The longboard is bound for Toronto.
The varnish on its fibreglass body hardens, the steel trucks and polyurethane wheels are attached. Emblazoned with skulls, the newly-completed board joins a procession migrating east from the Vancouver workshop.
From Toronto the board may be re-routed to a Palestinian girl in Israel, to a boy who weaves between gang members in the toughest neighbourhood in Houston, Texas, or to Vietnam, Malaysia or Hungary.
This is Michael Brooke's attempt at world peace.
Brooke, a magazine publisher, author, longboarder, and "failed Xerox salesman," is the founder of Longboarding For Peace, an organization attempting to spread harmony and understanding through boarding.
Like a missionary bearing boards instead of Bibles, Brooke arrived in Israel in July 2012 with $10,000 worth of gear, almost all of it donated. Originally planned as a family vacation, Brooke had been seized by the idea it could be more.
Looking to the Mediterranean Sea with his back to the Peres Center for Peace in Jaffa, Brooke stood atop a cement block. It was a perfect place to skate.
"We brought in Jewish Israelis in East Jerusalem and they were freaking out, thinking 'Oh my God, they're going to kill us.' And of course the Arabs are looking at us going, 'Who are these people?'" Many parents were also unimpressed with Israeli and Palestinian children skating together, according to Brooke. "We got a lot of people coming up to us, Israelis in particular, saying, 'We're over this.' And I would say, 'Well, you may be over it, but the kids are the next generation and that's who we want to talk to.'"
Approximately 70 kilometres away, air raid sirens had been sounding as bombs dropped on Sderot. But on that slab of sunbaked concrete, Brooke saw Muslim women keeping balance with the aid of Jewish Israelis.
The parents saw it, too. "We were dealing with kids, and I could see that the relationship between the adults started to thaw. So people who normally don't trust each other were seeing that their kids were having fun, and that impacted how they felt. I got goosebumps."
Resolving what many see as an untenable conflict has been attempted through soccer, but Brooke maintains his approach is different.
"Someone always wins, because it's a soccer game. The funny thing about this activity is that no one wins. But no one loses," he says. "That's the way you build peace: one person at a time, through a level of trust, and balance is a perfect metaphor."
Brooke is aware of the region's bloody history and the labyrinthine nature of geopolitical conflicts, he just believes those problems can be transcended. "Maybe you should just back away from the big, big things and work just person to person. Just work with children."
• • •
"I've been stabbed twice. Been shot three times."
Speaking in a friendly Texas drawl from his home in Houston's Fifth Ward, Mikey Seibert talks about skateboarding the way a prisoner might talk about tunnels. "Originally it started as a way for me to get out of my crappy neighbourhood I lived in. When I'm doing it nothing else matters," he says. "I'm just skating."
Nicknamed the Bloody Nickel, the Fifth Ward is known for gangs and violence.
"One time there was a homeless man freaking out on me. He spit in my face and when I pushed him away he stabbed me in my ribcage. Another time I got into a fight with a guy at school and I won, so after school him and three friends jumped me and they sliced me from my belly button to my nipple," Seibert says. "My brother-in-law shot me in the leg 'cause he was drunk.... The second time I got shot I was with a guy and come to find out he's been talking shit to some dudes earlier in the day. They cornered us up at Wendy's and started firing into the car, so I turned to get out of the passenger seat and run and got shot in the back."
Seibert was a member of the Bloods, and remains affiliated with the gang.
"There's only three ways to leave: you can buy yourself out, you can die, or you can age, which is what I did. I hit an age where I became an elder, and so now I'm not really viable anymore," he says. "I'll technically be in it till I die."
Seibert credits skateboarding with getting him away from that. "A skateboard was a way and a reason," he says. "Me and a couple of my friends, we really got into skateboarding when we were young, which gave us a way to get away, gave us an excuse to leave."
Seibert didn't come to longboarding until injuring his back while trying to skate a handrail. "My doctor told me that if I wanted to keep skating while I was healing - because he knew I wasn't going to stop skating and it was just going to get worse - he said his nephew rode a longboard and he noticed his nephew didn't really fall and get hurt real often."
Seibert was unimpressed. "I was like, 'Them kooks? I'm not doing that,'" he says.
But he discovered the only way he could skate while healing was to ride a longboard because of the soft wheels and low impact.
After getting comfortable on his new board, Seibert stumbled across Concrete Wave, a longboarding magazine published by Michael Brooke. The two exchanged emails about Brooke's Longboarding For Peace program.
"I was like, 'Hey, dude, how come y'all don't have one in Houston? Houston's a really bad city, it's the fourth largest city in the country, really bad neighbourhoods," Seibert says. "I was thinking more along the lines of him finding some people to do it; and he said, 'All right, great. You can do it.' And I was like, 'Oh, shit.'" Seibert started building a curriculum and holding sessions at a community centre in San Antonio near the Mexican border.
"One of the kids in our program is 16, he's already got a two-year-old son, and he's been to jail three times. These are the poorest of the poor," he says.
The program quickly expanded and now includes the children of battered women. "I was skating on the back side of downtown where there's a battered women and children's shelter," he recalls. "I saw these eight, 10 kids sitting in this parking lot of this women's shelter, and they looked miserable. I can only imagine that not only is their dad abusive, but then they've moved into this shelter away from their friends out of their school, all of this stuff. Life's just got to suck for them.. .. I thought, 'Man, those are the kids that would benefit from this.'" Seibert works from 9 to 5 as an auto mechanic, and besides spending Sunday watching the Houston Texans play, the rest of his time is dedicated to Longboarding For Peace. He estimates 15 kids show up for the Friday night sessions and another 40 are there on Saturday.
The kids cruise around on donated boards and for many of them, it's become important enough for their parents to use it as leverage.
"Their parents are now using Longboarding For Peace as a punishment. They tell them, 'Hey, if you don't do your chores or don't get good grades you can't go to Longboarding For Peace this week.' So the kids are actually doing better in school."
The longboarding sessions have become more than a series of skateboarding techniques. "I instituted a mathematics and geometry plan. We deal with different durometers, different sized wheels, different contact patches, angles of trucks, metallurgy," he says. "Just trying to make it to where they can learn as well, it's not just, 'Hey, let's go skate and have a good time.' They need to learn something.
"Most kids say school sucks, so I explain to them, 'Look, you go to school, you don't have to go get a job designing roads for a city or designing buildings. The guys that make these wheels and make these struts, they're engineers. You can have that job as well."
Seibert wanted to let the kids take their longboards home, but that presented its own challenges. Ironically, his past as a gangster provided the solution.
"What I did is I went around and I made what they call a concession call to all the ranking members of these gangs that are in these areas of Houston. I said, 'Look, as a favour to me, don't mess with the kids when they're skating on their longboards. Don't pick on 'em, don't steal 'em, don't let people mess with 'em, and so they all said OK."
The concession call is still working, according to Seibert. "The kids can skate in their neighbourhoods without fear of hassle because they're basically being protected by the gangs that we don't want them to join," he says. "It's a weird dynamic, but it's the only way to make it work."
• • •
Immigrating to Canada from England as a child, Brooke gravitated to the freedom and immediacy of skateboarding when he discovered cricket was nonexistent in his new neighbourhood.
"I took a ride on a board.
A kid in the neighbourhood had traded it for a knife," he says. "That summer was when everything started."
He would spend hours in the garage fiddling with his skateboard in his neighbourhood. It's something he still does, only now he's interrupted by his kids.
Brooke is married to a woman he describes as "Mother Teresa's cousin," and credits their decision to foster children with Longboarding For Peace.
"I think fostering does change your family's DNA. It certainly shows to your children that there's more to life than just having children. There's also this idea of giving back and helping people who need help."
Longboarding For Peace embodies a charitable spirit, but the organization is not a charity. "It's not a non-profit. We don't ask for money. We just ask people to step up and they do."
One of those people was Tom Edstrand. The North Vancouver native and co-founder of Landyachtz longboards was at a boarding trade show when he saw some Longboarding For Peace photos.
"He looked at it he said, 'Holy crap! Look how stoked these kids are riding our products,'" Brooke recalls. "He turned to me that night and said, 'Michael, if you need anything from Landyachtz, let me know.'" The Vancouver company donated 125 boards.
"Anything that Michael Brooke does we like to support," says Landyachtz sales rep Nate Schumacher. "He's not your typical magazine publisher who's always looking for the bottom dollar."
The movement provides Landyachtz with exposure, but the project is bigger than that, Schumacher says.
"There'll be a lot of photos with our boards in them, which is solid. Aside from that we're not really doing it for more gain. It's more to help out someone who's been building a scene for a long time," he says.
While certain activities seem to belong to a culture or a country, longboarding is neutral, Schumacher says. "It shows that people are people and that the cultural differences really aren't as great as they've been led to believe. And it's just fun, so it gives people an escape from their daily hell."
With the program in more than 20 countries, Brooke is currently preparing to speak to United Nations executives in Switzerland early next year. "The big overall concept is to build an army of 50,000 people. I call it the army of peace."
The mandate is simple: mobilize a tribe of longboarders to create joy or assuage suffering every day. "It'll take me 30 years, but I'll do it," Brooke vows. "I wasn't put on this world to change the face of skateboarding, I was put on this world to help change the world, or to leave it in a better place than I found it."
