Interlude
SK8 the ST8S
Wiping out is an underappreciated skill.
—Laird Hamilton
Image from author’s collection.
CLEVELAND, OHIO
SUMMER OF 2011
Five teen boys and two grown men, squished into a huge SUV, hemmed in by skateboards, video gear, sweat-skanked clothes. Doritos bags, soda cans, and water bottles at their feet. A record-breaking heat wave simmering outside, the air-conditioner groaning. Seven of us, lost in Cleveland, and I’m wondering why I thought this was a good idea.
Sean pokes our iPad screen, zooms in and out on a digital map, desperate to find a skate spot he’d seen on YouTube. Using the Google Maps satellite view, he searches for a little plaza surrounded by housing projects. “We’re close, we’re close!” he yells, unsure, close to panic. Pinch and zoom, treasure hunting for a patch of Cleveland concrete.
We’ve been on the road for five days and our adventure is imploding. We should be sprawled out in a converted 1972 school bus, but the bus died in South Carolina before rolling a foot. “The last thing we need right now is getting lost in a Cleveland slum,” I say, eager to keep pushing toward Detroit. I want to support Sean, but I have that nagging feeling I’d had in New Orleans five years earlier, driving through the Lower Ninth researching a post-Katrina book—I feel like a ghetto tourist.
“We’ll be back on the road in thirty minutes,” Sean says, then scolds: “and it’s hardly a slum, Dad.”
I appreciate my sons’ curiosity about the off-piste corners of the world, which YouTube and their online skate community have helped shrink. They’ve come of age at a time when a Seattle kid in the back of a Ford Explorer can find an inner-Cleveland skate spot with an iPad. I’m cool with that. But we’re behind schedule. And our stinky SUV is due back to Budget Rental at St. Louis airport in three days. Unless we find replacement wheels we’ll be stuck halfway into our cross-country skate park tour.
Still . . . one reason we’re on this fathers-and-sons trek is to experience a nontouristy, mostly urban version of America, including the concrete jungles that have become my kids’ playgrounds. So I grudgingly pulled off I-77 and follow my fourteen-year-old’s spotty instructions. “Don’t worry,” says Sean. “We’re really close. I think.”
After a few laps around a neighborhood that could be a stand-in for Baltimore in The Wire, Sean yells, “Turn here!” A few hundred yards later we’re in an alley, and Sean checks his on-screen satellite view and yells “stop!” He jumps out, turns down an alley, and with a glance back at the SUV is gone. My first thought: Mary’s going to be so pissed.
Sean finally emerges from the alley and skips back, wide-eyed and giddy. “We’re here!” The other boys grab their boards, and my pal Lou and I swap nervous looks as all five boys—his son, my two, and their two friends—skate past the NO GUNS! signs toward a plaza of concrete ledges, banks, and a trapezoid-shaped platform topped by a Japanese-looking sculpture. I’m thinking: We risked our lives for this? Sean, as if hearing my thoughts, yells: “I’m not scared . . . Maybe I’m a little scared.”
The boys roll across the plaza and begin ripping ollies and kickflips, rock-to-fakies, and board slides. Another skater arrives, then another, and the plaza is transformed into an impromptu skate park. A young girl walks by tugging twin boys, five or six years old, in matching cargo shorts and Gap T-shirts, and Leo rolls up and offers his board: “Wanna try?”
The twins’ eyes light up and they look to the girl, who shrugs. Our crew starts giving skate lessons, holding the twins’ hands, towing or pushing them. One kid juts out his arms and strikes a surfer’s pose, “Check me out!” It’s cute, but I’m thinking: What if he falls and cracks his skull?
Later, as we head toward Detroit, Leo’s buddy Nathan writes our daily blog post, summing up the Cleveland detour: “Most parents wouldn’t have done that.”
And I’m not sure if I should feel proud or ashamed.
The idea had started small, but word spread quickly, and we soon had an entourage.
Sean and Leo would each bring a friend: Willem for Sean, Nathan for Leo. Three dads latched on: my decades-long friend Lou, with his son Niall, who’d known my kids since babyhood; Reid, Sean’s elementary school teacher from back in Asheville, who’d become a good friend and now lived in Charleston; and Willem’s dad, Paul, an old-school skater who’d join us for the final few days.
When I launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for an RV or van—calling our project “Sk8 the St8s: a coast-to-coast, fathers-and-sons adventure”—friends gave me shit for taking their money to pay for a vacation. But I’d convinced myself their investment was serving a greater purpose. With the boys teetering on the edge of a new school phase, and me on the verge of an upcoming career transition, I wanted to take a few weeks to immerse myself in the sport and culture that had come to dominate our family lifestyle.
“This is no vacation,” I told friends and reluctant donors. “It’s a mission.”
Our mission was to drive a giant S across America, from South Carolina to Oregon, where I’d drop three of the five boys at a weeklong skate camp outside Portland. Along the way we planned to interview skaters and skate dads, chronicling the skate scenes of Middle America on a blog and on YouTube. A former high school classmate who worked for CBS saw our Kickstarter campaign on Facebook and offered to help with the blog and have CBS radio stations interview the boys in a few cities.
The $4,500 we raised was supposed to pay for a 1979 school bus nicknamed Bustaride, owned by a friend of Reid’s. Air-conditioned and wired for sound, with a lava lamp and shag rugs, it was a dorm room on wheels. The boys couldn’t wait to flop into one of the beat-up couches.
“That bus is gonna smell like ass cheese in a few days,” Reid teases as he drives us through Charleston toward our preplanned rendezvous with the bus.
That’s when we see Bustaride’s hood propped open like the maw of an giant alligator, three men standing on the bumper, staring into the engine well.
Bustaride is busted.
Reid and I plunge into Apollo 13–style contingency mode, ditching nonessentials at his house, the minigrill, camp gear, food, my guitar. In his wife’s SUV, which we dub “Trustaride,” Reid drives us to Richmond to meet Lou and his wife, who shuttle us to their home outside D.C. Reid says he’ll rejoin us in Los Angeles, “If you ever get there.”
After a flurry of calls to RV and car rental places, all I can find is a seven-passenger SUV at Reagan National Airport, which I’ll have to return in St. Louis four days later. “I’ll take it!” I yell, putting our adventure back onto a wobbly track.
The next day’s USA Today carries a full-page, color-coded map showing most of the country locked in a record heat wave. The red zone? We’ll be rolling straight through it.
I’d hoped that spending three weeks on the road with my sons would unravel the mysteries of the board. I’d crack the code. The Matrix would be revealed. And I’d become a better dad. But now, without the bus, and without Reid as codriver and third adult, I’ll have to scale back my roles as interviewer, videographer, and ethnographer and step up as driver, navigator, and a few other unanticipated roles. And instead of camping and sleeping on the bus, we’ll need lots of hotel rooms.
After our Cleveland housing project detour, a biblical deluge seeps through our not-so-waterproof rooftop carrier. So when we check into a two-room suite in Detroit—scored via Hotwire . . . “the nicest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in,” says Nathan; “Me too,” I add—we drape the entire suite with rain-soaked clothes.
The boys explore the hotel and I flee to the bar, order a bourbon and a beer, catch up on blog posts and e-mails to RV renters. When Lou walks in I have no time to hide either of my drinks and feel like I’ve been busted by my parents. When we’d met twenty-plus years earlier, Lou had hair to his ass, played shirtless guitar in a killer college band, smoked and drank prodigiously. Now, he’s a father of two, a government employee, a lung cancer survivor, and sober—or, as he puts it, “retired.”
He’d signed on to the road trip in hopes of sampling a taste of his old life—“It’ll help me reconnect with my inner punk next door,” he’d said. Instead: our kids are the punks, and we’re the babysitters. “Um, our gentlemen are fucking around in the weight room,” he says, not commenting on my two-fisted drinking.
I drink up, close my laptop, and find the boys shirtless and pumping weight machines beneath “adult supervision” warning signs. Something about their heedless fun and my uptight obligations tweaks me, and I light into them like some dick-wad gym teacher.
“You guys are supposed to be helping,” I whine, then turn to Leo, who’d promised to make a skate video for our blog. “I need help, here!”
The boys dive into heaping mounds of red-sauced pasta, buttery bread, and glistening salad greens, our first home-cooked meal since D.C. We’re in Chicago, at Mary’s aunt Gerry’s house, where our scuzzy clothes twirl in the washer as we tell Gerry and Uncle Ed about the trip so far. I sit off to the side, keeping the video camera rolling, capturing the tense mood . . .
Niall: “I don’t like the situation with the car. It’s a little too small for me. But I love skating all the spots.”
Lou (with a quick glance toward me): “You know what? I think we’re better off when we just let them . . . skate. That’s what they’re here to do, right? And we’re here to just, like, buy water and drive them around and get them Skittles.”
Nathan: “I dunno, I’ve just had so much fun so far. I mean, I don’t even know what day it is. It doesn’t even matter anymore. It’s gotten to a point where I don’t even care. It’s like, I’m with my friends, doing something I enjoy more than anything. I love it, actually. I dunno, I’ve had the greatest time so far.”
After dinner, Uncle Ed takes the boys to Wilson Skate Park beside Lake Michigan while I stay home with Gerry and do laundry.
When the boys return, Leo pulls me aside. He’s getting mad that I keep working on the blog and videos instead of being part of the trip.
“I wish we’d never agreed to the stupid blog,” he says. “I just want you to have fun and you’re not having fun.”
Thankfully, a beer from Ed and a Xanax from Gerry helps me slide into a floppy sleep atop a blow-up mattress on their floor.
After a brief skate session beneath the silvery St. Louis arch, eyes alert for cops while illegally parked beside the Mississippi River, the boys (and Google Maps, and our iPad) lead us west into an industrial underbelly. Beneath Kingshighway Bridge lurks a homemade park built by skaters from cast-off materials—chunks of sidewalk mortar, slabs of marble countertop, metal oil barrels, concrete highway barriers, jagged sections of swimming pool, blue-tiled NO DIVING letters still visible.
“Oh, this place is sick,” says Willem, who throws himself into the park like a toddler plunging into a playground. The others follow, weaving between bridge abutments, rolling up molded waves of concrete, ollie-ing over trash cans and coils of garden hose.
Littered with trash and abandoned furniture, hemmed in by a storage warehouse and a vacant parking lot, cars and trucks rumbling overhead, Kingshighway Bridge is a place for drug deals and prostitution, for dumping carpet-wrapped bodies. And just right for skating. Sean dubs it “full-on guerrilla.”
I’ll later google it and find the St. Louis Post-Dispatch description: a haven for a counterculture group of nonconformists.
Watching them lost in a fugue state of blissful skating, I borrow Leo’s board and try rolling around, though I’ve clearly lost every bit of skill I once had as a preteen skater.
Then, reluctantly, I call it—“Time to go, boys . . .”
Having had no luck with vehicle rentals, I’ve been desperately browsing Craigslist for something to buy. Mary’s sister, Katherine, has e-mailed about a few possibilities, including a fifteen-passenger church van near their home in Columbia, Missouri. Cheaper than an RV rental, the “Jesus wheels,” as she called it, could keep our trip alive.
I drive to a Bank of America and withdraw $3,500, then return our armpit-smelling SUV at the St. Louis airport. Lugging our gear through the terminal, I keep patting my ass to make sure the cash is still there. During the two-hour shuttle ride to Columbia, we all silently mull our prospects: if the Jesus wheels doesn’t work out, we’ll be stranded.
That night the boys watch a horror movie as I stand in my sister-in-law’s kitchen, slurping a beer, then another. I stood in the same spot (also drinking) three years earlier, halfway into our family’s cross-country move from North Carolina to Seattle, with me bringing up the rear as Mary and the boys got settled in our new northwest home.
Tonight, Katherine and her husband, David, join me in the kitchen and Katherine asks the obvious, “Bite off more than you can chew?”
I know she means the road trip, not everything else—the move to another new city, the boys and their skating, my stalled writing career, our family’s roller-coaster life . . .
I also know the answer—road trip, boys, skating, career, life—would be the same.
“Maybe so,” I say, and finish my beer.
In a parking lot in Jefferson City, Missouri, Pastor Mike holds out his hand and I resist the urge to hug him.
Mike tells me his fifteen-passenger Dodge had been used for years to transport prisoners to and from the county jail, where he works as chaplain. He’d bought it for church outings, and the words GRACE FAMILY WORSHIP CENTER are still faintly visible beneath a recent coat of white paint.
“What a blessing you are to those young people,” Mike says when I describe our road trip. I tell him he’s the blessing, then offer him an envelope of $100 bills and thank him for saving our trip. I drive off, listening to country music radio, grinning like a goof and trying not to cry with relief as Willie Nelson, as if the pastor had conjured it, warbles (no lie), “On the road again . . .” The AC fucking cranks.
Back in Columbia, the boys dive inside, stroking the five rows of vinyl seats—one row per skater—as if they’re Corinthian leather.
For our inaugural drive, Katherine and David lead us to a swimming quarry. As I dive into the cool water, the ogre that’s been thumping inside my chest calms to a dull ache, and I allow myself to believe, for the first time in a week: maybe we’ll make it to Portland after all. But we still have a thousand miles to go.
In the new prison-cum-church-cum-skate van, we detour into Joplin, Missouri. It’s been two months since tornadoes maimed this town, and at first the boys just want food—“Let’s go to Chili’s”—but then we see the mounds of rubble, the wiped-clean house foundations, a car on the roof of a half-smashed school.
Nathan wonders where everyone is sleeping, and Niall marvels at the random pattern of destruction, one side of the street ravaged, the other side intact—“like gerrymandering,” he says, and Lou and I exchange raised eyebrows. Gerrymandering?
It feels a bit ghoulish, but I can’t help myself, the journalist in me guiding us along the path of devastation, past neighborhoods swiped into oblivion, past an RV with a banner advertising TRAUMA COUNSELING & PRAYER. All around are the ragged remnants of domestic life—lawn chairs and a busted Santa statue, carpets and clothes, toys and TVs.
After a few “holy shit” comments, the van becomes hushed. I feel my throat clench and look over at Lou, whose eyes are as misty as mine. I hear sniffling from the back, and wonder if this was a mistake. Niall and Leo share blogging duties that afternoon, and Leo writes: “We have never seen anything like Joplin. It was like a horror movie. All of us were scared to be there. We all got teared-up looking at this town . . . We couldn’t believe the devastation.”
Niall writes: “I saw places where once there was a happy neighborhood, where people were having potlucks and parties that now looked like the prairie.”
South to Tulsa, then Plano, then Dallas, where we score another Hotwire deal at the swanky Fairmont. The boys play a game of commando through the halls, earning the wrath of the security team as I escape to the lounge, order a Woodford on ice, start blogging and planning, missing the fun. Though I’d toyed with the idea of not drinking at all on the road—in solidarity with Lou, and because I knew it couldn’t hurt—that idea got flushed after Bustaride died.
Comfortably buzzed, I rally the crew for dinner, detouring along the way to another place of tragedy, Dealey Plaza. A tour guide helpfully shows the boys the book depository window and the grassy knoll. The boys read the plaques and tourist brochures. As we walk on toward Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse, I hear them talking . . . politics?
“There were such high hopes,” says Sean, the 2012 election more than a year off.
“There still are,” Willem says. “But he hasn’t done everything he said he would.”
The other kids nod as Lou and I share double takes.
“Don’t get me wrong, Obama’s great,” Willem continues. “But you can’t fix everything in one presidency.”
Driving through the shimmering 112-degree heat of West Texas into New Mexico, Lou and I take turns on the iPod, dragging each other back to the nostalgic core of our musical prime, the ’80s. The Replacements give way to Elvis Costello, the Cure, Haircut 100, the Smiths, both of us swinging our arms, playing air drums and air guitar.
Then Lou dials up some Turkish surf music just as the western sky darkens and sparks with lightning. “Are those tornadoes?” one of the boys asks.
The trancelike monotony of the westward haul toward L.A. becomes a trippy highlight—more boredom, less panic. With the boys sitting peacefully in their rows, with Google Maps to guide us, coffee in the cup holder and tunes on the stereo, I feel in charge and in control. The landscape reminds me of Buzz Aldrin’s description of the moon: “magnificent desolation.” The boys keep themselves surprisingly content, whiling away the hours with less screen time than I expected and few “how much longer” complaints.
I wonder if all that hanging around skate parks developed a comfort with the in-between moments. They seem so content, so patient. I only regret I didn’t plant an audio recorder in the back of the van, to capture their far-ranging conversations about skating, school, friends, girls, farts, food, sharts, Snooki, Jersey Shore, and more politics.
“I’m voting for Nader,” Nathan says.
“Watch, he’ll get elected someday and he’ll be the best president ever,” Leo adds.
Sometimes I look back and see them all lined up, listening to music or not, staring out the window or straight ahead, and I think: Did I get this right?
A ten-hour drive from Dallas ends with the boys skating the chutes of a concrete arroyo beneath a Motel 6 sign outside Albuquerque. The next day, en route to Tempe, Lou pulls out a camera to “interview” Niall, Sean, and Willem about their upcoming entry into high school, which awaits on the other side of our trip like a foot-tapping schoolmarm.
“I don’t wanna be really rich and kinda sad,” Niall says. “I’d rather be, like, middle-class—with a family and a job that I can go to and know I’ll be happy.”
“I don’t want to be too ambitious and try to do something like skateboarding or become an artist of some sort,” Sean says. “Because it’s very difficult to make money or be a success doing that.”
That one stings a bit. Is that how Sean views me, “an artist of some sort”? He’s surely witnessed the “difficult to make money” part.
Willem says he wants to be an architect, but Sean, who’s almost as hard on Willem as he is on Leo, cuts him off.
“Willem . . . architects design buildings. Maybe you can be a construction worker.”
Willem just grins, but Sean keeps going: “You see, me and Niall, we’re like Macs. We’ve got taste, style, and a strong Internet connection. Willem? You’re kinda like a Dell.”
I tell Willem to go ahead and punch Sean, but Willem keeps on silently grinning.
“Hold on,” Sean says. “He’s still loading.”
What we eat: chips, cheesesteaks, scores of peanut butter sandwiches. During one lunch stop we realize we’d lost our plastic knives so Lou scoops out peanut butter with his fingers and smears it on white bread. A successful meal to me is Subway—at least they might get a little lettuce. Success to us all is our first In-N-Out burger fest.
What we drink: Gatorade, energy drinks, an occasional soda, gallons of coffee. During a Starbucks stop everyone orders frothy mocha drinks except Willem, who asks for milk. “Make it a venti,” he says, which the others find hilarious.
Even funnier: the In-N-Out next to the Kum & Go.
We also drink many gallons of water from scores of plastic bottles bought by the case. The scrunchy bottles become playthings, noisemakers, weapons, and, maybe inevitably, piss receptacles. At one rest stop I discover a collection of yellow-filled bottles stashed beneath the seats. Thankfully none sprung a leak.
During a roadside pee break we venture off the highway onto a dirt road into a spooky patch of Arizona desert. We find a dried-out elk carcass and hunt for rattlesnakes. We decide to cover up the faded WORSHIP CENTER on the van with all the stickers we’ve collected from skate shops, turning the process into a time-lapse video for YouTube.
That evening I leave the boys and Lou at the Tempe skate park to buy a case of water and sandwiches for dinner, then linger at a strip mall coffee shop for an hour. When I get back I stand there watching Lou on a bench watching his son skate beneath gauzy lights. It reminds me of all those hours I’d spent on the fringe of a skate park as my kids did the thing that made them happiest. It hits me: this is what the road trip is supposed to be all about. Not seeing America, just skating—for five hours straight.
When I ask Lou about it later, he says he became mesmerized watching the boys in their zone, and had an epiphany of his own.
“They had the freedom to do nothing but skate,” he says. “No school, no rebelliousness. Their minds were clear. They were unshackled by any constraints. They were intense and determined, but serene and calm. They skated like it was their fucking job.”
In Los Angeles, skateboarding’s birthplace, we hit a dozen parks and spots. We watch pros flying and grinding and spinning at Hollenbeck Park and Stoner Plaza. The boys ollie on and off picnic benches at YouTube-famous Lockwood Elementary, and security guards kick us out of Santa Monica High.
And then . . . we lose Sean.
Reid has flown to L.A. to rejoin the road trip. He starts the afternoon at a rooftop bar and texts me “join me at the hotel erwin?” Lou agrees to stay with the boys at Venice Beach Skatepark while I escape to meet Reid for a cocktail.
I find Reid at the railing, Jim Beam in one hand, smoke in the other, talking to a tall, multiply pierced guy called Seven. I order a bourbon and bum a cigarette off Seven. After two weeks in the company of five teens and my alcohol-free copilot, a drink and a smoke with grown-ups is just what I need. We look down at a drum circle on the beach, out toward the setting sun exploding behind Santa Monica Pier, and just as I reach near euphoric relaxation Lou calls: “Have you see Sean? We can’t find Sean.”
I stub out my smoke and race back through the freaky heart of Venice, past tattoo parlors and a procession of chanting Hare Krishnas, to look for my son. When I get to the skate park, Sean still hasn’t rejoined the others. (First thought: Mary will kill me.) After a few worrisome minutes, I get a text from Reid: “sean is here with me.”
Sean had somehow overheard which bar I was headed for, googled the place, walked away from Lou and the others, then talked his way up to the rooftop and found Reid. I sprint back to the bar and take pictures of Sean and his ex-kindergarten teacher, high above Venice, with a dude named Seven photo-bombing behind them.
One of the first to visit Sean in the hospital after his accident, Reid now tells his ex-student: “Never would’ve guessed then that we’d be at a rooftop bar together in L.A.”
The next day, Lou and I part ways with a kiss-on-the-lips farewell that’s become our hello/good-bye over the years. He and Niall are headed home to D.C. while the rest of us are bound for San Francisco.
“Thanks for taking me outside my comfort zone,” Lou says. “I needed that.”
“Likewise,” I tell him, and wrap him in a bear hug.
Is it true, though? Have I fully tested my discomfort? I’m so grateful to Lou for adding a gnarly new chapter to the story of our twenty-year friendship, and I’ll remember certain moments—Cleveland, Pastor Mike, Joplin, West Texas air guitar, dead elk, Tempe—forever. But I worry I’ve been too much of a bitchy babysitter: “buckle up!” “brush your teeth!” “charge your phone!” Also, being around my sober friend only highlighted how frequently I sneak off for a glass of something to tame my stress.
Yet, in his final blog post, penned from D.C., Lou essentially reminds me to stop worrying and just enjoy the ride . . .
“That’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time,” he writes. “I hope I was an able copilot, or yin to your yang, or sumpin’. I love you man.”
At Portland’s Amtrak station, the midday train arrives from Seattle and out steps my beautiful wife, who clutches our boys and bursts into tears as I wrap myself around them all. Our family has never been apart for so long. Everyone piles into our van and we drive to a hotel, where Mary and her sons huddle and catch up. Tomorrow, we’ll deliver three of the guys to their summer skate camp. But tonight? I’m finally off duty. Of course . . . I crave a drink. And Reid is there to oblige.
“Do y’all have minibars?” Reid asks the Crown Plaza concierge.
“No, sir.”
“How about a megabar?”
He and I rush off like naughty boys, find the hotel lounge, and order a bourbon and a beer apiece.
As a skate-obsessed teenager, Reid had pinched his dad’s VW Beetle to drive, with no license, to a Bones Brigade skate show an hour from his home. He’s now a college professor, a red-bearded surfer with a wife and daughter. He’s been part of this trip all along, rescuing us from early disaster, following the blog, commenting on Facebook. Now, having joined us from L.A. up the coast, with four drinks in front of us, he wants details, hungry for assurance that it’s been a success.
We talk for two hours—about skating, drinking, God, boys, the South, and the origins of my kids’ defiance, which Reid had glimpsed as Sean’s teacher. It’s the longest I’ve been separated from the boys in three weeks. Eventually, Reid asks, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
Across five thousand miles and nineteen states, we visited two dozen skate parks, some famous and iconic skate spots. My kids added twelve new states to their life list, and had now skated nearly half of them. We met scores of skaters, pros, kids, dads, skate shop owners, and not an asshole in the bunch. But did I find what I was looking for? I suppose I’d secretly hoped for an a-ha! revelation, for some wise old skater to pull me aside and explain it all, like Morpheus in The Matrix.
I tell Reid about a few skate sessions—through New Mexico arroyos, beneath a St. Louis bridge, in a Cleveland housing project, at skater-built FDR skate park beneath I-95 in South Philly, where a CBS Radio reporter interviewed the boys, all wearing their “Sk8 the St8s” T-shirts, asking them, “So what do you guys really like about skating?”
They all took turns trying to put it into words—“it’s kind of hard to explain,” Sean said—until sweaty-faced Willem thought for a moment, stroked his fuzzy chin, and said, “For me? Skating is a way to express my creativity. It’s kind of like an art form.” Nathan popped Willem a wide-eyed look like he’d just spoken Klingon.
“I’m not sure what I was looking for,” I tell Reid. “I was in survival mode for three weeks.”
I’d at least learned that my kids’ art form was best accompanied by a whiff of danger, the risk of assault or arrest. At their “guerrilla” spots, the boys found their zone. They were focused and fearless. No expectations, no pressures, no teachers or parents. It all sloughed away in those wildcat destinations. Maybe that’s what this trip has been all about, delivering a few memorably off-piste moments.
My boys and their friends seemed happiest out of bounds.
It wouldn’t click until years later how much the road trip reflected our family life, and how much I still had to learn about that. In one of my “Sk8 the St8s” notebooks I’d later find scribbled clues to my future self . . . freedom of the road, detours off the beaten track, improvisational, rash, messy, harried . . . wild ride, unpredictable, best plans get trashed . . .
And I’ll laugh when I later read this, apropos of the road trip and so much more: need to pivot and adapt, be patient, try to enjoy the moments of peace and beauty.
Reid finally asks, “Did you at least have some fun?”
I flash back a few days to a session at Third and Army in San Francisco, where Sean kept encouraging me to try an ollie. I’d grabbed his board, right foot forward, pushed with my left, rolled ten feet, pushed again, made a few wobbly kick turns, tried to hop, but failed. Sean just rolled his eyes. “Are you trying to look uncomfortable?”
After all those miles and all those skate parks, I’d traveled less than a hundred yards on a board.
I confess to Reid: “Man, I think I forgot how to skate.”