Humbled By Concrete

A couple of weeks ago I bought a secondhand skateboard from this guy in Narrabeen for $60. He was selling it because he’d injured himself playing tennis and wouldn’t be skating for a while. I don’t think he had any idea what he was handing over. As far as he was concerned, it was a deck, four wheels and a pair of trucks changing hands at a fair price. But for me, it was a lifetime of nostalgia, returned to me for $60.

The first thing I did was buy a skate tool to tighten the trucks to where I remembered having them. There’s no spec for this, just a tension that had apparently been stored in my wrists all those years and was still there when I went looking.

When I got back, I pushed out onto the street outside my flat, which is a questionable place to relearn anything, being a road the buses from Manly Wharf regularly use. Fuck it, I went for it. It felt weird, and also cool, and the weirdness was mostly a confidence thing. I wasn’t comfortable going over the uneven surfaces at first, because I’d have bailed hard, with an audience. 

So I took the board up to Keirle Park and pushed most of the way there, getting used to it by degrees. The first thing to come back was the foot you’re not pushing with. I had massively taken for granted how much strength that leg needs. The pushing foot gets all the credit while the other one does the real work of keeping you upright on a moving plank. I’d also missed the surfaces, and what they tell you through the wheels. You’re completely present in it.

Then I bailed. A backside powerslide with an attempted 180 out of it. This kid at the top of the ramp, on a scooter shouted, “Oh shit, you alright mate?!”. I was back. That moment took me straight back to doing the same thing down Thame.

Skateboarding is a beautiful thing. It humbles you in ways you don’t always expect, but more importantly, it makes you feel included in something far bigger than yourself.

This is what I feel I’ve been missing from my life, because I haven’t felt like I’m part of something, even when I’m not with other people.

It was never just the skating. The music came with it. So did the clothes, which were less a style than a uniform for a club with no membership. Every 411VM I watched led back to it. The way I looked at a handrail, a car park, a patch of smooth concrete outside a building. All of that instinct came from a plank of wood with wheels.

And underneath all of it was the knowledge that the whole thing was a group effort, with people I hadn’t even met. Everyone was trying to better themselves, whether it was on film or not. Everyone had their own style. The shops were always there, pushing the community along. There were multiple places you could exist, all in the same world, and none of them needed the others to physically be there. 

It also taught me things I didn’t know I was learning. You persevere. You embrace failure. You encourage the people around you. You get more creative with what’s in front of you.

It turns out to be one of the better things you can do for your brain, too. Learning something physically difficult forces it to build new connections, and the old idea that this stops when childhood does is wrong. Adults stay plastic. I had the proof in my wrists: all those years away, and the tension on the trucks came straight back. The new stuff doesn’t come back for free, though. A powerslide into a 180 is your brain finding out, at speed, that its map of the world is out of date, and the only way to update it is to fall over until the body works it out. More and more of our thinking is being handed over, the directions, the answers, the first draft. I find it a relief to do something that can only be learned the slow way.

Now I’ve taken it back up, without any concern for what anyone might think. I reached a point where I really don’t care, and it’s liberating. That feeling of trying something and seeing how it goes, the reward, building on it, the total escapism: it’s all still there.

In surfing, the waves humble you. In skating, the concrete humbles you. You get taught a lesson by your environment, which ultimately shapes you.

And it makes me happy to know there are so many people my age doing the same thing, bringing back that youthful energy, not together, and all of them part of the same thing.