Once the snow and ice melts, Wasilla’s ten-plus-year-old skatepark will be filled with skateboarders from dawn until dusk.

Hell, these days the skaters complain that the park’s not big enough for all of them, especially considering the bikers and rollerbladers with whom they share the concrete wonderland.

Before 1998—before the Wasilla skatepark was built—it was a far different scene for Valley skateboarders. The teens who carve on the park’s curves, grind the rails, ollie the stairs, or just bust a 360 shove-it on flat ground probably don’t know the pains to which their forebears went to get the park built. That’s bound to change, though, with a film called Breath of Fresh Air heading to skate shop shelves soon, documenting the civic battle that Wasilla skaters undertook to get the city to build them a place of their own. When skateboarding moved off of half-pipes and into the streets in the ‘90s, business owners, cops and citizens unfamiliar with skateboard culture took a hard stance against these kids with their rebellious-looking style, cruising and flipping their boards haphazardly along sidewalks and down outdoor staircases. This wasn’t just a phenomenon in Wasilla, but in cities across the U.S.

As illustrated in Breath of Fresh Air by archival footage of security guards, cops and business owners tackling, handcuffing and brawling with skaters, there was serious community concern over these kids’ preferred sport. So where the hell are we supposed to go, the skaters asked. Build us a skatepark and we’ll get off of your sidewalks and out of your parking lots.

“Our parents brought up the idea of going to the city to ask about the chances of getting a real, concrete skate park built,” Zach Carothers, Wasilla native and Portugal. The Man bassist, wrote in an article for MTV.com this past fall. “The number of kids skating was growing like crazy, and with all the baseball diamonds, hockey rinks, and tennis courts around, it seemed like a reasonable request.” At the time—the mid-90’s, when John Stein was mayor of Wasilla and Sarah Palin was on the city council—Wasilla’s government had a fiscally conservative philosophy, as former council member Judy Patrick explains in the film. The skatepark that the teens were asking for just seemed like another government expense, one that could easily be turned down.

The skateboarders started attending city council meetings en masse, voicing their desire for the city to provide them an alternative to being evicted from one spot only to move on to another, where another business owner would try to boot them out. Raise some money yourselves, the council eventually told them, and we’ll talk about it. The Wasilla Skate Park Committee was formed, and skaters and their parents began selling t-shirts and stickers, holding fundraising concerts and dances, and raffling off donated merchandise like four-wheelers.

The Wasilla Skate Park committee raised north of $40,000, and the city of Wasilla pledged to get them their skatepark. Ground was broken in May of 1998, and the park opened later that year.

Mike Burns has never been a skateboarder, but his friends were among those who lobbied to get the Wasilla park built. Burns—now 25 years old—got into video production in high school, taking a class in his senior year at Burchell High School with Ron Dennison, who ended up as the lead cameraman for Breath of Fresh Air. He says he was never too serious about filmmaking until a couple of years ago, and had just played around making music videos for his friends’ bands.

On his 22nd birthday, February 22, 2006, while riding around in a limousine with his friends, Burns got a call from Jerry Lewis, a friend of his mom’s who knew he was into video production. Lewis said he had an idea: They should make a documentary about the skaters who fought to get themselves a skatepark in Wasilla. Burns was down.

He and his friends—they call their group Blambo Entertainment—went down to the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman and copied all of the articles about the skaters’ battle for their park. After researching the project, it stalled for a while, then regained its momentum in the summer of 2007.

Burns interviewed former Wasilla Mayor John Stein, former councilwoman and more recently Mayor Dianne Keller, former councilwoman Judy Patrick, former Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon, as well as four parental members of the Wasilla Skate Park Committee, LeRoi Heaven of the Wasilla Historical Society, and a grip of the skateboarders involved with the project.

Noticeably absent is Governor Palin, who became mayor of Wasilla during the battle for the skatepark. But Burns says it wasn’t for lack of trying to get Palin on-camera. “Right when we were going to approach her, she started her governorship,” he says. “We talked to staff, they pointed us in all different directions. I actually bumped into her at Fred Meyer one day, and I was like, ‘god, there she is, after all the phone calls, after all this bullshit, she’s right there!’ So I went up to her, told her about the project. I was being enthusiastic, but I was probably stuttering and sounding like an idiot—she had no idea who I was—I was like, ‘yeah, we’re doing a skateboard video.’” Burns says Palin said she loved the skatepark and would be happy to talk, but when he called her office again he got the same runaround. “By the time McCain got a hold of her, I just figured we’d leave her out,” Burns says.

Interspersed with public domain archival footage and skateboarding footage donated by friends, Breath of Fresh Air is a slick, hour-long presentation of the skateboarders’ struggle to find a place of their own. Burns makes no apologies for the film’s pro-skateboarder, pro-skatepark agenda. “What ignited [the film] was knowing how skateboarders were looked at in society, how people viewed them and how people treated them,” he says. “It’s changed a lot after a number of years, but there’s still resistance to it, and a huge resistance to skateboard parks. We really wanted to get across that these skateboard parks do not create more liability; they’re not an eyesore in these towns and communities.”

Perhaps just as importantly, Breath of Fresh Air is a lesson in civics for young people. And it’s pertinent even to the younger skateboarders who today enjoy the luxury of Wasilla’s skatepark without knowing the story of its genesis.

As previously mentioned, the skatepark is crowded; skaters complain about collisions with bikers and rollerbladers, and that pegs on bikes are chipping up the concrete. But, Burns says, “the only way the city will make any adjustments to the skatepark is if the same thing happens again—basically a group of kids work their asses off with their parents to come up with some money.”

But Burns doesn’t think that’ll happen. They’ve got a park, even if it’s crowded. The tension with the cops and business owners is nowhere near as drastic as it was before the park was there. “It’s like they’ll settle for it,” Burns says.

“There needs to be an indoor park; it’s Alaska,” Burns says. But he recognizes that’s something that no city will touch, despite communities’ enthusiasm for basketball courts, baseball diamonds, hockey rinks, and the like.

Besides, Burns is focusing on getting his film into the public eye. He screened it several times in December and January, then made further edits. Now the retail copies are on order, and he’s submitting Breath of Fresh Air to film festivals. And the story of how Wasilla’s skateboarders got a park of their own is recorded for posterity.

bjk@anchoragepress.com