Buying skate shoes in Bismarck, North Dakota

Today we have a guest post from Cat, who I met through her Fort Collins blog, Lost Fort Collins: ´´An unofficial exploration of Fort Collins history´´, who recently posted today´s story on her new Bismarck Blog.  Cat´s blog has inspired me in many ways to explore things like Reedsburg history and see the value of putting the content online.  It is amazing to see how much people from the community can add to a post through their comments.

She says this about today´s ´´Buying skate shoes in Bismarck, North Dakota´´ post:

´´My online friend, Paul, left for Lima, Peru, at about the same time I left for Bismarck, North Dakota. In some twisted way, I see parallels as we both leave behind life we know and abandon the job force in the middle of a recession to find what else there is. In a recent blog post, he wrote about finding a surfboard in Lima, Peru. This is my not-so-parallel universe response.´´

We came to North Dakota, my son and I, with one bag each, a carry on, and whatever we could fit in the pockets of our jackets. Underwear and chapstick, mostly.

I thought it was modern Joad. Flying away from the old life, the house, the job that wasn’t going anywhere, and all those possessions that weigh us down and keep us from what’s real.*

But tell that to a 13-year-old with only second-hand snow boots to wear. As you might imagine, we were soon downtown, scouting Bismarck’s two skate shops for acceptable boy shoes. Maybe a pair with some free stickers in the box…:

Discontent
On the web, Discontent looks the most promising of the local stores. It has an indoor skate park for these cold Bismarck winters. Surely the center of skate culture, if such a thing exists here.

And maybe it is, but it’s also a head shop. Burning incense, dusty skate shoes, Bob Marley silk screens, well-used ramps, and an 18+over back room.

Let’s talk about pot for a minute. I don’t care how legal pot ought to be, little kids have a hard enough time of it and…okay, let’s not. But someday you’ll have a kid or even a kid sister, and you’ll get it. So, I’ll just say this:

Damn, you’d think shop owners would know who pays for those $60 skate shoes. It’s not the kids.

Savvy Sk8 and Sno
Even less promising was Savvy Sk8 and Sno. Its lame web presence is dated and incomplete. From the web site, I was sure I had missed it by maybe 3 months–out of business. I drove to the address anyway, in a hybrid residential/industrial neighborhood next to a public housing complex, and found a splintered sign on top of an aluminum barn.

If they went out of business, it surely wasn’t the rent that did them in.

But surprisingly, the lights were on. Then more surprisingly, inside I found a thriving skate and snowboard enterprise. Nicely lit, full of choices.

“Of course,” I thought. “An incomplete web site can mean dead. But it can also mean too-popular-to-get-to-the-online-thing.” And I think that might be the case for Savvy. It fairly teems with kids.

Could it be that the best businesses don’t need social networking to make it? That in a small town getting your name out there isn’t near as important as getting kids to want to come back?

Maybe it’s in fact a positive statement that Savvy didn’t sink money into rent or online marketing.

I’m guessing, no, I’m hoping, that could be true about many more things in life.

*In truth, we’re only Joad-ing temporarily, in a few weeks we’ll go back to Colorado and get more of our crap to move back up here…but that doesn’t change my image of myself as a 21st century Henry Fonda, not even a little bit.