Welcome back to the Letters. We're here in Orange, California with this cooked egg
plant, Josh Borden, for the Burt Ramp in his backyard. Not too many people build
Burt Ramps anymore, especially in their backyard. So this letter is going out to
the old Krusty Burt Ramp and all the wonderful sessions that used to go down
and sometimes still do.
All the skate parks from the 70s closed down because of the fucking insurance
problem. There's this giant void in skateboarding. The industry doesn't really
know what to do, so back up ramps are popping up. They're just trying to keep
skateboarding alive, man, so you know, kids started building shit in the
backyards and that was the genesis that blew up from there.
The East Coast Burt scene was insane, so we're gonna try to get some footage of
some of these East Coast Rippers for your viewing enjoyment.
We became a tight-knit group, man, of survivors, you know, and that's when we
started making zines to communicate with others as to what's going on, if there's
gonna be a contest at a ramp, just to, you know, reinvigorate everybody, like,
hey man, we're still doing it, you know. Yeah, the whole DIY punk ethos. Yeah, we're
so tight-knit and we're just pushing each other, man, you know, charge it, you know,
and just various splintery wooden ramps, you know. You had Hell Ramp, that's
Maryland, and then you got Cedar Crest, and there's really why I want to do the
love letter because I'm a big fan of Cedar Crest. It's the biggest regret I
have in skateboarding is that I didn't go to Cedar Crest because I was so fucking
in love with it. This is Cedar Crest Country Club. Things like this don't go on all around the country. This is a special privilege that we here have.
The early ones, they were all, all wood, and splinters were deadly, and wood breaks down
real quick, you know, you put wood sideways at first, it was real slow, then we
put it vertically and soaked the sheets and water, remember that, to get it to
bend. This was all like kids just picking up skill saws, trying to figure it out.
We're polarized, east and west here, so we forgot there's a whole land in the
middle. So we need Darren to fill in the gap. The Midwest. No one thinks about the
Midwest. I think about the Midwest because I'm from the Midwest. I don't know, is it,
is it intimate, okay, to use in the skateboarding thing? Because it was just
intimate to go there, and there was five people, six people. It wasn't about trophies,
it wasn't about stadiums, it was just, it was backyard, it was just, it was
outcast. And every ramp you went to, it didn't matter where on the map, whether
it was fucking Europe or Indiana, you know, you're walking into a
crew of six to ten dudes, you know, with maybe three or four real serious dudes.
Six to ten if you're lucky. If you're lucky.
Morris Wainwright, he's gonna try to educate us on East Coast because I'm
just a West Coast kid, and I didn't really get to spend too much time back in
the vert headache back there. Tell the people what you know. What do you know?
Oh, I'm at ramp, so that's what we did, because that's what we had with the
peace supply, with the sticks to prop it up, and then we built like another stick
to prop it up a little higher, and then I think at the last year I was in high
school was like 80, we made it a half pipe. You know, you start hearing about more
and more ramps, like, you know, an hour away, two hours away, and the community
just kept building, and we just started like traveling with other people's ramps
and building more and more, and then slowly but surely this whole kind of ramp
network, I guess, kind of like punk rock, like there were there were cliques of
dudes. We got our ramp, we're these guys, you know, then you get into all those
teams, and stuff like that, like where are you from, and then you get the
Tope Team, and Team Steam, and all kinds of loud ones. Yeah, the Fork Crew, and
Virginia Beach, right, everybody's repping their their local spot, and their
local spot is usually a eight-foot transition, foot-a-vert, 24-foot wide,
piece of shit.
It was you and your friends only. There was no coop on some fucking longboard or
roller-blade, just fucking stupid scooter thing, or dad trying to stand in the way
of the middle of the ball, or some kid with a remote control car, or some other
dumbass rolling around the park. I bumped head so hard with Blaze, like the first
five times I met him, that's the single reason I chickened out of going to the
East Coast. Fucking front-side sliders with his hand down, some of the most
beautiful Andriks you've ever seen, had a sloped fast plan from hell, and I just I
was so horrified, because I had so much beef with Blaze, because he was he had
such a fuck you attitude. Yeah, he was back and fucking up, like you couldn't say shit.
Yeah, when the dude drop in, drop in, he'd fucking humble you.
Dude, I just got a history lesson right there. I've never heard any of those like
ramp games. There's no way, way before his time.
Because of that, because of those those ramps and stuff, skateboarding jumped to
the amount of the progression that came out of all of that, of going back and
forth, Neil Blender calls it the swing set, back and forth, back and forth, and
after a while, the powers that be the collective they decided that it was to
elitist, because not every kid has access to building, you know, a $15,000 or
back then a $5,000 vertical facility, you know, so that so then they
actively pushed to go to street, and that's when streetskating was born.
