A giant leap

It’s synergy. It’s serendipity, too. It’s a concatenation of need and fulfillment, an almost magical amalgam of problem and, at once, solution.

It’s skateboards and Wonder Wood.

Bangor, like hundreds of communities large and small throughout the country, has a dilemma. A lot of kids, good, fun-loving kids, enjoy skateboarding. Skateboarding is an athletic, energetic, fresh-air activity that beats the heck out of video games; it just doesn’t mix with pedestrians or traffic. So some of Bangor’s more devoted skateboarders are raising money for a skatepark and city officials are promising to find them a place to set it up. The effort is far enough along that the choice of materials for the ramps and runways already are under discussion.

Meanwhile, a few miles up the road in Orono, at the flagship campus of the University of Maine, is the Advanced Engineering Wood Composites Center. It’s the home of Wonder Wood, that amazing high-tech combination of low-grade sawmill waste, carbon and fiberglass that results in a building material that’s as strong as steel, cheaper than dirt and loaded with potential for the Maine economy.

Wonder Wood has been used in a few bridges and docks, the Department of Defense is giving it try for some of its marine-facilities needs, but it has yet to explode into the public consciousness or, even more importantly, the marketplace.

So build the skatepark out of it.

This would do two things, both of them good. First, the skatepark itself would end a lot of pointless grief for a lot of good kids who just want to have fun, for police officers with better things to do than confiscate boards, for merchants who’d rather not be spoilsports, for fearful pedestrians and worried motorists.

Second, it would give a promising product of UMaine research the kind of high-publicity buzz money can’t buy. The story of how Bangor, Maine, solved a universal problem using a superior material that is equal parts high-tech and Paul Bunyan would be irresistible to the national media. Just imagine Willard Scott up here learning how to how to do ollies on a Wonder Wood quarter pipe. That’d be way cool.