Last winter, Boston, Massachusetts weathered a greater snow accumulation than ever, amassing 108.6 inches of snow by March 15. If you paid even the slightest attention to the board-related interwebs, you’d be well aware that every crew, or semblance of a crew, or even aspiring grom using stolen money from his parents, had scrambled to Boston at some point during the season to reap a share of the spoils. The Rendered Useless boys were no exception, and with a sizable amount of their contingent Northeast natives, they realized opportunities in their backyard like they’d never imagined.                                                                                  

I don’t think I’d ever driven down such tight, snow-tunneled streets. The two-lane avenues of suburban Winchester, Massachusetts were whittled down to small, meandering serpentine strips of pavement, weaving between towering (and browning) snow monoliths. Though the roads were crowded, my home base for this three-day excursion, Ian Boll’s house, was slammed. I knew there were already some dudes there, and was reminded that it may be more than a few as I wedged my sputtering Nissan Altima up onto the sidewalk in front of the house between a pickup loaded with shovels and gear and a trailer. But I certainly didn’t expect to be the 19^th person to arrive. Three crews had declared the Boll residence home base: an all-girl crew that had set up a wall-to-wall fortress of cushions and comforters in the living room, Stept productions – a ski and snowboard crew – had their lab on the top floor, and the Rendered Useless misfits, who assumed a place befitting their gritty and nomadic nature – the basement. Though I only tagged along for a short snippet of their Northeast crusade, I got a healthy glimpse at one of the hungriest crews out filming. To this point, their full video will leave no doubt.

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Day 1 -  “I think you can spit up blood and be OK”

The trampling of feet overhead came earlier the first morning than I would have liked, and I was roused from my Coors-induced coma at about 8:00 a.m.  These dudes meant business. We reserved time to party, for sure, and there was no shortage of beers, spliffs or pints of ice cream, which seemed almost like Rendered Useless ritual, but it was immediately apparent that they were hell-bent on making the best video they could and weren’t about to let anything get in the way of that. Not in a militant manner, but in a driven, underdog sort of way. There would always be time to send it. Snow accumulation like this for an independent production shooting in the streets is a godsend, and how long it would be around was anyone’s guess

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Jon Stark, the film’s producer and filmer (alongside Matt Roberge and Eli Olson who were filming elsewhere when I joined) spearheaded this blue-collar hustle on the trip. He possesses a work ethic that’d put Germans to shame, as well as a sharp and risible wit. Not one to let a chance at wordplay slip by the wayside, he’d be turning out one-liners like, “Today couldn’t have gone Eddie Vetter,” or toss in a random, “Holy nipples twist,” or a rap-style call out,  “Shout out to Bend, Oregon,” at will and without warning. But it ain’t his first rodeo: It’s wise to keep it loose when standing in the cold for hours on end.

We honored the time-tested tradition of a coffee-and-a-smoke breakfast while we mapped out a day plan, and the crew - Stark, Boll, Andrew Aldridge, Dan “Vinny” Vinzant and myself - was out the door and in the van just after 9:00 a.m. Off to our first spot, half the crew crooning an off-key rendition of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way”, a few of us just staring blankly, working off the morning haze. "It seems like you have to be a thug to live here,” says Stark as we wind our way toward a school in Lowell, Massachusetts, a city to the northwest of Boston known to be a bit rough. “Or at least have a fitted hat," adds Aldridge.

The first spot was Brady’s and despite how gnarly it was, and how early it was, the dude barely blinked. Not only was there a strong chance his highback would get snagged along the uneven school front where the creeper ledge he planned to attack extended, but the closeout fence on the other side was begging to shred an ACL. I’ve long preached that Johnny is one of the best, and underappreciated riders in the States and his pre-noon backside 5050 on a high-risk creep only reinforced that sentiment.

Bagging a hammer before noon is like having sex with a stranger while the sun is still up. Doesn’t happen everyday, but damn, when it does, the rest of the day just feels like a vacation. We loaded our haul back into the van, lined our guts with take-out pizza and were on to our second school zone (gotta make those weekends count, kids), a series of parking lots and drives behind the school where levels of railings offered plenty of possibilities. Many of these options, however, were guarded by masses of snow, rendering them too small or inconsequential to justify the amount of digging it would take to set them up. We’re talking double-overhead mounds of snow, a growing pile, re-fed by the succession of storms and the plows that cleared them into a melting, refreezing, and now unmovable hummock of ice.

There was a kink in the lower zone of spot, and oddly enough some of the girls who were staying at Ian’s were already sessioning it when we arrived. Our sights were trained a touch higher up on one face of the brick building where you could wallride from an upper level entrance of the school to a lower, grassy platform. What made this wallride particularly unique, and incredibly heavy, was the succession of curved steel bars that formed a metal wave atop the wall. The idea was to ride the wall from upper level to lower level, while getting as barreled as possible inside this metal tube without turning into skewered meat. Not one to shy away from anything, Vin jumped in the saddle first, rolling the dice in search of a switch wallride to regular.

After a number of attempts the transition was deemed too tricky to handle switch and the torch was passed to Aldridge. Dridge is a tall dude but commands a super fluid style, and was steadily working higher and higher up the wall. Not happy with being only partially shacked, he was going to keep at this until he got fully pitted. As you can see in the photo on the next page, the wall is not entirely brick – there is a cement section that buffers the brick and metal. The layers of material do not sit flush and there was a slight lip between the two surfaces. In true Murphy’s Law fashion, the nose of Dridge’s deck kissed this lip, interrupting his natural progress down the wall, and sent him toppling backwards, head first toward the railing below separating the two levels. In one of those moments that seem to unfold in slow motion, his bodied plummeted to the rock-hard snowpack below, though he did manage to dodge a backwards taco - or worse - on the railing. Short of breath and surely shaken up, he seemed to be intact for the most part, if you discounted the blood he was now spitting up. Reluctant to go to the hospital, and unsure whether the bleeding was internal or from his mouth, he pledged to keep an eye on it. 

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Day 2 – Party at the Moon Tower

Prior to his residency at the Boll’s, Stark lodged over 30 days at Cole Navin’s folks’ place, long enough for Cole’s parents to take up a personal interest in their ceaseless NBD-spot-finding process. “They started looking up different places and trying to recall rails they had seen, showing us pictures and asking if we thought they’d work,” Stark tells me.  One such inquisition brought us to an old lookout tower.

After a short drive and some geo-locating, we parked the van at a trailhead and walked into the woods. A fifteen-minute stroll yielded a clearing at the crest of the hill where the tower stood. An old down-flat-down rail ushered up from pillars on either side of a staircase completely covered in snow.

One man jumped in on the ice pick, a few more tossed away slabs of ice with shovels and the rest of the lot dug right in there with their mitts. The park proved to be a popular spot and we greeted a number of passersby, including a fellow who detailed a time long gone - a Fast Times at Ridgemont High sort of era, where drunken revelry, massive orgies and psychedelic experimentation were not only allowed at this site, but encouraged. Perhaps that’s not exactly what he said and more of what I wanted to hear, but he did mention that because of a discrepancy in jurisdiction, the local boys in blue could not police this state land and the State Troopers couldn’t care less about doing so, which made it a popular hang for a six pack and a doobie under the stars. We too avoided the attention of the authorities and Ian battled through broken board and many near makes to walk away with this ollie off the kink to slide on the concrete pillar.

Day 3 – “If you dug this place out, you’d find all kinds of cars and bodies.”

Our third day, and my final day of the jaunt, took us to an out-of-commission quarry with upper bluffs offering an impressive view of downtown and steep rock faces lending plenty of opportunity to dial in a unique shot. It was not without consequence though - many of the takeoffs were completely blind and the whipping wind was as unpredictable in direction as it was persistent. Johnny had already logged a shot at the quarry earlier in the week, but the door was wide open for a few more.

Evidently, this place was also a popular spot to tie on a day buzz, and a few Boston fellas sporting a fitting mix of denim, camo and Carhartt came through with a twelve pack of Bud Light. While Ian and Vinny put the final touches on their approaches, Dridge, who was still working off the slam from Day 1, photographer Cole Martin and I were treated to a slice of local lore. “If you dug this place out, you’d find all kinds of cars and bodies,” they declared. “Some people think it was easier for them to just cover it all than look into it.”

It was a long day in the sun and snow glare, but one of our most successful, demanding a proper Northeast reward - lobster rolls. Not sure if anyone actually bought a lobster roll once we got down to the docks, but I do remember Stark buying Vinny a kingly scallop platter for nailing a wild gap to ledge to wallride. Following our feast was a prime example of Stark’s tireless motivation. With a belly full of fish and a good days haul on film, most might pack it in, but next thing I know we are all hopping a fence into the overgrown lot of abandoned psych ward.

Words - Mike Goodwin