For the last two and a half weeks, starting on February 2nd, the Woodstock Square has gotten a new business that seems, at first glance, a bit hard to define. Walk into the “Warp Corps,” in the former Lloyd’s Paint ‘N Paper building at 114 N Benton, and you might think you’re in an “X Games”-era skate shop. If there’s an older man with a Merlinesque beard behind the counter, he’ll tell you he’s Rob Mutert, former owner of the Warp Skate Park on Route 47 – and that this isn’t just a revival of that youth-favorite hangout, it’s a frontline headquarters for McHenry County’s battle against opioid addiction, substance abuse, and suicide.
Mutert, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, said that “Warp Corps” came about both as a new chapter for the Warp Skate Park, and as a response to a community and nationwide crisis that had hit his own extended families – skateboarders and the military – especially hard. “We had to close the park in 2010 because of the recession,” Mutert said. “Those were tough times in America. A couple years later in 2017, one of our skateboarders, a young man that grew up at Warp Skatepark, was serving in the Army, and he succumbed to suicide. It was a very, very sad day for me personally, and for everybody who knew him. But through that process, it brought me back in connection with a lot of the skaters and their parents.”
Mutert said when he started to catch up with former Warp Park regulars and their families, he got a “full dose” of just how serious the opioid epidemic in McHenry County had become. “I was checking with parents and other skaters,” he described, “‘how’s Bill, how’s Tom, how’s Jim” – dead, dead, dead, rehab for the third time, prison… and that was all I needed to hear. As a veteran myself, with 22 suicides a day in the veteran and military community, that was just unacceptable.” Mutert said that thirteen young people he had known from their childhood at the Warp Skate Park had died from either heroin or legal opioids – “that yanked on my heartstrings like nothing ever has in my life,” he said. “I looked at the skillsets I had, the areas I’m good at, where I’ve worked with young people in the past, and I asked, what can I bring to these problems.”
The answer, Mutert said, was the “big three – art, music, and adventure sports.” Opioid, alcohol, heroin, and suicide deaths are collectively known as “deaths of despair,” and all of them have been dramatically on the rise in the United States over the last few decades. The goal of Warp Corps, he said, was to be the “‘deaths of despair’ killers” – in the same way that early Americans had a vitality and pioneer spirit built on making new things and engaging physically with the world around them, Mutert agreed “absolutely” that he wanted Warp Corps to recreate that same spirit for the modern day.
Warp Corps has a full list of current and planned events, based around Mutert’s motto that “life is better if you’re alive.” So far, the group has held an opening-day concert with local musicians Karen Schook and Rotten Mouth, a music support group and workshop, a free yoga session at the neighboring Woodstock Yoga Lounge (founded by Mutert’s wife, Cara), a Narcan anti-overdose training session, and three “Cypher” programs – online-only art and music broadcasts filmed at the Warp Corps building and livestreamed on the group’s facebook page (doors locked, and only that evening’s musicians allowed in: in other words, live music minus the live party).
To help both their fundraising and community recognition, Warp Corps has put a major emphasis on building itself as a brand – while the building has a large space for events and meetings in the back (and a “product testing area” for skateboards downstairs), the front is something close to an extreme-sports boutique, with hoodies, t-shirts, hats, snow and skateboards, and even Warp Corps’ own “Max Happy” coffee blend on offer. Mutert said that the coffee, created with a local roaster in Loves Park, is a “huge component” of the group’s funding mission, and that aside from a few items, most of Warp Corps’ clothing and accessories are produced in-house, as part of a workforce development program with the McHenry County Workforce Network.
In the coming months, as the weather improves and Warp Corps builds its presence in McHenry County, the group plans to host hiking and nature trips, skating lessons, graphic design, film, and music production classes, workforce training and a “military prep & awareness” class, a “yoga for recovery” workshop at the Yoga Lounge, anti-bullying support, and additional training and awareness programs for drug and substance abuse. This Friday on March 1st, Warp Corps will hold its first “425 tour” to bring its members and its message out to Chicagoland skateparks, kicking off at the Fargo Skatepark in DeKalb. The number, Mutert said, is part of the Warp Corps brand – as he explained, everyone knows the “international callsign to ‘get high’… ‘425’ is, ‘just stay alive.’”
It’s all part of a thoroughly “Gen X” approach to a crisis that the “Boomers,” both conservative and liberal, have never really managed to get a handle on. As Mutert put it, Warp Corps has “no judgment or bias, no politics or religion – we are Switzerland, we have respect for anyone’s beliefs, political or religious. I have my beliefs, but that’s not what this venue is about.” Instead of beating people over the head with an ideology, Mutert said he wants to “beat them over the head with ‘hey, let’s stay alive’ – life is better if you’re alive.”
For more information, visit Warp Corps on Facebook and at http://www.warpcorps.org
Willcockson Wordsmithing 