Getting Adjacent in Goonies Country

CAST:
Uber Driver
Me – Justin
A variety of skateboarders

SETTING:
Pacific Northwest. The Adjacent Skate Conference. 2026. July 24th , 25th , 26th

PROLOGUE:
It’s just before 2 a.m. pacific time when my flight arrives in Portland, OR from Austin, TX. A quick walk through an empty airport and I’m outside in the Oregon air. I can already smell the trees. It makes me miss home, not my Texas home. My home before that, where trees mingle and meander through the woods like wayfarers. A hodgepodge of redeye flyers and myself shuffle curbside as Ubers and cabs drive by.

Driver: Are you Justin?

That’s me.

Driver: Where we headed?

I’m headed to ___ NE 50 th Ave. Should be an apartment complex.

Driver: Gotcha. What brings you to Portland?

I’m in town for a skateboarding conference, called Adjacent. I’m a freelance reporter hoping to write an article.

Driver: Did you say a skateboarding conference?! What is that?

Yeah, there’s a bunch of these conferences popping up. I’ve attended a similar event in Tempe, Arizona and have heard this one is kind of like a sister event to that one. There’s panel discussions, skate jams, guest speakers, a healthy mix of industry peeps and academia peeps, art shows and a bunch of other skate nerdy type shit. This is the second year for this event.

Driver: I’ve seen where the X-Games are still on TV and the Olympics has skateboarding now, but I’ve never heard of anything like that before. And you flew here to attend?

All the way from Texas. There’s gonna be panels on shoe design, YouTube creators, a
retrospective with a well-known skateboard photographer, and a Q and A with several notable skateboard Podcasters. With a bunch of actual skateboarding in between.

Driver: You hoping to talk to anyone in particular?

Actually, yes, there’s a pro skater from here who sort of inspired the main question of my article. I’m really hoping to run into him. You ever skateboard?

Driver: Man I tried when I was in high school, but I didn’t last long. Looked fun, but that shit was fucking hard, and painful! I think those two things kept me from ever really getting into it. Do you skateboard? For how long?

I started when I was 13 after getting a board from a good friend. Immediately fell in love with it. Probably spent over a year never leaving my garage learning tricks before ever going street skating. I’ve pretty much been skateboarding in some kind of fashion since then. I’m in my 40s now, so after three knee surgeries and a possible needed hip replacement, I mostly roll around these days, still love the shit out of it though.

The World Famous Burnside

Driver: It’s cool to hear there’s this whole aspect of skateboarding; I guess I’ve never known there was this side to it. You said we’re looking for an apartment complex? This just looks like a bunch of houses, you sure that’s the right address?

Fearing an additional $50 fare, I answer yes, but quickly realize as the Uber drives away, I had written NE 50th Ave, instead of the correct address, SE 50th. At nearly 3 a.m. I grab my board from my carry-on and decide to make the hour-long skate to Seamus’ apartment rather than catch another Uber, hoping the journey will be mostly downhill. It is not. After click-clacking my way up and down three in the morning Portland neighborhoods, I make it to Seamus’ and am greeted with a hug. A day one homie from the days before Texas, those early years of skateboarding after learning how to in my parents’ garage.

Act I - Adjacent Day One
Wake up and make my way to the closest coffee shop. A coffee for me, a coffee for Seamus, then back upstairs. Both dads now, our morning conversation leans more toward fatherhood than skateboarding but still makes time to reminisce about the Pancakes Skate amp; Whirl days. Seamus heads to work and leaves me a spare key and directions to Burnside. Opting to keep a “NO Ubers” theme, I plot my path via skating there, pin dropping a few recommended skate spots and ;taco joints along the way from Portland skateboarder and former Adjacent Panel host Taj Hanson. After a 10 a.m. skate through Da Vinci and eating two al pastor tacos, one carne asada and a cochinita pibil taco, I’m at Burnside.

Tacos y'all

How’s it going? My name’s Justin. I’m in town attending the Adjacent Skateboard Conference, and was hoping to ask some of the skateboarders I meet while I’m here one question, which is, why did you start skateboarding? You down to answer?

Zeke: For sure. I’m Zeke. The why for me is because my dad skated. He was a flow rider for Alva way back when. I don’t know if that means anything now. Also, him and Patrick Melcher were really tight while I was growing up, plus his brothers owned a skate shop over in Illinois, so skating is kinda in my blood.

You from Illinois?

Zeke: I’m from Wisconsin but moved here in 2020. Growing up in Green Bay there weren’t a lot of skate culture types, so we would make trips to places like Milwaukee and surrounding areas. I think skateboarding helped me find my people, so to speak, because there weren’t a lot of us – I mean I had my dad, who was influenced into skateboarding by the punk era of the 80s, but there wasn’t a lot of that type of skateboarding influence for us.

I feel similar. I grew up rural, so there was never really more than a dozen or more skaters scattered throughout the state, but once we found each other, we were as thick as thieves. How about you? Why did you start skating.

James: I grew up in Miami and wanted out from all the partying my friends were doing. I saw some neighborhood kids skateboarding, and I don’t know, I just thought, I want to be friends with those kids, so I got a board and started skateboarding, and I’ve never stopped. I wasn’t very good, so I was always the filmer. One of those things where my friends kept progressing and I sort of plateaued, but the nice thing to that, which took me a very long time to figure out, is you don’t have to be good to hang, you just need that mentality and to not let your ego get in the way.

On 2nd Ave, below the quarter tops on the west side of the skatepark, Scizo and Logan are packing up from their morning sessions.

Scizo: Because it was awesome, fun, cool and better than walking. I used to see kids on tv and videos skating, and we didn’t have that stuff where I grew up, like ramps and half pipes or parks, I grew up skateboarding in Coos Bay and picked up skateboarding from my cousins, who were from Boise, Idaho. I’ve lived here now for most of my life, skating Burnside.
Logan: I’ve been hooked ever since I was 5 years old. I had the classic, cool older brother, who was into punk, metal and skateboarding. I remember my brother showing me all those CKY videos, plus he had all the Tony Hawk games on PlayStation. Oh shit, and CCS catalogs – I would get obsessed with board graphics and artwork. So, my brother, CKY videos, Tony Hawk video games and skate graphics. It’s weird because I feel like I’ve always been a skateboarder, even though there’s still that thing where in your 20’s and 30’s you’re searching for that thing, but for me, I feel like ever since I was 5 years old all I’ve cared about was skateboarding. That’s my thing.

Immediately breaking my “NO Ubers” rule but maintaining the TACO rule applied to all my
trips, which is to eat as many as possible, I app myself a ride back to Seamus’ apartment and stop at a taco truck before heading upstairs. Rest, relax, apologize to my knees, then I smoke a joint and eat my tacos. I think I hear my hip laugh when I check the skating distance from Seamus’ apartment to the new Adias skatepark. Uber rule strike two....Just west of the Willamette River off Highway 405. The Adidas Skatepark. Adjacent opening meet and greet. 6:12 p.m. Day one.

Alex Fazekas-Boone (Adjacent founder): It’s hard to say why exactly. I had a neighbor who skated, and we would go out skating a bunch together. The whole culture of it was so interesting to me, plus I’m the target Tony Hawk pro skater video game era with that skating boom from the early 2000s. Sports like soccer or baseball never really worked out for me when I was a kid, with things like a coach and having to be somewhere at a certain time, so skating played into me being able to do it as much as I wanted when I wanted, with nobody giving a fuck with how I did it. Within a year I was fully hooked, I loved it all, the fashion, the music, the videos, the art, andknew I didn’t want to do anything other than skateboard.

Act II - Adjacent Day Two
My morning starts with a win for team anti-Uber and a skate through the Hawthorne and
Belmont neighborhoods to Nemo Design. Up a hill, down a hill, flat for a bit. Clickety-clack
clickety-clack, urethane across sidewalk seams – we all know the sound. Along either side of the main hallway in Nemo are gallery style setups of lights and frames for the photography and art show later that night. More meandering but with a mix of mingling this time. Coffee, doughnuts,handshakes and hugs.

Ben Degros (YouTube creator and Adjacent panelist): I started skateboarding because when I was 11 my friend and I were super into martial arts, and we thought it was cool, but it wasn’t that cool, and then his older sister told us skateboarders were really cool, so we thought, why don’t we become skateboarders. And then I ended up falling in love with skateboarding. We really just did it because he started telling me about these boards that had a new shape, these wheels that were super tiny, and that skaters would wear these giant pants and they were all rebels. He’d tell stories about skaters stomping car windows and all the other crazy stuff they would do. He’d tell me all these stories about what skateboarders were like, and I was like, I want to be that, and then once I started skating, I was hooked, because it’s the most fun thing ever.

Did you realize early on in your skateboarding that skating felt like a doing it forever type of thing? Like finding your identity?

Ben:I don’t know if I ever thought in those early stages, or realized, like okay, this is it, I’m going to be a skateboarder forever now. I don’t feel like you think long term when you’re a little kid. I think it was a day by day thing, where it was just what I woke up thinking about every single day. I went to sleep thinking about skateboarding, and I woke up thinking about skateboarding. When I started getting pretty good for my age, and sponsors started happening, that was probably when I was thinking, oh yeah, I want to do this forever.

Panel discussions on skate shoe design are followed by discussions on the validity and volatility of YouTube creation in skateboarding. After the panels, Dane Ichimura appears on stage to announce an afternoon break for citywide skate sessions. Recognizing some folks from February’s Slow Impact conference in Arizona, I ask if I can join them, and learn the Mostly Skateboarding Podcast folks are the only skate crew I’ve ever met who travel with their own lawyer, plausibly on retainer, which immediately makes me jealous and think of Hunter Thompson and Oscar Acosta.

Skateboarding, keeping the arts alive as usual

Downtown Portland. The CRR ledges. 2:33 p.m. Day two.
Sorry to spring up on you while we’re out skating, but I’ve been asking skaters I meet at
Adjacent why they started skateboarding? You down to answer? My name’s Justin by the way. For me, I kind of have a variety of reasons, but I think part of the reason was I was trying to fit in, or maybe better said, I was trying to find where I fit in, because I grew up super rural – lots of baseball, football, Americana and conformity, and by the time I was in high school I felt like I couldn’t fit into any of those things, nor did I want to.

Galen (friend of and lawyer to the Mostly Skateboarding Podcast): My why might not be too dissimilar to yours. I also grew up very rural, on 40 acres with 7 siblings in northeast Washington north of Spokane. The closest towns over had like 2,500 people living there, so the schools were small, and organized sports like football and baseball were a big deal, and all throughout school I was never a big joiner, I didn’t want to join anything organized, and I had a friend give me an old crappy board when I was a kid. There was a little skate park where I grew up, so I started going over there all the time and just got hooked. It was really all I cared about throughout elementary, middle and high school. Skateboarding was my way of fitting in without fitting in, you know, like finding where I fit when I wasn’t fitting in with what everyone else was doing. That’s what I liked about skateboarding, it wasn’t this typical American activity where everyone’s doing the same thing and conforming to what you’re expected to do. It was different, and I appreciate being different. You could do it by yourself and just get in your brain learning and skating for hours alone, or you could go out and skate with a group – I think that’s one of the most unique things about skateboarding.

Templeton Elliot and Henry peep the footy

After Templeton Elliot proves hombres over 40 still got ups by ollieing a sawhorse barricade from flat, he bids us a pacific northwest adieu, which is just a regular adieu with a French-Canadian accent. New arrangements are made for who’s going in who’s car. I pack my things into the back of Jamie Carey’s SUV. Next stop, the top of Mt Tabor. Am I smelling Pad Thai or is that Pad Kee Mao?! It’s certainly not the mountaintop hot dogs that are advertised, but I’m not complaining. A forest of skateboarders lounging under a forest of trees atop a mountain, while their good homie slangs Thai dishes from his two traveling woks is a sight to see. Mt Tabor doesn’t disappoint.

The Sidewok Kitchen is Open for Biz

Top of Mt Tabor. Up the hill from the Thai basil and sauteed chilies aroma. 7:38 p.m. Day two.
Cole Nowicki (Simple Magic): For me, initially, it was because my older brother was
skateboarding and I wanted to do what he was doing, and after some time I stopped skating, but then when I was around 8 or 9, I vividly remember having this sense of urgency and angst because I wanted something that was my own, and I was like, oh yeah, skateboarding, and then I started skateboarding and fell in love with it, and it just kind of became my thing from there.

Were there a lot of skateboarders where you grew up?

Cole: I’m from rural Alberta, so there weren’t a lot. Skating was an insular experience a lot of the time. I spent many days just skating my driveway. I didn’t have access to things like quads or all that other outdoor stuff like the other kids had, and I wasn’t into hockey, so skateboarding was kind of the perfect outlet.

Mt Tabor BBQ Party Crew

Racing a setting sun, sections of skaters start making their way down the mountain. The trees passing by are hypnotic. I stop several times, take it in and am reminded of the mountain trees I grew up with, not in size or classification, but in the kind of close knowing of each other that can only be created with time.

Act III - Adjacent Final Day
My final morning coffee with Seamus is all smiles before I’m on my way back to Nemo Design with my skateboard wheels click-clacking across the sidewalk seams, up and down hills, my pace the only thing to control the volume. Disruptive and comforting, like grey noise, but with a color only skateboarders can hear. Nemo is packed the last day. Mostly mingling this time with less meandering. Promises to keep in touch, handshakes, hugs and a suggestion for next year: breakfast tacos. A Joe Brook retrospective and slide show is followed by a panel of notable skateboard podcasters. I linger after the day’s panels and find myself in a nearly empty room with artists behind me taking down their work from the previous night’s exhibit, and Aaron Herrington on the other side of the room sprucing up his coffee. Not using the best judgment, I shout. Aaron! Aaron!! So sorry for embarrassingly shouting your name like that, but you’re someone Iwas hoping to talk with before this weekend’s over, my name’s Justin. I’m working on an article
and asking folks this weekend why they started skateboarding? And your SMILE interview with the Raemers Foundation is kind of what inspired my want to ask that question.

Joe Brook Shares Moments from shooting Willy Akers to Willie Nelson

Aaron Herrington (Polar pro and Static alum): No worries, hi, how’s it going? Those SMILE interviews are so awesome. I had a great time working on mine, I loved it.

I’m also alcohol-free, 15 years now, and in your interview, there was a moment when you talked about a link to your sobriety from a desire to get back to how you felt in your early days of skating, like the days before drinking or drugs were even a thought, those days when ALL a skateboarder thinks about is skateboarding. I found that sentiment to be really inspiring, so thank you. And I know this is a bit of a broad question, but why did you start skateboarding?

Aaron: Thank you as well man, I appreciate that, stoked to hear it could have an impact. My brother skateboarded before me, so naturally I had to skateboard because my older brother did it, but we would skate together, and then our cousins who skated started sending us videos, which was a big deal. They would send us those VHS tapes that had like 5 skate videos recorded on it. One of the first VHS tapes they sent had Fulfill the Dream, Questionable, Second Hand Smoke, Virtual Reality and I forget the other one that was on it, but that VHS was my introduction to skateboarding. Then my brother stopped skating and I took it on more full time. And as I got older, that love and passion for skating grew, then I became a professional, with my idle time leading to overconsumption of certain things, not appreciating what I was doing at the time and taking too many things for granted. Now that it’s been almost 10 years not drinking and this, that and the other – it’s allowed me to appreciate life and just skating. Skating curbs, skating whatever you know? Even gripping my board is a pleasure, all those basic things are just as rad as before, it’s like I’m nerding out on skateboarding again, and I kind of hate that there was a period when I got away from that, where I treated skating as more of a duty and task, and not a love and passion. Skateboarding is something I want to cherish for as long as I can, and like Chris was saying, I think everybody’s trying to skate for as long as they physically can at this point, whereas before, you got into your 30s and there’s this feeling that now you gotta go out and get the life, wife and kids and stop skateboarding, but now it feels imbedded in people forever to be doing skate stuff, which I think is amazing. Like if my pro career disappeared, I wouldn’t just stop skateboarding because I’m not getting money. I can’t imagine losing the love for skateboarding entirely, you know what I mean?

I skate from Nemo to the Da Vinci DIY for the last dance of the Adjacent weekend. The portable woks have made it down the mountain and are sizzling in the corner of the park. Between taken turns and snaked runs, I witness a dude treflip in his bare feet, catch up with Taj and rate my trip’s tacos for anyone willing to listen. Hugs, handshakes and until next times. Just before 8:30p.m., the sun begins to set behind the trees

I Agree With Dale Cooper