Like countless American municipalities, Carlsbad has banned the sport from many of its public byways: grinding a downtown curb with your board puts you in danger of getting slapped with a fifty-dollar ticket. The skateboarders are viewed as something of a public menace. In Carlsbad, the surfers, who can be seen, day and night, strolling through town in wetsuits with their boards slung under their arms, are regarded as heroes. Over the years, however, the surfers and the skaters have grown apart, like cousins who secretly despise each other. Skateboard lore concedes that the sport was more or less invented in the early sixties by barefoot “street surfers,” who took to the pavement on days when the waves were flat. Carlsbad, California, which is situated along a hundred-and-twenty-mile strip of sand between San Diego and Los Angeles, is a town where the impulse to stay upright on a fast-moving piece of wood has spawned two closely related but rivalrous tribes-the surfers and the skateboarders.
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