Unlike many kids in the Palisades who grew up with a perfectly flat street and even sidewalks, my home was located somewhere along the Cliffs of Insanity. Which was fine if you intended to walk everywhere, but I was an adventurous child and if I wasn’t on my bike, I was roller skating everywhere like Tootie on “The Facts of Life”. *SIGH* If only my mom had let me wear my roller skates in the house. Those boarding school girls were so LUCKY.

My skate boots were just plain white, but my toe stops and wheels were yellow so I laced them up with kooky smiley face decorative laces. (Fancy laces were all the rage back then, don’t you know?) I even remember buying my skates in little shop on Santa Monica Blvd. just north of 26^th St. and next door to Carl’s, Jr. I think it’s still there, actually. I’ll have to check the next time I have a craving for a Super Star with cheese and some onion rings. Yes, I realize I could just look the skate shop up in the Yellow Pages but you can’t always trust that a business is still in business even when they are listed in the directory, especially nowadays with the whole Great Depression II: Redux thing.

ANYeveryoneisunemployedsoletshaveaparty, as I was telling you, the home in which I grew up in was on a hill. Navigating a safe path simply to get out of my building and on to the more skate friendly surfaces of town (the Via de la Paz Flats), was a difficult task in and of itself.  You see, I’d put my skates on before I left my front door and roll down the outside walkway and on to the elevator, push “G” and emerge into the lower garage. That was the easy part. The hard part was the 50 feet between the gate to my garage and level ground.

Sometimes, I wouldn’t even bother. I’d practice my skating in the garage while listening to Barbara Streisand sing “The Main Event”. The garage was smooth, flat and relatively large, making it an ideal location to practice my toe stops and spins. The tricky part was avoiding any incoming or outgoing traffic and, more importantly, the stucco walls that craved the blood of small, clumsy children. Other than those dangerous obstacles, the garage was the best place to skate and listen to music (the echo made my rinky dink cassette player sound like a real ghetto blaster).

If I decided to venture out into Palisades proper, I was faced with a myriad of difficult hurdles. First, there was the problem of skating up my driveway which is at about a 10% grade. I probably could’ve made it to the top of my driveway no problem if the street that I lived on was flat.  Just a couple of hard pushes and me and my yellow wheels would roll to safety. However, the only thing steeper than my driveway was my street. Antioch may be a short street, but what she lacks in length, she more than makes up for in steepness. Right smack dab in front of my building, I’d estimate her pitch to be about 18-20% grade.

Antioch is the insult to Temescal Canyon’s injury. Even if you master the beast, and manage to make it all the way up Temescal via your preferred mode of self-propulsion, you still have Antioch to contend with. Many a man, woman and child hath taken the Lord’s name in vain when faced with that last block of road which leads to the Promised Level Land of Via and the Village. Hello, and welcome to MY childhood.

As if all of that wasn’t enough to deter me, the driveway and the street meet at a perpendicular angle situated so once you made it to the top of the drive, and avoided rolling backward into the unforgiving Black Iron Bars of Death that make up the garage gate (hey, I lost the roof of my car to that behemoth in a silly attempt to sneak through the gate as it was already closing…two words: The Mangler), then I’d have to somehow hang a right, up Antioch to the blessed mesa of Via de la Paz. Gravity was a concept I became very familiar with at a young age. All I wanted to do was skate down the sidewalk gracefully as to allow the gentle breeze waft over my sheer Danskin wrap around ballet skirt and caress the flowing ribbon barrettes in my hair—just like ONJ in Xanadu.

It was never that simple. I have the scars to prove it.

Even with all the off-road roller skating practice of my youth, Rollerblades presented an entirely different challenge. They were lightning fast.

When I lived in Santa Barbara, during college, I had the ULTIMATE apartment that was literally across the street from the beach. The bike path was directly outside my front door, and on many occasions I biked or bladed over to State Street in lieu of driving. Santa Barbara was mercifully flat. Well, most of it.

My hip digs were at the far Southern end of Cabrillo Blvd. The only thing between my place and the Ralph’s in Montecito was the zoo. Can we take a moment to appreciate the Santa Barbara Zoo? It may not have been the biggest zoo, or even the best zoo, but for three years the zoo and its wonky-necked giraffe were my next door neighbors. It was not uncommon to hear the elephants trumpet or the seals bark. It’s about as close as I’ll ever get to living in the jungle.

So, one day, my friend Lisa and I went to purchase sustenance at the market in Montecito before blading the rest of the day away. Now, if you’ve ever driven through Santa Barbara on the 101 north, there’s an unusual off ramp that exits from the fast lane of the freeway directly onto Cabrillo.  The southbound lanes also have an exit right there, and these two off ramps meet at an intersection I now refer to as the “Oh, Shit Crossroads.”

Lisa and I had followed the bike path from my house and through the “Oh, Shit” intersection, when we gradually noticed that the road to Ralph’s was suspiciously steep. Getting up the hill wasn’t an issue. However, traveling in the opposite direction suddenly seemed to be potentially problematic. We both knew that if we skated back down that hill, we might have great difficulty slowing to a stop.  Little did either of us know that stopping was not even an option.

After leaving Ralph’s, we started down the “little” hill towards the “Oh, Shit Crossroads.” What had seemed like a relatively gentle slope on the way up now felt like a triple black diamond run in Mammoth. Half way down the slope I hit maximum Rollerblade wheel rotation and was traveling at approximately 100 miles per hour…headed directly towards the four-way stop from Hell. I knew that ANY attempt to move my blades (which were now smoking from the friction of being pushed to their limits and quaking so hard my teeth almost shook out of my head) from their forward-facing direction would catapult me up into the air, smash me into the concrete facing of the freeway, where I would disintegrate upon impact.

So, I did what any rational woman faced with death would do—I screamed. At that particular moment, my voice was the only “Emergency Alert” system available. As I rocketed down the hill and straight through the intersection, shouting “OH SHIT” at the top of my lungs, I somehow managed to avoid being run over and, rather quickly, made it to the soft grassy patch along the edge of the bike path where I immediately collapsed into a quivering pile of jelly. My entire body was shaking involuntarily and my legs were numb from the vibrations. A second later, Lisa caught up to me, she crumpled beside me and we laughed uncontrollably until we cried. We had done it. We’d managed to survive what surely could’ve been a very painful and possibly fatal experience.

The Rollerblading Gods took pity on our souls. Hallelujah. Can I get an AMEN?

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