Who the heck is Steve Emig?

This was my favorite place that we lived in Ohio.  It's called Holiday Lakes, outside Willard.  We lived there for about 2 1/2 years, 6th through 8th grades for me.  I think this video was uploaded by one of my sister's friends from back then.

I was born in 1966 outside Akron, Ohio, and my family moved around small towns and rural areas of Ohio as I grew up.  My dad was a band geek as a kid, playing clarinet and saxophone.  He became an avid car guy and target shooter in his younger years.  Among his cars, he owned three of these babies. My dad was a draftsman, so he actually drew pictures for a living.  He taught me how to draw Army Jeeps when I was 8, and later how to draw isometric and oblique pictures.

My mom listened to country music all day long and liked to do crafts.  Ceramics was the one she was best at.  I have a sister, Cheri, five years younger than me.  My family was more dysfunctional than most, and less dysfunctional than some.  We moved to a new house or apartment nearly every year.

I was pudgy, smart, bad at sports, I had buck teeth as a kid, couldn't say my "R's" or "S's" well.  Yeah, I was a dork who got picked on a lot.  When things got bad, I'd usually run off to the woods and wander around on my own for hours.  John Denver's "Country Boy" was my theme song as a kid.

At age 10 in Willard, Ohio, a kid showed me a skateboard for the first time.  It was handmade by his dad out of pressed aluminum with steel roller skate wheels.  He showed me how to ride it.  I rolled about a foot on his rock sidewalk, hit a pebble, fell down, scraped my knee, and said, "Skateboards are dumb."  I changed my mind a few months later, and saved my allowance money for nine months to buy a green, plastic Scamp skateboard at Western Auto.  It cost me $11.92.  A couple years later, I bought a homemade board for $2 at a flea market.  It was surfboard shaped, made out of a 3/4" piece of oak, and had 2 1/2" wide GT wheels.  I rockwalked that board until about 1988.

When I was in 8th grade, in the late 70's, my dad's company was having troubles, and he found a new job... in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  That was a huge culture shock for a small town kid from the Midwest.  I went from this to this overnight.  It was a rough year.  But then that company had problems, and we moved to Boise, Idaho.  Though we moved to a new house every year, I did manage to go to Boise High School for the full three years and graduate. My plan was to go to college and become a wildlife biologist.  But I didn't have money to start college, so I "took a year off" and ended up never going at all.

At the end of my sophomore year of high school, in June of 1982, we moved to a trailer park in the "desert" outside of Boise.  The plan was for my parents to save money for a year and then buy a house.  Officially, the park didn't have a name, but all the street names started with the word "blue."  So everyone called it Blue Valley.  There was nothing but miles of sagebrush in three directions.  The other direction was bounded by I-84.  It was really hot in the summer, so the dozen of so junior high and high school kids in the park would watch TV all afternoon, and then we'd come out in the early evening after supper.  Like kids everywhere, we'd play basketball, whiffle ball, football, or just talk smack to each other.  But all us guys had cheap BMX bikes, and we'd also go out to this little area of jumps and berms some motocross rider had built a couple of years before.  As the summer progressed, we spent more time riding our bikes and less time playing other games.  BMX became our thing. In October of that year, someone heard that there was a BMX track near downtown Boise.  We found it, and raced the last race of the year.  The track was at the edge of the foothills, in a drained sewer pond.  It didn't look like much to most people, but it was amazing to us.  Despite our cheap bikes and lack of actual racing experience, we all won trophies.  Our daily competition with each other paid off, and we surprised and pissed off the local racers by doing so well.  "Where'd all these fast kids on lame bikes come from?" they asked all day.  BMX became our thing.

I raced BMX for all of 1983, and helped re-design the Boise track, and then designed a new track.  But the emerging sport of BMX freestyle, doing tricks on BMX bikes, was way more interesting to me.  I joined the only BMX trick team around, and did shows with Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore.  For once, I was actually good at a sport.  OK, hardly anybody else actually did that sport, but I didn't care.  Much to my parents' dismay, I spent hours a day learning tricks on my little BMX bike.  Without realizing it, my life turned in a totally different direction.  The idea to be a wildlife biologist faded, and I worked at restaurants and rode my bike, and not much else.

The year after I graduated high school, 1985, my dad got a job in San Jose, California.  I finished my summer job in Boise, managing a small amusement park called the Boise Fun Spot.  In August, I packed up my ugly, brown 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose to live with my family. 

While my year in Carlsbad, New Mexico was a tough one, I came to love the desert and the wide open spaces of the West.  I also made several trips to Carlsbad Caverns, a truly amazing and beautiful cave system.  When I lived there ('80-81), another cave, called The New Cave then, was just beginning to be explored.  Now it's called Lechuguilla Cave, and is one of the largest cave systems in the world now, bigger than the original caverns that made the area famous.