EVERYTHING HAS A SEASON, EVEN AN OLD HALFPIPE
I suppose our old skateboard halfpipe is a model of sustainability.
It was created from all natural materials in 2002, starting with the reclaimed posts and beams from my neighbor’s demolished carport. It served a healthy outdoor recreational purpose for many years. In dismantling it, we saved about 90 percent of the wood, nails and screws. We’ve re-purposed some of the materials for a composter. From ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.
Don’t snicker, but our next project is a chicken coop. I mentioned this in my first post about my third attempt at creating an organic garden, which garnered a surprising amount of surprise from my readers. Not sure why?
I thought it was pretty cool to breathe life into this old structure by creating something new and purposeful out of it.
HERE’S WHAT THE BIRTH, LIFE, DEATH AND REINCARNATION OF OUR HALFPIPE HAS TAUGHT ME
- A dad can get instant street cred among his son’s highschool friends with the mere consideration of, let alone acutally building, a halfpipe in his backyard
- You get to spend unforgettable quality time with your boy and his buddies, especially during the numerous Home Depot runs
- It’s an invaluable opportunity to teach an old world craft like framing and carpentry
- In the teen’s hands you put gnarly power saws and drills and chainsaws and saws-alls and all the stuff computer screens and video games can’t emulate
- You work with your impressionable crew to design and problem solve and measure and cut and bend nails and re-cut and make another trip to Home Depot
- When finished, the young men are proud of what they’ve created; a monument to their ingenuity
- They learn to become promoters as they throw the official halfpipe launch party
- Your backyard becomes the cool hangout for a time, and yet cooldom is fleeting
- Like so many remote control cars under the Christmas tree, the novelty wears off and the halfpipe grows silent
- Interests change and sons move off to college and the mesquite and lemon trees begin to retake their rightful portion of the backyard as the plywood starts to splinter and crack
- Fast-forward seven years and our youngest son and his friend help me dismantle the structure
- In their hands I replace computer mice with the same gnarly power tools, but for a different purpose
- They learn to saw, and unscrew things, pull nails, remove lag bolts
- They learn a new term: dunnage
- The autopsy reveals to them the engineering behind the structure spurring lots of questions about why did you do it this way, and what’s that for?
- It’s nice to again have the back portion of our yard clean, neat, reclaimed, with the lemon tree trimmed and the mesquite tree soon to be removed to make way for fruit trees
- You can turn anything into something
This has been a great project that has taken on a life of its own, and has added immeasurably to our own.
