The photo to the left is the grade I call “the big one.” Two years ago, skating a longboard skateboard back up that deceptively mild slope, I miscalculated and found myself seriously manhandled by the surface of that otherwise benign looking street.
If you are careful, judicious and use some common sense, riding a longboard skateboard is not all that difficult. But those qualities could be considered absent in the very act of a person my age, a certified social-security recipient, even thinking of mounting a board. But so far, I’ve yet to fall while actually riding. All five of my inadvertent contacts with the paving have come while trying to skate the board, that is, pushing or kicking it forward along on flat ground, or on returning back up a hill.
In the process of skating or propelling the board, the slightest loss of concentration or loss of balance, and you are off the board and into a free fall. You fly and then you land. Unlike surfing or even snowboarding, when you land, it’s onto an unforgiving surface, blacktop or worse, concrete. To minimize the potentially catastrophic consequences inherent in such an occurrence, I take on the appearance of the Michelin Man; a foam-lined plastic helmet, hard-shell elbow and knee-pads and wrist guards. After my first two falls, both of which were backwards falls, I purchased a roller hockey girdle, that’s a pair of heavily padded long-legged, hi-rise pants complete with a tailbone-protecting strip of foam padding.
My last spill, the one that pretty much kept me from riding for almost two years, was a first, a fall forward, a pitch out over the front of the board as I was executing the third stride of a push back uphill. This was after a particularly graceful high-speed descent of what I define as a moderately steep and curving, deserted residential street. I sensed something not quite right with my second stride, a subtle awareness of an infinitesimal shift in balance, the realization of which came as I was well into my third thrust or stride. What was essentially a minutely minor flaw in technique escalated in a fraction of a millisecond into a major malfunction. My mind flashed a frantic “Mayday! Mayday.” Too late, too late for adjustments, too late to compensate, I was airborne. In a cliché of slow motion replay reels, I could see and understood precisely what was happening, but I was powerless to do anything but ride out the fall.
The impact was horrendous. In an instant, I had gone from a condition of flowing coordinated movement to a dead stop, to a completely inert and moaning state of being. Shock and disbelief were my first sensations. My attempts to process what had happened to me were immediately short-circuited by an overwhelming rush of pain. How bad was this going to be? As I tried to calculate the damage, moving my legs, my arms, my fingers; I could see the blood on the outside of my left elbow, more on my left knee. The pavement had sanded off several layers of skin from each surface, leaving quarter and fifty-cent sized circles of wounded flesh. An instantaneous mental inventory reported similar searings from my left shoulder, from the fingertips of my left hand and from another spot near the already bloody elbow.
Interestingly enough, my first response upon realizing that I was not going to die on this gritty patch of blacktop was to look around to make sure that no one had witnessed my embarrassing performance. Even with my body oozing blood from five or six spots, character won out. Same as it ever was; vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
Getting slowly to my feet, self-recrimination kicked in. Carelessly, I had chosen to strap on the knee and elbow pads, forgoing the elastic sleeves that would have helped keep the pads firmly in place in even a moderately bad fall. At my age, any fall is a bad fall. The less than secure pads had become twisted and skewed during my wipeout, bringing what should have been protected areas of my skin into contact with the street. The wrist guards had performed as promised. They had borne the worst, the hard plastic plate on the palm of the left guard was scored and chipped. Despite my careless preparations, the pads had more than done their job, and had prevented the serious bone injuries that might have damaged my knees and elbows. And the hip pads of the hockey girdle had protected the entire lower left side of my body, whole areas that would have been badly bruised and/or scraped raw had I not chosen some degree of safety over comfort.
Slightly dazed, bleeding and also a little pissed off, I was ready to bag what had been planned as at least a full-hour session of riding. “Enough,” I told myself. Kicking the board ahead of me, with just a touch of malevolence, I trudged slowly back up to the crest of the street where I’d left my water bottle. Lowering myself down on to the curb, I removed my helmet and took a couple of long swigs of warm water. My scrapes were beginning to smart big-time, but I was able to draw back and try to reflect objectively on the consequences of my smearing.
The truth was that if I was going to ride a longboard, if I was going to accept and cherish the Zen bliss and the adrenaline rushes of carving at seemingly high speeds down the faces of smooth, shaded suburban back streets, then these kinds of mishaps, these splatterings had to be accepted as an unavoidable part of the package. If I decided that I couldn’t handle that, then of necessity, I would have to pick up my board, walk the quiet three-quarters of a mile back to my home, take off my equipment and give up the whole endeavor. Instead of doing that, I stayed out and wisely or not, completed a full ninety-minute session of skating.
Eventually the wet, open sores hardened and scabbed over. For a week or more following my fall, I would find myself wincing after an inadvertent contact or a movement that stretched a healing spot. The seasons have changed and it’s Spring once again. Finding myself looking at the idled longboards left standing against the wall in the basement, I began telling myself that once the weather warms up a bit, maybe I’ll give it another shot. I have and to date this season, I’ve gotten in three hours on the big ones, the scene of my splattering two seasons ago. Stay tuned.
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