The Difference a Good Scene Can Make

The Boise BMX track around the time I started racing.  We called it Fort Boise then, because it was in a drained sewer pond behind the old Fort Boise site.  This little place changed the course of my life. 

I got into BMX in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho in 1982.  There were about 12 junior high and high school guys there, not many girls, and not much to do.  We watched bad TV re-runs all afternoon in the summer, then came out as it cooled off in the early evening.  When I first moved there, we'd get games of wiffle ball, football, or basketball going against each other every evening.  And we'd ride our BMX bikes on some little jumps and berms a forgotten motorcycle rider had made a couple years before.  It was just something for us bored teenagers to do. That's how it started.

As the summer of 1982 progressed, we rode our bikes more, and played traditional games less.  We were just a bunch of punk kids trying to learn a new trick on our bikes and out-do each other.  Our little rivalries grew and faded, and we all started breaking parts on our cheap bikes.  And we started getting better.  BMX became our thing.  I didn't realize it then, but we organically formed a little scene, pushing each other to improve.

We started buying magazines with money made babysitting or mowing lawns.  When one kid bought a magazine, he'd hide it and read the whole thing in one night, sometimes twice.  Then,  he'd bring it out the next day and we'd all flip through it, learning the names of top riders and looking at the tricks in the photos.  As our cheap bikes broke, we bought (some kids stole) better parts.  We all tried to learn a new trick without the others seeing it, we were hyper-competitive with each other, always trying to be the first to pull off a trick or move we saw in a magazine.  Because of that, we progressed fairly quickly.

In those pre-internet days, news traveled at a snails pace, and it took us several months to learn that there was a BMX race track in Boise.  For those of you not familiar, "BMX" is a short version of "bicycle motocross."  One Saturday in October, four of us and three bikes piled into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto.  It wasn't a hatchback, so it was a tight fit.  I left my bike at home, because I was the worst rider in the trailer park at that point.

We went to the track, tried it out, and coached each other on the best lines to take and where to pass other riders.  The three guys who rode, Scott, Brian, and James, all won trophies.  We were hooked.  We headed back to the trailer park like we'd just conquered a foreign land or something.  When the other kids saw our trophies and heard our stories, the plan immediately began for the next race.  Unfortunately, that was the last race of the year.

Early that next Saturday, we piled in my dad's Ford Van, about nine of us, all with bikes, and unleashed our low-budget, but high energy crew on the local BMX scene.  Most of us had "K-Mart Special" bikes with a few upgraded components.  Most of the local kids had bikes that ranged in price from $350 to $600 each.  They had full motocross style leathers as uniforms, we had shabby Levi's and T-shirts.  They had custom number plates, we had paper plates with numbers hand written by the officials taped to our handlebars.  That day, I first saw the difference a tight scene can make.

All day long we heard one phrase over and over from kids and parents; "Where did all these fast kids on piece-of-shit bikes come from?"  It was the first race for most of us, the second race for  those three.  We were not only competitive, but we all went home with trophies, mostly first and second place.  We had everything going against us... except the thing that mattered most that day.  Hunger.  We lived BMX.  That's all we had to cram our teenage anger, frustration, and energy into.  Even before that first race, BMX was our life.  We had something to prove to the world.  We came from a bunch of families that were more dysfunctional than most, and we all had issues.  BMX gave us something to focus on, to be good at, and to begin to progress as a human being, not just a bike rider.

That desire for personal progression shaped the whole course of my life.  I went on to take chances, on my bike and off, that I never dreamed of early on, and that many wouldn't want to try.  I learned, first on a physical level, then on a life level, to get back up every time I fell down.  Or was pushed down.  Or punched in the head (that's for you Scott).   I'm still trying new things and progressing today.  And even now, at 51 years old and really overweight, I still have the urge to ride a bike and keep progressing.

Financially, my life's a mess.  Like many, I got stuck in an industry that  changed drastically due to new technology.  But I'm still going, still at it, and my artwork is starting to open some doors.  Now, 35 years after that summer in Blue Valley Trailer Park, I look at scene of people pushing each other in a totally different way.  Over those three and a half decades, I've learned that much of the progress in the world comes from small groups of people pushing each other to get better.  Scenes.  Art scenes. Music Scenes.  BMX, skateboard, and other action sports scenes.  Entrepreneurial scenes.  High Tech scenes.  These are all loosely connected.  My work I'm doing these days is trying to share the importance of these small scenes, especially creative scenes, how they grow, and to help build better ones.