Riding Bikes Doing Jumps

This is exactly the type of thing I imagined I was doing. 

On any given day the very most common thing we did besides building forts, was riding bikes. For anyone familiar with BMX bikes knows there is only one way to ride them, hard and over jumps. I wrote BMX back there in that last sentence but I was exaggerating, we never owned actual BMX bikes we owned used knock-off BMX bikes which probably single handedly accounts for why I never learned how to do a totally sweet front-flip on a half-pipe. They say it is a poor workman who blames his tools, I think the adjective 'poor' in that aphorism is supposed to refer to the skill of the craftsman, but I like to think it is reflective of the workman's socio-econimic standing. Then it sounds more like a justification then a dig at the person's character. Getting back to the matter at hand there is two ways to ride hard; riding fast and doing tricks. Riding fast is exactly what it sounds like but in a relativistic sense in that fast to a 8-year-old riding a knock-off BMX bike around his block is not very fast in an absolute sense. It felt awesome to go all out wind in the hair and pumping away on a un-geared set of peddles, and then the pièce de résistance , jamming back hard on the peddles to break and, bike gods willing, skid the tires. A beautiful thin line of black rubber was admired by all the other kids and bike riding skill was directly correlated to its length. Next in glory after skidding came riding with no hands especially if you had the skill to turn corners and break without having to touch the handlebars. The move that made a young boy a god among men was popping a wheelie, and if you wanted Santaquin bike immortality you rode that wheelie. I could skid and ride mostly strait with no hands and I could momentarily lift the front wheel of my bike off of the ground. Shame. After riding hard you did jumps and we spent a lot of time as children seeking out or building some really sweet jumps. We would go to an abandoned lot by ourhouse that had a little circuit trail and would take shovels and dig a pit in the trail and take the remaindered dirt stack it up and make a little jumping hill in front of the pit we just dug. The idea being that if all went well you would ride up the hill get sweet air and clear the pit with no trouble. That did happen on occasion but mostly the rider would dribble of the end of the hill well below the necessary velocity for takeoff and the pit would become for the young dirt bikers what the La Brea tar pits were to Stegosaurus. At least the dirt was forgiving other jumps we tried were off a set of steps by the church that went up three steps parallel to a ramp and then they just dropped off about two feet. In my mind I would ride up the ramp and launch super far into the air and land all awesome hopefully while girls were watching. In practice, and I must be clear I have no photographic evidence of this, the move looked more like a rather timid kid easing his bike off of a two-foot tall cement ledge. Girls were never around. I don't know if I ever did a proper jump where both of my tires came off the ground and it looked cool and I landed it like a two-wheeled gymnast but I spent a lot of time trying.