On June 21 skateboarders around the globe will celebrate the pure exhilaration, creativity, and spirit of one of the most influential activities in the world by blowing off all other obligations to go skateboarding!

Skateboarders everywhere will hold fundraisers, contests, protests, demos, they’ll skate across cities, gather in skateparks, stream into their local skate shop and some will even revel in the solitary act of skateboarding alone, all bringing together the skateboarding community in the grind heard around the world.

— from the Go Skateboarding Day website, which lists 475 events planned worldwide for GSD 2007

The sound started slowly, a low rumble that built gradually in volume until the background noises which fill the Caffé Buongiorno on most afternoons had been drowned out entirely. It was the sound of running shoes scuffing rhythmically against asphalt, and hundreds of overheated wheel bearings grinding in unison to create a skateboard symphony of sorts, performed on this solstice afternoon before a startled audience of pedestrians and drivers at the intersection of Pender and Richards streets in Vancouver.

Everone paused what they were doing to watch as the intersection filled with boarders by the dozens, the hundreds, decked out in jeans and sneakers, torn T-shirts and beat-up back-packs, kicking their craft along, a river of protest and celebration, ignoring the traffic lights as they changed from green to red, ignoring the horns and curses of drivers who were obliged to idle a minute longer as they waited for the spectacle to pass before them. One irritated driver surged his oversized sedan towards the self-appointed traffic marshall who had stopped directly before the car with a bullhorn held aloft like a herald’s trumpet. The marshall stood his ground defiantly, knees to radiator grille, waiting for the last beat-up board to surf safely across Richards Street, the entire boarder parade now stretching west along Pender Street ahead of them, their vanguard already deep into the heart of Vancouver’s financial district where the commodity brokers and the stock speculators were undoubtedly oblivious to all the exhilaration and creativity which streamed past them at street level, some twenty-odd stories below.