Mason “Mayday” McNay’s Raw Coverage of Kona

There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Kona was a total clusterfuck.

I tried to explain beforehand to those not in-the-know the extremity of their ignorance. “It’s not real life” I tell my parents at a visit, gesticulating wildly. “it’s three days of skateboarders voluntarily cut off from the universe in a world entirely of their own invention.” Two old people and a dog stare at me blankly, the severity of my insinuations completely lost on them. Meanwhile, I shiver with neurotic excitement, yelling “ANYTHING can happen!”

Going in, I was anxious, a little stressed, obviously excited and not ashamed to be slightly afraid. The gods and demons that show their faces at King of Kona are the same ones that ancient men drew in the margins of their maps. They are fickle and veangeful. Blood for the Blood God, they say. Anything can happen.

Most events I caravan to with a carload of fellow screw-ups dawdling at every stopping point to lurk and skate and kill time we don’t have, juggling piles of non-essential gear in our laps but still having all left important things at home. This time I traveled relatively light, and I traveled alone. The forecast threatened torrential rains so I said fuck tents and threw a mattress in the back of my station wagon. One of the best decisions of my entire life. Three weeks later, it’s still in there. On my way out the door I’ve got a lot of naysayers suggesting I should sit this one out. My knees and ankles are screaming from pre-existing injuries, I’m buried under too many over-ambituos personal projects, and school starts mere hours after my projected return time. They don’t understand. They don’t realize this isn’t a choice. They can’t grasp what it’s like to be somewhere where anything can happen. I don’t have anything to prove. I love a good skatepark, but it’s not my place to shine. It’ll be enough for me to be there. I vow to myself to take it easy, to come back with my legs intact.

The trip went by quickly until I hit Jacksonville and get lost. Gas station attendants direct me in frustrating circles around the park for nearly two hours before I get lucky. Laying eyes on the twelve foot KONA pillar vaporizes my discontent, scours it with infantile waves of giddiness. The sun still has at least an hour to set, not that it matters anymore. The lights stay on all weekend

I meet some of my teammates at the mini-ramp. We partake in an orthodox greeting ritual.

“Dude!”

“DUDE!”

“Kona, dude!

“Dude, I know!”

“Dude, Fucking Kona!”

“AAAAAAAAAAAH!”

And we pour one out for Cameron Frazier. For making it happen, not because he’s dead.

An hour of skating later and my vow to take it easy has gone out the window. On top of freshly rebelling shinsplints and patellar infundibuli (<probably didn’t say that right), I busted my tailbone falling out of the mini ramp and smacked my face running over a silly in the snake run. Still I can’t stop. I learn spine transfers and roll-ins. Still can’t stop. Learn to rock and roll instead of just to fakie. Still can’t stop. Get shoved out of the snake by an utterly remorseless Schumacher. Manage to shotgun a beer faster than my friends for the first time in my life. Drop in switch. Still cant stop. I’m boueyed up on the irresistible tide of new experiences with old friends, stoked out of my fucking mind on atmosphere alone. Total strangers are locking arms and singing badly, giving eachother food, beer, rides, gear, introductions are effortless because everyone is here for the same reason. Standing anywhere in the park I am surrounded on all sides by people doing inconceivably gnarly shit.

I want to howl. Others join me.

The threatening ache in my legs completely forgotten, I don’t even think about cooling off until the sun is long since down. My friend Holland mentions making food. Holland is a great freaking cook. I’m not alone following him back to his campsite by the fire pit, which is piled with rotting skate surfacing, but unlit. “Just waiting for a little gasoline” a passerby suggests.

For those of you that don’t know, I’m a bit of a hobbyist outdoorsman. I live in the heart of a sprawling metropolis and hate ever second of it, so when I get out in something even remotely resembling wilderness I start running around like a buffoon; building excessive campfires, making shelters out of sticks, setting small traps, and sticking my head in holes… None of it’s very practical or especially skillful, but I have fun. And as far as making fire is concerned, I like to do it the hard way- from tinder and kindling and a spark from a flint, or from rubbing sticks together (No, I’m not shitting you. Yes, I can do that). So to gasoline, I say fuck that and go get my big knife. I’m chopping down wood with it like I have thousands of times before, and I’m almost done. Just a few more scrapes and I’ll be good to go. I’m rushing it. I’m trying to get it done before any random dude comes over with a lighter to spoil my fun. My blade swings are getting a little reckless.

“Dude, you should maybe be more careful with that” Holland suggests, sitting closest to me preparing food on a grill in his lap. Matt and Taylor are skating around us in the dirt, beers in hand. It’s dark. I’m way too excited to be handling a really big knife. I need to slow down.

“Holland, you are absolutely right.” I admit. “I’m probably about done anyway.” I stop chopping and reach for my flint, but there’s one last whittle barely clinging to the fuel log I was scraping. I go to pry it off with my blade using no more force than in my thumb and two fingers. Holland says something I don’t quite hear.

“Whats that, Holland?” I look away. The whittle gives and my hand slips. The blade of my knife ever so gently grazes the back my left middle knuckle. There is no pain, but there is blood. Matt’s already moaning at the sight of it. “Dude, chill the hell out.” I think to myself while assessing the damage. “It’s not like any of us has never nicked themselves before…” I make a fist and a yawning red mouth gapes up at me, toothless and obscene. A thick white wormy tongue snakes in and out of the wound before slithering down the back of my hand into my wrist revealing stark white bone. They wouldn’t uncurl, i could clench but not unclench. The muscles in my wrist spasmed sympathetically, tryig to motivate digits they were no longer conected to. There it was, folks. Anything happened. Blood for the Blood God.

My internal monologue is suddenly much less stoic. “Alright,” I announce to my wide-eyed friends, “Let’s go to the hospital”

The next few seconds are like a frantic wartime Simon says.

“Pour some whiskey on it!”

“Okay!” It’s cold and it burns at the same time.

“Wrap it in your shirt! Hold it above your head!” My Jati tanktop is splattered with mud and booze and sweat and Florida’s unique varieties of filth, but it staunches the bleeding.

“Spit In it, I promise, it helps!”

“Lets go! I’m good *hic* good straight to promise I’m drive!”

“Someone get earthwing! They can sew it!”

“Tis but a fleshwound!” someone far away yells.

A heartening number of people volunteer to take me to the emergency room, but it would seem that Adam Westfall was the only legal driver at the park who hadn’t embibed himself silly so I hop in with him, but on our way out the parking lot we pass a carload of our friends pulling in. I haven’t seen them for months, so of course we have to stop for a safety meeting. Then we go to the hospital. Adam drives me there and stakes it out like a fucking hero; through passing out from blood loss in the lobby, to triage, to getting stitched up and my prescriptions filled, hours and hour and hours go crawlingly by, and this dude’s still got my back with a smile and not a word of complaint.

As a needle is pushing in and out of me, we tell the doctor the story.

“I guess it’s all fun and games till somebody loses a hand…” she muses, thinking herself clever. Adam and I share a look. We already know. We know I’m going right back to the park when this is over.

“Nah, it’s all still pretty much fun and games.” We say in unison. Of course she looks at us like we’re crazy. She doesn’t understand.

They tell me I’ll need surgery when I get back to Atlanta, but I push that to the back of my mind. It’s Friday, no surgeon would speak to me before Monday, and even then I’ll still have to wait for an appointment later in the week. I’d never tried just hanging out at an event. I’d always rushed from place to place trying to rep, skate, meet, hit all the things I’d never get to hit otherwise. Given the choice, that’s still how I’d do it. But two hands, one hand, or no hands, just chilling out for a while is a refreshing change of pace. I wasn’t too butthurt about it, the rest of my body still ached from the skating I did on Friday alone. At least this would give the rest of me time to heal.

Kona took a hefty blood toll this year.

Mere hours after I get back I find out Laura Nocka had been hospitalized as well, concussion(?) and skin loss from getting trampled in the snake, I hear. But the worries the rumor inspired were only half-founded. Next I see her, she’s got her skateboard in hand, a bittersweet smile in the corner of her mouth, and somehow still looks a stunner with a face full of road rash.

Ed Nieves got thouroughly fucked. He broke a few helmets, probably a few ribs, and blew all the bedazzles off his jacket in one single slam. He either fistfought, made out with, molested, sang to, or shot fireworks at every single other person in the park. I doubt he slept. Pretty sure he won “king of crust” which means something, or it doesn’t, I don’t know. Good show, Ed.

Shoe’s wrist looks so swollen it’s trying to grow another hand. He’s cool about it. Says he probably deserves it from remorselessly bowling into people all yesterday.

I heard tell of a few other concussions. A few more rows of stitches here and there… you didn’t have to be observant to spot the bloodsplatter on the concrete.No more or less common than sweat or spilled beer.

All around, everyone is intoxicated on the residue of gnar. Modest riders get inspired, come out of their shell with something new and do stupid celebratory dances. Accomplished riders pump effortlessly around the whole park, their feet never touching the ground, half the time they’re in the air. There is free beer, and a thunderstorm hits that no one seems to notice. We’re louder and wetter.

Peter Croce DJ’s a set that takes hours and hours, but goes by in the blink of an eye.

The sun goes down on Sunday, and I’ve let myself stick around for some reason. A seven hour drive home is looming, I have surgery hanging over my head and my first classes of the semester are in less than twelve hours. Somehow it’s more important that I stay here. “I have to see the award ceremony” I tell myself, even though I know it’s horseshit. “For my write-up.”

Almost everyone else is already gone. Most of the people still here I don’t know. The judging was by video entry, most checks off the checklist wins. I don’t know the guy who won, I don’t know if I’d ever seen him before this weekend, but I don’t doubt he earned it. I glimpsed him a few times out of the corner of my eye doing crazy shit on like a forty inch board. He was stoked, everybody was stoked for him. He got a nice cash wad.

You’ll have to ask him for verification, this is only a guess, but I’d be willing to bet that one of Cameron Frazier’s favorite things in the entire world is throwing ridiculous amounts of skate gear into swathes of clamoring skaters. He does so with obvious relish, and had I not been there I would have not believed the amount of wheels exploding in all directions. It’s easily as grand of a finale as fireworks, which we had already had in abundance. Now after a final climax, everyone in the park is stooped with the exhaustion catching up with them. Even the bonfire is reduced to a mount of dimly winking coals. All the fuel from around the campground has been scavenged, but still a few campers huddle around its fading warmth like crows on a carcass. It’s over. It’s time to go home. To real life, where severed tendons take months to heal, and missing patches of face on your skin are not medals. Where people sneer at you for the name stitched on your jacket instead of cheering for it. It’s bittersweet, to surrender to the end of a good thing. Injury or no injury, I still did everything I set out to do, if a little less of it. Even with my arm in a sling I managed the nerve to take more than a few (unimpressive) runs in the vert ramp, and i’d hadn’t ruined my legs, they felt just fine. Still, it’s hard to drive back to a city you’re tired of, to school in the morning, knowing all the people you’ll encounter between now and the next event will be that much less passionate, less impressive, less real. Reduced, and distilled and synthetic. Uninspiring. I don’t drive home FROM events, I drive home TO them. The house I sleep in is just the place I rest between races, and sometimes the only thing that gets be back to it is the faith there’s always another one soon.

Cameron, you did a fine fucking job. I promise I’ll try harder not to blow it next year, not that you cared, jumping naked through your bonfire.

Kona is the only place in the world where it’s all still fun and games, even after you cut your hand off.

Anything can happen.