I Thought My Future Would Be Chaos
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In January 2003, I sent a letter that would eventually lead my family to Joplin, Missouri. At the time, I was just trying to book another BMX show.
The year before, Chaos on Wheels had performed 13 times, mostly at small-town events. I believed the team could become something much bigger, but opportunities weren’t simply showing up. I spent a lot of time contacting churches, festivals, fairs, and anyone else who might be willing to book us.
I was determined to get Chaos in front of as many people as possible. After several years filled with failed indoor park plans and ideas that hadn’t worked the way I expected, I was ready to make this one work.
One of the letters I sent went to an event called the Freedom Experience. I had seen it advertised in some youth ministry resources and thought Chaos might fit with what they were doing. The event had been created by a Christian illusionist and entertainer named Brock Gill. I didn’t know Brock, but I sent him our information to see what would happen.
While I waited for responses to my letters and phone calls, Chaos was starting to look like a legitimate BMX team. In March, I bought a fifteen-passenger van from Youth for Christ in Albert Lea. We had also replaced our flatbed trailer with an enclosed trailer, and both now had our logos on the side.
When I first started doing shows, I was often the only rider. Eventually Frank began joining me, but he usually drove himself and met me at the event. By 2003, our typical show included me and three other riders. Jenn and our son often traveled with us, and sometimes the other riders brought their families too.
Adding riders to the team also brought bigger tricks into the shows. The backflips, supermans, nothings, and other crowd-pleasing tricks made the whole thing feel different. We had a van full of riders and sometimes families, a trailer full of ramps, and our name on the side of everything. Chaos was finally becoming the team I had imagined.
When Brock responded to my letter he invited us to be part of the Freedom Experience in Virginia. The event combined a band, Brock’s illusions, and Chaos on Wheels into one larger show. We would do school assemblies during the day to invite students to the evening events, then bring all three parts together for the main performance.
Before that trip, I mostly thought of our shows as BMX demonstrations. We set up the ramps, introduced the riders, performed our tricks, shared a message, and packed everything back into the trailer. Working with Brock challenged me to think of a BMX show as a complete performance. We weren’t only there to demonstrate tricks. We were there to entertain an audience and help create an experience.
Ramp-building commitments had kept us from leaving Iowa early enough to stop for the night, so we drove straight through to Virginia. Frank, Tim, Joe, Jenn, our son, and I all made the trip. For most of us, it was the farthest east we had ever traveled. It was work, but it also felt a little like we were cheating. We were getting paid to ride bikes, travel across the country, and see places we had never seen before.
We connected well with Brock, the band, and the rest of the crew. Brock didn’t sit me down and give me some secret formula for building Chaos. He did share his experiences and ideas throughout the week. The shows came together well, people enjoyed the riding, and a large number of kids and adults responded when Brock invited them to follow Jesus.
I remember being overwhelmed by how many people came forward. Chaos had done church events before, but this was larger than anything we had been part of. It seemed like the team had found a way to reach more people than we could reach on our own.
The Virginia trip also introduced me to Brock’s booking agent. Sometime after we returned home, I signed a contract with the agency. They could find events, negotiate better pay, and include things like travel, lodging, and meals in our agreements. They also kept a percentage of the income, but I believed the additional opportunities would make that worthwhile.
The partnership didn’t immediately fill our calendar. Most of the 24 shows we performed in 2003 were still events I had booked myself. But the agency booked two shows for us in Texas that September and another in Cassville, Missouri, at the end of October.
At the time, they just looked like three more dates.
After a busy summer of building skateparks and doing shows, September was when the growth of Chaos really began to collide with the rest of my life. Jenn gave birth to our second son during the first week of the month. Five days later, I was scheduled to begin a week of shows at the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, Iowa.
Waterloo was close enough that I drove back and forth from Manly every day. I performed at the fair, drove home to spend a little time with Jenn and the kids, then went back the next day.
A few days after those shows ended, we left for the two agency-booked events in Texas. Jenn stayed home with our two boys, including our newborn. Frank’s boys also needed somewhere to stay while he traveled with me, so they stayed at our house too.
I was excited because Chaos was finally working. The previous years had felt like a lot of failures, but now we had a real team, a booking agent, and shows taking us across the country. I wanted to keep building that momentum because I believed this was how I was going to provide for our growing family.
At the same time, I wanted to be home helping with the kids and supporting Jenn. I didn’t know how to balance those responsibilities, and most of the time the Chaos schedule came first. Jenn never asked me to stop, but looking back, I can see how much she was carrying and how little room I left for her to have dreams of her own. Our life was arranged around the Chaos on Wheels dream, and she was along for the ride while I chased something that mattered deeply to me.
If I could do it over again, I would still pursue the opportunities God was presenting, but I would prioritize my wife and family over chasing my dream.
The next day was Sunday, and we were in rural Kansas. I wasn’t very optimistic about finding the part we needed. Surprisingly, I did find a cab that took me about 30 miles to the nearest parts store. After I returned, we siphoned out enough gas to drop the tank and replace the fuel pump on the side of the highway.
Once we got the van running again, we continued toward Iowa. Things didn’t slow down much when we got home. Chaos had nine show dates that September, and when the travel days were included, I was away for 16 days during the same month our second son was born.
In October we got a little break. We did one show close to home and built a small skatepark in Forest City, Iowa. Then Frank, Tim, Travis, and I left for the final booking of the year in Cassville, Missouri.
We stopped in Joplin the night before the event and got a hotel. Someone there told us about an indoor skatepark in town called The Bridge, so we went to see if we could ride.
It was Thursday evening, and The Bridge was hosting a Bible Study and Skate Night. Bikes weren’t allowed during that session, but they told us to stop again on our way home.
The Cassville event was on Halloween night inside a church gymnasium. We had to wait until the high school football game ended before getting started, so we rode late into the evening. The event was fun and went well, but the part of that trip that stayed with me happened the next day when we returned to The Bridge.
They welcomed us like we were famous professional riders. The guys rode for a while and impressed the local kids, but the ramps themselves weren’t what stayed with me. They were fun, but we had been to better parks, and I had spent most of that year building public skateparks.
What stood out was the atmosphere. The Bridge felt like it had been built with those kids in mind. The park was full of people riding bikes and skateboards, and there were adults present who genuinely seemed to care about them. It reminded me of the evenings at the Barn in Albert Lea. The ramps gave everyone a place to ride, but the people made it feel like something more than a skatepark.
While we were there, I met someone I already knew, although we had never met in person. Years earlier, Steev had owned Poorboy Clothing, and I had sold a lot of his shirts through my bike shop in Minnesota. I had no idea he was now in Joplin helping run The Bridge.
After talking about the “Old Days”, Steev told me about their plans to expand. They wanted to build a multi-million dollar youth facility with a café, basketball court, climbing gym, video games, music venue, and a large indoor ramp park. He handed me a full-color flyer showing the proposed building and explaining the fundraising campaign.
I wanted to believe it could happen. I believed places like that were important because I had spent years trying to create one. But I had also written enough business plans, met with enough banks, and heard enough youth pastors describe similar dreams to know how difficult it would be.
The guys finished riding, and we loaded their bikes into the trailer. The visit didn’t make me want to go home and start pursuing another indoor park. I believed Chaos on Wheels was the direction my life was going, and everything that happened in 2003 seemed to confirm it. We had nearly doubled our number of shows, traveled farther than ever before, and found a booking agent who could help us reach even more people.
I thought I was building a BMX team and seeing how far we could take it. I didn’t realize God was using a letter to Brock, three bookings from an agency, and an unexpected stop in Joplin to lead us back toward a dream I had stopped trying to make happen.
As we drove through the night toward Iowa, I told Frank what I thought about the plans Steev had shown us. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Two years later, I would learn how wrong I had been.
If you believe places like Rooted matter, I invite you to help us keep this opportunity available to everyone. Your support helps create a place where people can ride, grow, build relationships, and belong.
Jeremiah Anderson
Rooted Action Park Founder
If you enjoyed this story, share it with someone else who might enjoy following along. I have a lot more stories from these years that I’d like to tell, so leave a comment and let me know if you want me to keep writing them.
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