Pain is a Souvenir
After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down. -Jack, "Fight Club"
Why do I keep doing this to myself?
Why do I keep finding the most outrageous and creative ways of injuring myself?
It'd be so easy not to; all I'd have to do is simply stop skateboarding. Done. End of discussion.
But I can't.
This morning I went out to Pier Park. It's one of the only parks in Oregon to have a full pipe. It's 11.5' tall in the deep end, and 9' tall in the shallow end.
"Shallow" being a very loose use of the term here.
I showed up at the park just as the sun was staring to come up with a pushbroom/squeege combo tool and 3 towels. I was ready for business.
I climbed down into the bowl and began to sweep out the leaves and I used the towels to help speed up the drying of the puddles.
While down there I discovered a large number of earthworms, much like how they appear on sidewalks after rainstorms.
One of my greatest fears is getting stuck in the bottom of the Pier bowl, being unable to get out, and dying down there. Because of this, I was unable to simply sweep away these creatures. I began to pick them up one by one and fling them over the top of the coping and out into the grassy havens beyond. I rescued 34 in all. I also rescued a little frog about the side of a 50 cent piece. He didn't want to get picked up by hand so he had to take a ride on my makeshift dustpan-catapult. The only thing missing was Christian Slater making an time-period inappropriate comment about his launch.
With my karmic points earned for the day, I went back to my business of cleaning out leaves and wiping up as much water as I could.
There's one very simple rule about skateboarding when it's wet. DONT. This is extremely important when going somewhere with slick painted concrete, like Pier park. If your wheels get wet, any slick pavement instantly becomes a sheet of ice and you lose all control whatsoever. My hardest slams have always come from slipping out on wet pavement (Two of these were at Burnside).
Luckily, Pier has a full covered pipe so if nothing else, you can pump back and forth inside there. Which is exactly what my friend Rich and I did. We'd start out at the bottom and pump back and forth until we were rolling up the walls and turning up near where the pipe started to go vertical.
At one point I had a brilliant idea. As I came around one of my kickturns way up on the pipe wall, I angled myself so that I'd go out into the shallow bowl end and maintain enough speed to remain above the wet part at the bottom. Kind of like in the Matrix where Trinity goes running along the wall around the agents and then jumps down at the last second. That's how it was. This way I was able to avoid the water and extend the skateboarding area as far as I could.
It worked, it was awesome, and it took the session to a new level. So we kept skating and watched as the sun climbed up in the sky, albiet it very low. Fall Equinox is a pain.
As the sun same up higher, parts of the deep end started to dry up a lot quicker. So not content to simply skate the pipe and shallow end anymore, I decided to take a stab at rolling around the deep end like I had in the shallow area.
So I came barreling out of the pipe and onto the first deep wall just fine. I was able to even make the first corner and get onto the back wall. However, as I made the last little turn by the hip that leads back into the pipe, I found that my wheels had picked up some of moisture. As I came across the hip, my board slipped a little and I had absolutely no friction to speak of with which to control my board.
But somehow, miraculously, I was able to keep it together and with just a quick little readjustment I rode away back into the pipe with my heart in my throat.
You'd think I'd have learned my lesson after this, but no.
A few runs later I decided to try my epic turn through the deep end again. This time, however, as I came off the hip my skateboard decided that it was time for it and I to part ways and see other people. My board decided that it wanted to go explore what was off to our right, while I kept going straight and was introduced to Mrs Flatbottom. I just have to tell you all right now, she's a mean bitch.
I essentially fell about 3 feet onto the flat of the ramp, landing on my hip and the palms of my hands, with a slight bounce onto my shoulder. The wind was knocked out of me, my hip was sore, and my hands felt like they were on fire. As I sit here, I'm two Aspirins in and am still aching pretty bad.
You can tell when I get hurt because I don't get up laughing. Most times when I slam I lay there for a second but I laugh because of how much fun the whole experience is. The joy of landing a trick or doing something gnarly is only great when there's a threat of getting hurt doing it. Each time you don't slam, you cheat pain and death just a little bit. But when I lose one of those bets, I behave in a much different manner. I stand up and start pacing around, back and forth, trying to walk off the pain.
I was pretty hurt, but it wasn't too bad because I was able to climb back out of the pipe and get out to safety. Perhaps my karma from saving all those worms paid off. They were able to exit the pipe and so was I.
As I was walking it off at the top of the ramp I had a long conversation with myself.
"Why do you do this to yourself? You could have easily broken your hip, your leg, your wrists, your shoulder.... any number of things. Why do you do this to yourself?"
I realized that I didn't have a sufficient answer for myself.
A lot of people give me weird looks when they hear that I skateboard. I'm 33 years old and I still ride a piece of wood attached to some wheels. And I go fast and do crazy stuff. And I get hurt. Bad.
I wish I had a good explanation to give myself and all of you that kind of just smile and nod when they see me limping around the office or home. But I don't.
All I can offer is this video of Rich riding inside Pier today.
Sure, we're not doing any crazy moves. We're not getting air and pulling 900s all over the place. We're no where near being the kind of guys that get sponsorships and ride for companies.
We do it simply for what you see in that video.
Skateboaring only exists when its happening. You can take pictures and video, but there's no way it can capture it. The only time you can have that rush, that experience, that peace, that flow, and that fun is when you are doing it.
So as I stood atop the ramp, looking down at the spot where I fell, I realized that I didn't have a good answer for myself.
"Why do you keep doing it?" I asked again.
My only reply was to strap my helmet back on, climb back down into the ramp, and skate until I was exhausted and the pain became overwhelming. After all, there's plenty of time to heal when it's raining. Today it was dry, and the pipe was ours.
EPILOGUE
During my "encore" session I screwed up going up one of the walls and my board shot out from under me and went up and over my head and out of my line of site.
For what felt like an eternity I stood crouched down with my hands on my helmet, waiting to see where it would land. During this pause, I realized that having my hands on my head was probably the dumbest idea of all since the board would essentially sever my digits were it to come back down.
Just as I realized this and started to bring them down I heard a BANG! as my board came down about 2 feet from me.
This triggered the biggest laughing fit I've had in a long time. The sheer absurdity of me voluntarily standing around waiting to see if a giant chunk of wood was about to come crashing down and smashing my hand seemed like the most illogical, yet logical thing ever. As I laughed to myself pondering the Paradoxical position I was in, I realized that I am either some kind of genius for discovering this sport, or I'm completely crazy.
Maybe it just takes some kind of combination of the two.
