Ten years of falling off a skateboard

I started skateboarding at eleven because Matt had a board he had stopped using, and I kept at it until I left for college. Most of those years happened at a popular skate park about an hour from home, the big one everybody in the upstate drove to, with a real bowl, a street section that flooded every spring, and a parking lot full of older kids who would teach you anything if you kept showing up. Dad drove me there most Saturdays for two years and graded chemistry tests in the car.

I loved doing tricks I had no business trying. I never landed anything that would impress you. I landed a lot of things that impressed eleven-year-old me, which is the only audience that ever mattered there.

What the park taught me, in the order I learned it. Nobody cares how you fall, only whether you get up in a way that keeps everyone else moving. You learn more from the kid two levels above you than from the best skater in the state, because he still remembers not being able to do it. Progress is invisible for months and then arrives all at once, usually on a day you nearly stayed home.

I stopped when I moved for school, and I have missed it every year since. The board lives under the bed in New York now. It comes out about twice a year, early, on the flat part of the river path, when nobody is around to see how much I have lost. My wrist still clicks when it rains. I think of it as a receipt.