Immerse yourself – Tyler Surrey by Zach Baker
Nollie heelflip frontside noseslide pop-over, Cornellá. Ph. Gerard Riera
Words by Zach Baker
There are places we’ve barely been, places we’ve happened upon in the midst of a long drive, in the middle of the night; a city whose outskirts we’ve stopped to pee on, its lights glistening past the tree-lined edge of an interstate. There are places we know, places we may even call home. But reality is weird (and don’t get me started on time… let alone space). While certain sites bear some semblance of familiarity and comfort, dare I say safety… can anyone ever say they really know them? Does anyone actually know anything? Regardless, these places, distant, domestic, far-flung and familiar, have ways of instilling themselves in us, like an earworm or a tick… mementos of shit we’ve sometimes only liminally even experienced… or maybe never saw at all.
Blindside nollie heelflip to fakie, Sarrià de Ter. Ph. Sam Ashley
In skating, so many towns and cities and street corners take on a mystical quality. Some undeniably spectacular, no matter what you’re into, others mundane to the point of eye-rolling puerility. Take, for instance, this Ralph’s in LA. A supermarket. Or rather, the bank to the curb on the sidewalk outside of the parking lot of a Ralph’s supermarket. For all I know it hasn’t existed in decades, but one time Gonz did a blunt to pivot, rode through the sign, back 180ed on it, then rolled off into the street. I saw it in a video file on a friend’s family’s computer like twenty years ago… and now… that’s just a part of who I am. It’s a part of me. Sometimes these experiences of places exist only in the abstract, even if the site still exists; even if you’ve been there. I know the park from the line from the Stevie Chocolate commercial… I know it well. I was there the other day. But to me, it’s like I’ve never been, like it lives in a time outside of ours; in a different galaxy. It’s like the guy doing the best fakie hardflip in the history of skating isn’t actually the same Stevie Williams, but some alien entity who’s uncannily been endowed with sweat glands and a pair of nuts to grab, just like us.
Switch frontside ollie, Vilassar de Dalt. Ph. Gerard Riera
The Smolik Rock is a part of me. As is the bump to bump to bump to bar in Besos… the one Surrey switch big flipped. Be it a snow globe or a t-shirt… a promotional video cassette–you spend enough time with a certain artifact, evidence of a place, proof of a place, and it ceases to be just a corner or a spot or a building or a town. It becomes something bigger than that, something approaching sacred.
As many, I dreamed, from as soon as I developed a sense of the greater zeitgeist and community around skateboarding, of visiting Barcelona. An American Easterner, in circumstance and mentality, born in Boston, raised in New Jersey, back again to Boston, pursuing a background in (capital L) Letters, useless, mostly, save for the opportunity herein displayed, some oscillating thoughts: an as yet unproven thesis punctuated here and there with some possibly misused em dashes and five dollar semicolons. But we’ll get there in due time, body, conclusion, and all. An American Easterner, I say, drunk on Mixtape, Panama Dan, Uncle Fred, et al. I won’t bore you with cliched assumptions around Southern California… palm trees, a pool-draining drought, sand in your bearings… but I’d been there. I wanted to see something new and exotic; this magical place from the vids… the Gaudí shit. So I holed away some table-waiting money and I went.
Nollie kickflip, Barcelona. Ph. Sam Ashley
It was 2009. I was a jit. I’d never left the States. I was alone. I don’t know what kind of phone I had or what the Internet looked like, but I got a hostel on La Rambla somehow. I gripped a board with a rock, drank beer from the sewer, fell asleep on the metro all night and no one stole a thing. I saw all the spots from the vids, or at least the obvious ones. I got chased by a dog and propositioned by a prostitute and ate bocadillos for every meal. I skated those rusty flat bars in Barceloneta maybe with these strange English guys, then went to their flat where I got zooted on hash and marvelled in silence at the obscene amount of tea with which they travelled. It was like a twenty gallon bag filled to the brim with PG Tips I swear.
The day I left, it was near sunset. I’d made a few bocadillos for the flight, checked out and began to drag my wheelless duffel up La Rambla, worse for the wear, head hung, sleep in my eyes. I regarded a pair of Air Maxes and as my eyes churned upward I found that I stood before the sunbathed, smiling face of Tom Penny. Wordlessly, I ogled. He extended a fist. I reached forward and pounded it with my own. He said nothing. I said nothing. I continued to the metro, to the airport, flew home without telling customs about all the Iberian ham I’d smuggled when I got there.
Ollie, Barcelona. Ph. Gerard Riera
But when I got there, too, I was like (and maybe this resonates with one or two of yinz), damn… I gotta go back and also shiiit… I don’t know how but… I could see myself living out there for a long time… maybe like… for good. Then the other stuff starts popping up like but what about the homies and but what about my parents and what the hell would I do for money and if this is my home but I abandon it then who am I? What am I? Where do I belong?
It becomes a crisis of identity. From wearing one’s naturalised geographical circumstance as a badge to then forfeiting said status; fearing the chosen life of a man without a place. The poor good homie in purgatory. We like to think, if we’re smart and personable enough that, by our bootstraps, we could thrive anywhere; that any of us could easily integrate into the myriad global skate scenes, armed with our universal language of shifty flips or whatever, and never look back. But in so many words: losing what you have and what you know and the community that you’re a part of and maybe even lent a hand in shaping… can be a pretty scary concept.
Switch kickflip backside nosebluntslide, Barcelona. Ph. Gerard Riera
I’ve never really been to San Diego. I’ve never met Tyler Surrey. I went to Greece once with Wes (ask him about it), and to South Dakota with Marius (ask him about it). I don’t know Brandon Turner and if I met Peter Smolik I’m not confident we’d have much to talk about. But if this was my umgebung, if these were my guys and that was the place that surrounded me during my formative years as a guy who liked to skateboard, I think I’d be pretty fucking contented. If I was SK8MAFIA from day one, I could see myself latching onto my hometown and never letting go.
So, to have an example like Tyler Surrey–a San Diegan–a person with firm roots and the soundest of resources, born and raised in one of the most reliable places in the world to earn a living from biannual sizzle reels of yourself playing with a piece of plywood–who then opts to dip out 6000 miles away, a continent and an ocean away, possibly for life–is frankly an inspiration. Well… let’s be real because… hundreds of people leave home every day for reasons far more urgent and severe than some whimsical wanderlust. Like… those fleeing any number of horrors, people without the privilege of wondering whether where they’re going will be chill, whether fools will be down, for whom ex-patriotism is a matter of mere survival and nothing more. It has to be said that travelling the world is a privilege not bestowed to all of us, and similarly, having the assurance that you don’t have to leave if you don’t want, that you’re safe and happy enough not to want, is its own kind of privilege.
Nollie kickflip frontside lipslide, Alcoletge. Ph. Gerard Riera
But so, to choose to thrust oneself out into the unknown, as a man born with the aforementioned privilege plus a big one as yet unmentioned, that is, his unparalleled talent and creativity on a skateboard, is an admirable display of courage. It’s a risk, but in this instance, the benefit of relocation is clear to me. What’s gained is at once a reaffirmation and reimagining of a person’s talents. There’s also probably something in there that has to do with a validation of a person’s character, a test of one’s moral fibre or what have you. Like I said, I never met the guy, but he seems pretty fucking agreeable to begin with. But you know… you spend time in a place beyond a couple hectic days and hammered nights and really get to know it… it too becomes a part of you, and you, in some small way, a part of it. Somewhere along the way it goes beyond trying and doing the old tricks on new spots (I don’t just mean skateboarding) and the new place, with its new experiences, starts to inform wholly new ideas. Meanwhile, the place before–the previous one–with all its insights, never actually went anywhere. What’s more, maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, because after all I’m just an American Easterner, day one ‘til now, that place of origin never actually went anywhere and really, all that happened was that your sphere of influences and people just got bigger. By merely existing, by trying new shit, otherwise disparate places and people suddenly find themselves in communication with one another.
Wallride nollie tailgrab, Barcelona. Ph. Gerard Riera
In this day and age, assuming the robots don’t get too sentient, Tyler Surrey can do whatever the hell he wants wherever the hell he wants with whoever the hell he wants and it’s still Mafia4Life. There doesn’t have to be a precedent. You can live here and go there and get boards from wherever, and the whole process can move smooth as soft-serve so long as a person keeps an open mind and stays true to themselves. I look at Surrey, putting his unique lens on rinsed Barça spots and breathing new life into them, and doing the same with obscure spots and nuts tricks the likes of which I, even if I smacked my head a dozen times, could never have dreamed… and I feel a strange sense of pride. Weird right? Because, man I don’t know this damn dude! I’m 37 years old, what business do I have feeling proud of this nollie tre flippin’ off the side of the Arc de Triunfo headass expat across the Atlantic?
I guess it’s that he is proof against the complacency that so many of us, most certainly myself, are liable to feel in this ever-confounding reality. “If shit’s good, why fuck with it?” is a safe mantra for survival, but it puts a pretty low ceiling on the untapped potential in all of us. It’s tough to trust in your own capacities, to grow and try new shit, when shit is already totally fine as is. It’s easy to go somewhere for ten days, go home, never go back, and let some vague memory of it live inside of you. It’s another thing, something else entirely, to get all the way in. To immerse yourself in the reality of a place, someplace else, somewhere new, a place that maybe, with enough time and experience, you could really get to know. That is, if it’s even actually possible to know anything at all.
Frontside 180 kickflip, Malaga. Ph. Jake Darwen
