Foreclosed places for fun and games

Foreclosed pool skating: from the NY Times

My new favorite blog, The Vigorous North, recently pointed out the weird phenomenon, as reported by the New York Times, of skateboarders emptying and cleaning many of California's tens of thousands of pools on foreclosed properties so that they can skate in them. These unattended pools have become "vernal pools" with their own ecosystems, including becoming the breeding grounds for enormous populations of mosquitoes, raising the risk of a West Nile epidemic. The governmental response to this is to distribute "mosquito fish" (Gambusia affinis), tiny mosquito larvae-chompers, into the pools, but skaters have a different idea.

The skaters find the foreclosures on a variety of websites, or by just cruising neighborhoods for signs of foreclosure. They then enter the backyards, pump the water and clean the muck out of the pools, and, once it's all dry, they skate! They make sure to skate in "short bursts during the workday to avoid disturbing neighbors or attracting police attention",  they take their trash with them, and don't leave graffiti all so as to maintain some idea of public service. And indeed, they are reducing the mosquito breeding grounds by creating a makeshift skate park, discontinuously spread across the suburban backyards of Fresno and other California towns, attracting skaters from around the world.

I think J.B. Jackson would be elated to hear of this kind of reclamation of space, but I also have to wonder how he would discuss it—skateboarding, while a "helix" sport according to JBJ's definition, has a distinctly vernacular streak, evidenced in the congregations of skateboarders around staircases, railings, parks, and streets around the world. In this latest incarnation of foreclosed pool skating, it also has arguably developed some of the superficial elements of JBJ's "agon" sports, namely those of moral code (though this could be ascribed to the draining and cleaning, but not the skating, and could further be seen as simply a measure to dissuade arrest) and formal setting (pool skating, after all, requires a pool). But these are superficial, as nobody would actually mistake skateboarding for a highfalutin agon sport, especially not foreclosed pool skating, which, it should be noted, is illegal, notwithstanding its tangible service to both the skating community and the community at large.

The moral code involved here, along with the spaces created, are in fact the antithesis of Jackson's "agon": regular skate parks, skateboarding's most formal settings, are rarely considered anything close to "consecrated", and are certainly not "free of obstacles or uncertainties". They're practically entirely composed of obstacles and uncertainties. Further, the discontinuous skate park of California's suburban pools requires trespassing to access, and instead of expecting "to be praised", as player of agon sports would, they can expect to be arrested, or at least kicked out by the police. Finally, while the practitioners of agon sports saw nature as a thing to be used and modified to produce an environment for their games, skaters are using and modifying man-made places to produce environments for their games. Many agon elements can be seen here, but they all appear to be inverted.

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