Dispatch from the USA: We Laughed, We Cried, We Moshed

The video in my social media feed auto-played and then auto-replayed.

I caught the moment on my second watch-through.

When Delta Connection Flight 4819 touches down on the tarmac at Toronto’s Pearson airport, its rear right landing wheel collapses. The fuselage hits the earth and flames erupt as the plane skids and flips upside down.

The video replayed and I rewatched the fourth major air travel-related accident to happen with a U.S. aircraft since the Trump administration regained power in January. The first since the Federal Aviation Administration was gutted further, resulting in hundreds of layoffs of “aviation safety assistants, maintenance mechanics and nautical information specialists” at the hands of unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

The video replayed. I closed the app and opened another to set an alarm on my phone. I was flying to the United States in the morning.

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From above, each mesa and mountain dotting the Arizona skyline had the look of orange putty pocked, squeezed and pressed by some celestial hand.

As I peered past the woman in the window seat, I caught a glimpse of her phone, whose light had flickered across her glasses for most of the flight. On the screen was a post or, more accurately, a lengthy screed on the social media app Truth Social from its proprietor Donald J. Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States. I looked away.

We began our descent toward Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. The plane started to shake, alternating between violence and weightlessness.

Turbulence. Something about unstable air currents in the valley. The passenger to my right gripped her seat. The passenger to my left kept a grip on her device.

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I had travelled from my home in East Vancouver to Tempe, Arizona, for Slow Impact, an annual skateboarding conference featuring panel discussions, art exhibitions, readings and live music. This was the third year in a row that I’d attended and I was scheduled to speak on a panel about journalism’s role in skateboarding.

Mostly, though, I was there to hang out with my friends.

As soon as I stepped out of the cab from the airport, a friend from Seattle shouted hello from a passing vehicle. Unlocking their bikes a few metres away was a trio of pals who had flown in from Alaska. Soon I’d see friends from New York, Malmö, Powell River and the Twin Cities.

We’d all come here for this. Part of me wondered, in consideration of everything that was going on, how we could be doing this.

In the weeks leading up to my trip, the president of the country I was visiting had been threatening the country where I live, first with tariffs, then with incessant prodding about annexation.

The absurd gave way to credulity. The week before I left for the 48th state, the New York Times was running pieces on how it would work for Canada to become the 51st.

It was a far cry from a 1919 Times headline that read, “CAN WE ANNEX CANADA? Of Course Not, Says Canadian.” But that was 106 years ago; times had changed, and dramatically so. The day after the conference wrapped, a much-talked-about call-in radio show on Canada’s public broadcaster asked, “Hmm, would you be into joining America?”

The Trump administration had recently pressured Google to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in its map service.

However, it reads as “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” if viewed from outside of the United States.

That’s all it takes to irrevocably alter the world: petty concessions to a juvenile tyrant. “Canada (America).”

I met more friends at a skate park. We rolled around on our boards, laughed, sweated, struggled and caught up as the sun’s last dregs burned brilliantly against the horizon. We roasted each other as friends do. Poked fun at our out-of-date outfits, misshapen kickflips and troubled hairlines. My Eddie Munster-esque widow’s peak got singled out and I feigned mortification.

“Damn, I guess discrimination is legal here now,” I quipped.

There was a pause.

“We’re actually quite upset about what’s going on,” my American friends replied.

The present remained inescapable

I bumped into another friend at the art exhibition that helped kick off the conference. The show, curated by Sam Korman, consisted of images from the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection that were blown up and suspended from the ceiling. They showed skateboarding captured and presented by non-skateboarders: advertising agencies, local newspapers and the like.

“Seen together, these images capture a joyful awkwardness — equal parts raw energy, adolescent improvisation and commercial co-option. The tension between freedom and framing is everywhere,” Korman’s wall text read.

My friend told me he recently landed his dream job as an attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but was summarily laid off after DOGE deemed government protection of the everyday consumer from parasitic business practices an unseemly budgetary expenditure.

There was no tension between freedom and framing here — this was a ransacking.

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“Let’s fucking go,” I yelled. The National Hockey League’s mid-season tournament finals had just ended and I’d caught the score on a television mounted high on the wall in a crowded dive bar.

Canada had edged out the United States in overtime, 3-2, and Connor McDavid, the Edmonton Oilers’ 28-year-old captain, scored the winning goal.

“You see that shit?” I shouted at my American friends. They had. But did they get it? The surge of nationalism felt sticky and unsettling.

“Bro, if McDavid hadn’t got that,” I told them, “we were gonna be annexed.”

Sportsnet reported that the game averaged 5.7 million viewers in Canada. It was one of the most-watched NHL-sanctioned hockey games in decades. Geopolitical instability proved great for ratings.

The following week, a McDonald’s franchise in Edmonton would change its golden arches sign to read “McDavid’s” in celebration of his game-winning goal, as would the McDonald’s in his hometown of Newmarket, Ontario. National pride fuelled by cross-border strife was great promotional fodder.

The next day, a 4.7 magnitude earthquake struck the Sunshine Coast and shook southwestern British Columbia.

A friend at home messaged the group chat, “It felt like a truck hit my office. Maybe a small car.”

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The weekend’s paper sessions saw academics, activists, artists and more present to a packed room of bleary-eyed but engaged skateboarders.

Jessie Frietze-Armenta, founder and CEO of Shred Cycle, explained how their business upcycles and recycles polyurethane skateboarding wheels, a product that revolutionized the sport from its days of using limited clay and steel alternatives, but is now one of the industry’s biggest and longest-lasting polluters.

Taj Hanson, a landscape architect from Portland, Oregon, asked the audience to consider skate parks as more than grey expanses of concrete outfitted with imposing concrete pools and metal edges, and instead see them as opportunities to build ecologically sustainable community hubs, where skateboarders and non-skateboarders alike can share space and thrive.

Hana Goodman detailed their work introducing skateboarding to the visually impaired and their efforts to make skate parks and skateboard gear adapted and accessible.

Eric Schoenborn expounded on the power of “skateboarding’s carnivalesque political expression.”

Bobby Wildheart Pourier Jr., an academic, teacher and counsellor from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, is a program director for the Young Medicine Movement, a community-based intervention program affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and Aaniiih Nakoda College in Fort Belknap, Montana.

He spoke about the concept of “communal mastery” and how something like skateboarding, when done with others, can help the individual not just overcome personal challenges, but work toward building better futures together.

Communal mastery would get cited throughout the rest of the conference, both as aspiration and in the realization that this is what we were doing by being here — an endeavour that increasingly looked like a bulwark against the rapidly decaying present.

A “Queer, Women and/or Trans [skate] Session” was held on the Friday, and while this is not a new practice in inclusive skateboarding spaces, it carried added weight as the U.S. government continued its monstrous campaign of anti-trans legislation.

Days later, a Republican state representative from Michigan introduced a resolution asking the Supreme Court to repeal Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015.

Amidst the revelry that Slow Impact’s events provided, the present remained inescapable. To open one’s phone was to release a flood of bile. Traditional news organizations struggled to keep up with and articulate the onslaught. Some continued to capitulate to the billionaires seated prominently on the dais during the inauguration day ceremonies.

Editorial capture, often a function of appeasing funders, political expediency, ignorance or cowardice, was explored in the panel discussion “Does Skateboarding Need Journalism?”

The panel featured a broad swath of media representatives, from seasoned journalists and editors to an independent magazine publisher, a popular podcaster, a famous YouTube personality, and me, who could be charitably described as a part-time blogger.

While we didn’t come to a conclusive answer to the panel’s provocative headline, it was clear that if we wanted anything approximating journalism in this space, or at least something separate from the institutionalized boosterism that dominates it, we’d have to do it ourselves.

A glimpse at what things could be

Fittingly, the skateboarding conference held its annual literary reading series “Anything at All” in Cowtown Skateboards. Against a backdrop of colourful and gleaming skateboard graphics, author and host Kyle Beachy and performers of all stripes shared work on any subject of their choosing.

Patrick Kigongo prefaced his reading with a request of the audience. “We’re living in a time where we are increasingly finding ourselves feeling disconnected, unhappy and distressed. So, take a look around you... the person next to you, say what’s up, shake their hand.” The room buzzed with greetings and laughter. Connection. Comfort. You could feel it, whatever it was we’d all come here for.

At midnight the following Friday, Feb. 28, Kigongo and his entire department at 18F — a wing of the General Services Administration previously praised by a Trump official as “‘the gold standard’ of civic tech,” and who were, among their recent work, “making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State [and] supporting free tax filing with the IRS” — were laid off without notice or explanation by Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts, as they detailed in a statement.

The Atlantic would note the abject and at this point rote hypocrisy of this move: “The Trump administration, as part of its push to modernize the government with software, laid off roughly 90 people from the General Services Administration,” wrote Matteo Wong, “all federal technologists whose role was to modernize the government with software.”

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How do you deal with a cruelty that is both gleeful and ravenous? That will eat everything, including itself, to spite everyone else? What’s the best way to go on with your day-to-day when each day feels collapsible, like the bottom might fall out?

To close the weekend, the Van Deck Parks, a cover band led by AJJ frontman Sean Bonnette, played songs from beloved skateboarding videos to a packed crowd at the Beast, a bar and venue that shares a space with Cornish Pasty, a local restaurant chain that serves the Cornwall staple in arid Arizona.

Heartfelt singalongs to the Highwaymen’s “Silver Stallion” (Ross Norman in Last of the Mohicans) and Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (Tyshawn Jones in Supreme’s Blessed) gave way to immediate, cathartic chaos as the first notes of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (Flip Skateboards’ Sorry) rang out.

A mosh pit opened, swallowed and carried us. Bodies collided, fell and helped one another up as Bonnette wailed the Stranglers’ “(Get a) Grip (on Yourself)” from Marisa Dal Santo’s section in Zero Skateboards’ Strange World.

We held up our hands to help keep others afloat. Crowd-surfers scraped the low ceiling, front stroked through limbs, sweat, tears and joy.

This was what we’d come to the desert for: a break from what things were and a glimpse at what they could be. To be alongside people working to build a better world within their own, where hope, fear and anger were not naiveté, but purpose.

An encore of Black Sabbath’s “Children of the Grave” (Fred Gall in Alien Workshop’s Timecode) drove us in one writhing mass.

Our voices hoarse and cracking, we belted the song's final lines in messy, impassioned unison:

Show the world that love is still alive, you must be brave
Or you children of today are children of the grave.