Thrasher Magazine: Project glow-rod la-la land

RUNNING WIRE IN A HOUSE can be an electrician's worst nightmare. To most of us it seems quite simple that your light turns on in your room when you flick a switch, or a stereo plays music after you plug it into a socket in the wall. But guiding those wires to each switch was most likely a pain in the ass. Some dude probably crawled under your apartment complex with a miner's light and some wire at one point so your neighbor could listen to Madonna while he jazzercises.

IF YOU HAVE EVER taken a look underneath your house or in your attic, you may have noticed that there's wire going everywhere: over, around, and then down into the walls, through insulation and wood crossbeams. Choreographing this maze of electricity took both some time and some tools. And one of the most used tools for running wire is called a glow-rod.

Standing at about six-feet high and an inch in diameter, the glow-rod is a last resort in getting a wire from point A to point B. They usually have an end that you can screw another rod onto, making it longer, and it's neon green so that you can see it in the dark. When an electrician can't reach a spot in a house by crawling underneath, the glow-rod is then used in a blind attempt to get to the other side. Often the rod bumps into other pipes or two-by-fours along the way, which may call for some drilling and wall ripping, but when it finally reaches its destination the wire is attached and easily pulled back through.

LA-LA LAND

AROUND THE SKATE BUSINESS WORLD, when the dust settles from a day's mad scramble and the investors finish shaking hands and closing shop, the only thing that truly remains is skating. Some pros get lucky and then wave good-bye from a ranch in Idaho, some get a television show, other pros have to find second jobs, yet all of this is cool. Regardless, the bank rolls don't add up to the length of road that skating still has yet to travel, and those dollar signs simply symbolize dirt under that big old set of stairs where Billy in Birmingham will try to kickflip with his friends tomorrow. Just because he wants to.

This same feeling was in a van holding the Consolidated guys on a recent trip fit for a glow-rod. There was no real plan, just a direction. The destination: to skate and have some fun. The map was drawn and we found our way from up north down to Mexico, boards underfoot.

The San Joaquin Valley is that big stretch of land you travel through when heading south from the Bay Area down to LA. What was once a great place for skating in the early '90s, due to its flatground and the fact that it was ok to skate a curb, is now just a place where you can have a brand new car and a brand new house with zero-percent down while making $25 thousand a year. They got you where they want you, if you know what I mean. The Valley now has a couple Starbucks, and a Trader Joes! Finding a decent set of stairs is like winning $1,000 at the local Indian gaming casino. It can happen though, and we found a couple things in the land of RJ--but you can't beat a good old bank-to-curb, and the McDonald's banks in Bakersfield were the highlight of the trip.

As the hills of the Grapevine descended down into LA, the feeling lingered: what road was that one ledge on that I saw? My picture phone isn't a picture phone at all, just a phone used like a phone--no pictures--so spots I've seen I only have addresses for, scribbled on some paper with a quick sketch of what it looks like. Nonetheless, the streets became familiar again and we were on our way. Photos in the mag are like lines of gunpowder leading to a spot, so we looked for some new things here and there, and ended up skating some already skated places. The stay in LA was brief but well received, and the group moved on without much fuss down to San Diego.

MEXICAN'T

BAILEY BECAME a great tour guide from San Diego to Mexico. He set us up at Camp Land on our first night in the tradeshowless SD, where we pitched tents and are s'mores over a Duraflame fire. In the morning we are quesadillas care of Laticia, and then attempted surfing. Bailey brought the boards and hang 10s, while the rest of us were left with the punctuated feeling that surfing is the gnarliest thing ever. The sand turned to soot as we barbecued at the Washington Street Park where they were having an art show to help raise money for the 'crete. Those dudes have built some gnarly shit and I was proud to see our friend Christian Hanson ripping the park, knowing that he helped build it. Some type of partying ensued at the barbecue/sesh (the usual), and then it was down across the border and into Mexico.

We followed along the border walls down the coast to Puerta del Mar, where Bailey's friend had a place right on the beach. It was too nice and everyone set up camp on her roof, only to be awakened by a windstorm that threw me out of my hammock in the middle of the night. At this point everything became "Mexican." If you saw a dog it was a Mexican dog. A solitary tree on the side of the road was a Mexican tree. And rightly so, we were in Mexico. Karma rode his first wave here. We are lobster, drank a couple beers, and skated some cool shit right down the road in Ensenada. After one quick stop to wheel and deal with some vendors for souvenirs we were back in the States.

What sometimes felt like a mess and a chore due to some bad weather and lack of planning ended up being exactly what it was intended to be: five quick days with no real agenda, just to get from point A and to Point B via skateboarding. The van trekked on like a glow-rod, poking through the San Joaquin Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego, and finally into Mexico, attaching another fond memory to he tucked back in our minds.