I'll Believe It When I See It...
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“Yeah, I’m actually sitting on his couch right now.” That sentence grabbed my attention. Normally I wouldn’t pay much attention to somebody else’s phone conversation, but Brock Gill was sitting on my couch. Apparently somebody on the other end was asking about me.
It was October 2005, and it was kind of amazing that Jenn and I were actually home in Manly, Iowa. We’d spent more time on the road than at home that year. Brock had called earlier that day to say he and his wife, Auny, were heading back to Tennessee after doing events in Montana. They would be coming through our area and wanted to stop.
We’d stayed at their house for a while during Winter Jam, so it was nice to have the opportunity to show them some hospitality. So, we invited them to stop and have a meal with us. I don’t remember what Jenn served, but I’m sure it was delicious because she’s a great cook. After we ate, we moved into the living room, and the boys took over the entertainment.
Their “shows” usually involved running and jumping on the furniture, pretending they were riding bikes on ramps. They’d take turns being the emcee and recreating illusions they’d seen Brock do. The ping-pong ball trick and the water coffin escape were some of their favorites. While all of that was going on, Brock’s phone rang.
“Yeah, I’m actually sitting on his couch right now.”
When Brock hung up, he explained that it was a guy in Joplin named Dan, who had gotten his number through Christ in Youth, a ministry organization based in Joplin that Brock had done events with. Someone there had suggested Brock might know a guy who would be a good candidate to run an indoor ramp park. When Dan called to ask, Brock just happened to be sitting on that guy’s couch.
Jenn and I were already praying about our future. We had another baby on the way, and I was questioning how much lasting investment we were making when we’d share the Gospel in one town and then leave right away for the next town. We’d been asking God for direction and wisdom. Before getting back on the road, Brock gave me Dan’s number and encouraged me to call him the next time we passed through Joplin.
I believe God was at work in that phone call. But I had heard about The Bridge before, and I had been fairly pessimistic about their plans.
Two years earlier, we had stopped in Joplin on the way home from a Chaos on Wheels show in Cassville, Missouri. Someone at a hotel suggested we go check out a little indoor skatepark called The Bridge. During that visit, I met Steev Inge in person for the first time. Steev and I had talked on the phone many times, but had never actually met.
Steev owned Poorboy Clothing, and I stocked his products in my bike shop back in the mid-1990s. His BMX videos had also been influential in how I imagined what BMX looked like outside of Elmore, Minnesota. Meeting him was pretty cool all by itself. As we talked more, he started telling me about their plans for The Bridge.
They were in a small rented warehouse, but they wanted to build a multimillion-dollar facility. The plans included an indoor skatepark, a café, a music venue, and several other things for young people to do. It was much bigger than anything I’d tried to build in Minnesota or Iowa, but the concept was familiar. As we were leaving, Steev gave me a brochure outlining the plans and their fundraising goals.
On the drive back to Iowa, I remember talking with Frank about it. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” was my response. I’d failed several times to get an indoor park off the ground and had watched other parks close, including the one in Cedar Rapids where I’d built all the ramps. It also seemed like every youth pastor we met had a dream for some kind of youth facility. Over the past few years, I had become pretty cynical about projects like that.
Chaos was growing fast, and I really never thought about The Bridge again. We still passed through Joplin fairly often on our way to do shows in Texas or Louisiana, and there was a little Italian restaurant called Bella Peppers where we liked to stop. During one of those stops in 2004, Jenn, the boys, some of the riders, and I were sitting in a booth talking about whether it would make sense to relocate.
“I could live here in Joplin,” I remember saying. A lot of our bookings were in the southern part of the US, and Iowa often added an extra day of travel. Joplin was closer to the center of the country, had easy interstate access, and wasn’t a big city. That conversation had been about making touring easier. Now I had a different reason to consider it.
A few weeks after Brock’s visit, we were heading west. Jenn was five months pregnant, the boys were with us, and Lucas was coming along to ride. We had shows in California, plans to spend Thanksgiving at the Grand Canyon, and we would end the trip at a trade show in Las Vegas where we hoped to get more bookings. Joplin was on the way, so I called Dan and arranged to meet.
We met at Olive Garden with Dan, Steev, and Paul, a BMX rider working for The Bridge. They asked questions and gave me room to ask some too. Somewhere in the middle of the endless breadsticks and salad, it started feeling like a job interview. Honestly, I’d never had a job interview before, but this was how I imagined one would go. After we ate, they took us over to the construction site.
It was dark when we got there. There wasn’t a finished parking lot or sidewalks, and about two-thirds of the building appeared to be just the frame and roof, and you could see right through it to the other side. Then they took us into the part that was finished and turned on the lights.
It was one of the most amazing skateparks I’d ever seen. The building was new and clean, a little like walking into a shopping mall instead of the dirty warehouses where indoor skateparks are usually found. From the balcony, we could look out over the whole park. It looked exactly like the pictures in the brochure Steev had handed me two years earlier. That’s when I realized I had to eat my words.
But seeing it brought up a whole different set of questions. Was this what God was leading us toward? Could we move our family five hundred miles from where Jenn and I had grown up? Was I qualified to run a place like this, and what would happen to Chaos on Wheels?
We stayed in Joplin that night and headed for California the next morning. The Bridge dominated a lot of the conversation during those hours in the van, but there were still shows to do and a trade show to attend, so we had to put that decision off and focus on the work we’d come to do.
When we got home, I caught the core riders up on the offer to relocate. Lucas had seen the park and wanted to go back and ride it. Frank, Tim, and Travis had been with me on that first visit in 2003, but the others needed the whole story and several wanted to see the place for themselves. Everyone was quickly realizing that my decision was going to impact all of them.
During our tour of the park, I noticed a stack of unused Skatelite. I had been talking about upgrading our show ramps with a Skatelite riding surface, but it was expensive and hard to find a supplier. That stack of materials gave me a reason to arrange another trip. I called Dan and asked whether they’d sell me some of the extra sheets, and we planned a trip.
Frank, Lucas, Tim, Frank’s son Dillion, and I went down to pick it up. We rode the park, bought the Skatelite, and I got to ask more questions about Autumn Ramp Park, which was what the skatepark portion of The Bridge was going to be called. The guys loved the park and liked the idea of it becoming a home base for Chaos. But it became clear that they were unlikely to relocate to Joplin. That reality would complicate things for Chaos, because I’d be five hundred miles from most of the riders.
The Bridge needed an answer by the first week of January. We had two shows booked in Virginia around New Year’s, but first we were home for Christmas. We celebrated with Jenn’s family in northern Iowa and mine in southern Minnesota. (Our parents lived only about ten miles apart, but saying we celebrated Christmas in two states is more fun.)
Our families had mixed feelings about the opportunity. They were excited for us, but Joplin would put us five hundred miles away. To me, the van had started feeling more like home than the house anyway. We’d spent so much of the previous two years traveling that moving didn’t feel quite the same to me as it did to the people we would be leaving behind.
Spending Christmas together made the decision feel much more real. The boys wouldn’t have grandparents nearby, and visits would take more planning and cost more. I don’t remember the specific conversations, but I remember feeling that our families would support us no matter what we decided. That mattered, but it didn’t make the decision any easier.
My dad gave me a letter during that time. He wasn’t one to express much emotion or say how he really felt, but he wrote that he was proud of how far I’d taken riding a little bike and how I’d stuck with it through the ups and downs. That meant a lot coming from him. Then he wrote about the decision we were trying to make. He told me that when God calls you to do something, you need to obey, even if your family doesn’t like it. He was one of the people we’d be moving farther away from, and he was encouraging me to take the job.
We left Manly for Virginia with Lucas, AJ, and Donny, still working through what all of this would mean. I was also finishing the “Decade of Chaos” DVD, which I’d started earlier that year to commemorate ten years since forming Chaos on Wheels. On that trip, we interviewed the guys about their experiences and memories. It was a weird time to be looking back at everything we’d done together. We were talking about a major milestone, but it also felt like this might be the end of an era.
Jenn and I had decided that unless God put up a major roadblock, we would accept the position. I hadn’t told the guys yet. In the back of my mind, I was wondering whether these might be my last shows wearing a Chaos jersey, hyping the crowd while my friends did amazing tricks on their bikes. I didn’t know what the next season would mean for all of that.
Those two shows were really fun. One was at Liberty University, and the other was at a large church. Both included bands, speakers, and Chaos. There was still a lot about doing shows with those guys that I loved.
Looking back, I believe God was orchestrating all of this. There were too many pieces coming together for me to see it as a string of random events. But recognizing that didn’t answer every question we had about our family or the team.
When the first week of January 2006 rolled around, we were back home in Manly. Jenn was seven months pregnant. We didn’t have any shows on the calendar until March, and it was time to give Dan an answer. We still didn’t know how everything would work, but I called him and told him I would accept the position. Our whole world was about to change.
Jeremiah Anderson
Rooted Action Park Founder
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