Adam Colton has some strong opinions on the state of America’s roads.
“Bad pavement will kill,” he said. “It will crush your soul.”
With nearly 1,400 miles of skateboarding under his belt in the past month and a half, he has gotten pretty intimate with pavement. With another 1,600 to go, the relationship will certainly grow. Or fester. Depends on how many shoulders he finds with rumble strips.
Colton, 22, wanted to do something interesting after he graduated from college last spring. So he recruited three pals and made a plan to skateboard across the country.
“It sounded like a hell trip to me,” said Shayne Rivers, the wry pilot of the 1966 school bus that serves as a support rig and home to the band of rollers. “Then my girlfriend of four years left me. Broke my heart. I said: ‘Adam, I got nothing left. Let’s do this.’ I’m in it for the girls. Yeah, that plan’s not really working at all.”
Colton and his buddies Chris Gregory and Byron Levy have a more altruistic reason for pushing their longboards across the country. Their plan is to raise at least $10,000 to help fund a learning center and skatepark in one of Washington’s most neglected neighborhoods. Through the East Coast Round Wall Foundation, the skaters are raising money to develop a community center adjacent to a giant skatepark built entirely of recycled car tires in a neighborhood where kids are considered “at risk.”
They left the Pacific Ocean in Newport, Ore., on Aug. 2. They skated down Cameron Pass, through Poudre Canyon and into Fort Collins last week. Except for a 9-mile stretch of road without a shoulder in Idaho, they each have skated every mile. Somewhere around 1,340, they reckon.
They’ve dealt with angry drivers and a snowstorm on Cameron Pass. They try to travel the back roads, depending on advice of locals to find the best – read: least-trafficked and best-shouldered – route. They milk the charity gig, beguiling innkeepers and cafe owners into helping out for their cause.
“IHOP has been treating us right,” Colton said. “They’ve been saving us.”
The skaters’ footwear is more duct tape than shoe. A common tactic for slowing a longboard is dragging one foot on the pavement. It’s a shoe-destroying strategy that only adds to the heat and numbness than comes with skating 60 miles a day. But they won’t wear the new shoes they sweet-talked out of the Quicksilver skate shop in Steamboat Springs because they create blisters. Blisters, it turns out, are worse than traffic, and even gravel, when it comes to skating across the country.
Gregory, a quiet 25-year-old from Boone, N.C., boasts one calf noticeably wider than the other, but he’s reticent to switch legs for fear of blistering his unblemished riding foot.
“The first time out in the morning is hardest,” he said. “There’s really no way to prepare for skating 50 miles a day except to skate 50 miles a day.”
Colton and Levy dance on their boards as they would on a kitchen floor. They gracefully maneuver like the old-school skaters, whose fancy footwork was eclipsed by airborne ramp and bowl skaters in the late 1970s.
“We’ve got our own style. We’ve invented moves,” Colton said, showing off a little board boogie before busting out a handstand.
The skaters don’t wax romantic about life on the road. They see little but the road before them. Even when they hit an exciting place, they are too beat to enjoy anything but food and sleep.
“I’m done at the end of the day,” Levy said. “Done.”
Still they know they are building lasting memories. They happily nag, speed-talk and tease each other relentlessly, as people are wont to do when they endure one another’s constant presence for weeks on end.
“It’s really good to have friends to do this with,” Colton said. “The lifestyle, really, is the best. It’s a simple life. We know what we have to do every day. Skate.”
Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-820-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
Follow along — Check out the team’s progress at www.whoisadamcolton.com.
