat to their “territory”. Maybe if I was 20 years younger they would have bothered me. Or maybe I just got lucky. One funny story: once as I was skating through East Oakland, a guy started yelling at me. I’m usually listening to my iPod while I skate, so at first I couldn’t really hear what he was screaming. For some reason, I pulled the headphones back so I could hear him; he was yelling “What’s your shoe size?” Now of all the things for someone to be yelling at me while I’m skating through East Oakland, that was probably the most unexpected. It turns out that he had a pair of skates he never used and wanted to see if they would fit me. He just gave me the skates, a pair of K2’s. Incredible.
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