Free Solo

The most harrowing moment in ‘Lucky to Be Alive,’ a short-form doc on Whittier, Calif. skater Tony Willie released this week on Thrasher, isn’t necessarily his awful, 26-foot fall from the roof of a school, or the stomach-plunging moment where his board abruptly stops while pushing full speed and he stumbles toward the edge, or even seeing him bust ridiculous lip tricks three months after being on death’s door with multiple broken bones — it’s seeing footage of one of his prior attempts at jumping the massive, towering gap, by himself, camera set up to film from a nearby roof, going until his board cracks.

The more camera-ready, pyrotechnic applications of skateboarding — the soda commercial half-pipe air, the viral slow-mo handrail sack, the EXPN broadcast MegaRamp highlight reel — has long lumped it, rightly or wrongly, amongst other thrill-seeking behaviours. As surfers have studied tides and underwater geography in pursuit of Guinness-worthy waves, and climbers have donned winged flying suits to leap from conquered peaks, skating’s followed suit, pushing MegaRamps up against China’s Great Wall and the Grand Canyon, white-knuckling it down traffic-patrolled San Francisco grades, protected mainly by hoodies and the street helmet. In the doc, Tony Willie relates how Jeremy Wray and Geoff Rowley footage sparked him to huck backside 360s and lazer flips across rooftops.

“I’m an adrenaline junkie,” he says in the doc. “When I first saw skate videos and people doing gnarly shit, I just wanted to be like those guys, even if I’m not getting paid for it or sponsored or anything.” At one point, he says his friends avoid joining some of his sessions because they’re too sketched out.

Tony Willie doesn’t seem motivated by careerism; flip trick extremist Jeff DeChesare, a friend, shares on the Slap boards that he’s eschewed the sponsorship game. The concept of filming yourself skating a gap like this alone — assuming a 10-foot drop from roof to roof and the roughly 17.5 foot length, you’re talking about a gap about as long as Wallenberg and as tall as the UC Davis gap, as per Jenkem’s spot dimension estimates — bends this type of skateboarding toward the exceedingly risky solo feats of the skyscraper-scaling rooftoppers. The idea of doing it for no sponsor obligation or career jolt pushes it further still, possibly into the solo wilderness treks and mountain climbs pursued by driven young men like those Jon Krakauer chronicled in ‘Into the Wild’ — including the author’s own ill-advised expedition to the top of the Devils Thumb in southeastern Alaska.

“People won’t understand what I’m doing if they don’t love skateboarding as much as I do,” Tony Willie says in the doc, and at another point he acknowledges the mortal peril he faced skating the gap alone. (He says he didn’t have anyone to skate with that day and felt good; “it’s definitely going to be the last time I do that, for sure.”) He acknowledges, late in the vid, that over his 20 years of skating he’s been lucky to get away with a lot of the stuff he’s done and tried, and he says his brush with death has left him changed.

The static shot of him pushing and pushing and 180ing across that huge, unforgiving chasm though sticks with you, an arresting glimpse of a truly extreme version of skateboarding — all alone, no money on the line, but for sure your life — and where things may go next, or where they maybe already are. People already hit up big rails with their phone popped up — will there be bigger ones? Will people plunge down some mountain road in the dark or seek out some bigger set of water towers, their phone perched on the roof of their car while they climb the spiraling steps to the top?

Tags: Alexander Supertramp, free solo, Geoff Rowley, GX1000, Into the Wild, Jeff DeChesare, Jeremy Wray, Jon Krakauer, Lucky to Be Alive, MegaRamp, mortal peril, roof gaps, rooftoppers, the Nazaré Canyon, Thrasher, Tony Willie