The photographic record says I bought cheap Amazon pintail longboards for me and Al eight years ago. They sort of sucked, but we dragged them over to a nearby elementary school parking lot/playground and practiced going in straight lines on them. We looked like bolt upright statues on a mechanic’s creeper.
After a month of that, I bought us each nicer boards: Drop-through decks made out of some kind of bamboo composite with bigger wheels and nicer components. That got us out onto safaris down the Springwater. Sometimes Ben used his skateboard, sometimes he used a cruising deck.
I can remember three spills:
The first one, which was very interesting to me from a sensory perspective: I remember being upright, then being up in the air and parallel to the ground, then I remember being on the ground. AppleCare applied to my watch.
The second one, I thought I broke a bone in my foot. The ER doctor said “50 years old and ’longboard accident’ as cause of injury is not normal, Mr. Hall.”
The third one, I went off the front of the deck and somersaulted across 92nd Ave, thankfully during non-peak traffic time.
Then there was the fourth spill, which wasn’t mine: It was Alison’s. She hit a seam between bridge and trail on the Springwater, went off the back, threw her arm out to catch herself, and managed to both dislocate and shatter her elbow. We spent 45 minutes sitting on the bridge while four 911 jurisdictions argued about whose responsibility she was before an ambulance crew finally came.
She has a titanium elbow now. Recovery took a while, and the doctor said she’d never get back full mobility. She has, at the cost of some throbbing pain when it’s really cold and damp out.
She got back on the board long enough to shake her dread at the thought, but it was pretty much my hobby from then on out.
I met a neighborhood dad at the asphalt school playground next door who used longboarding to stay primed during the snowboarding off season. He never wore pads or a helmet, and often didn’t wear a shirt, and he tore around the playground at speeds I couldn’t imagine. I hadn’t had that many spills, and I hadn’t really figured out that I was having them at all because I was so stiff on the board. He didn’t have that problem.
I eventually got pretty comfortable on my deck. I liked to use it to do little grocery runs into Woodstock, or to commute to the Max stop in Lents Town Center. I went from being a very steadfast bike lane or bike trail person to feeling safe on sidewalks with people around.
I wanted to get more proficient, so I ended up signing up for a downhill longboarding class that met every week for the summer at Mt. Tabor, where I learned to come to sliding stops and deal with downhill speeds. My last class, kind of the final exam, where we all rode down from the top, I had a pretty bad spill: My board was warped in ways that hadn’t shown up until I hit a good 20mph and started wobbling. It steered into a curb and I got tossed off. I had to sit by the side of the road with my head between my knees because I thought I was going to throw up.
When Covid hit, I ended up spending even more time out on a board, usually just cruising the Springwater. It was a way to not be in the house, and it was a little therapeutic. I kept thinking back to that neighborhood dad, and my rides went from easy cruises where I just wanted to meander around, to much faster runs where I pumped pretty hard and decided to just stop worrying about the stray rock or twig or crack, which completely paid off in improving my technique, but felt a little reckless.
Longboarding season in Portland isn’t super long, all things considered. Maybe May to some time in October. If you’re insistent you can find patches where you can get out here and there, but mostly it’s a five- or six-month window, then the deck goes on a hook in the garage and the gear goes into the closet. You can ride in the damp but it’s sort of sloppy and messy and hard on your gear.
Each off-season sort of attenuated my interest in being out on a deck. Eventually I stopped riding as much. I didn’t have a commuting excuse, and I was doing a lot more walking around and taking pictures, which doesn’t go well with longboarding.
One day maybe two years ago I grabbed one of the decks, headed down to the trail, and rode for a few minutes. It didn’t feel great. I felt uneasy on the board, frustrated because my muscles weren’t right anymore. And I started remembering how I felt when I rode during lockdown and the year after, when things weren’t great and I was throwing myself at those hard runs down the trail, pumping until I was sore and tired, going faster than really made sense. On a small hill I tried to drag stop and felt a rear wheel hit my heel. I went over backwards and just laid there for a second thinking it sort of sucked. I went home, hung the deck on the hook in the garage, and it has been there until today.
I don’t know why the urge to get back out on the board has been increasing. It just has. I remember parts of riding that weren’t great, and I remember parts that were really great. When the weather gets hot I feel a kind of nostalgia for being hot under my helmet, sweating under my pads. I used to psych myself up for downhill runs, or shake off a moment’s uneasiness about being on the board at all, by smacking the discs of my downhill gloves together, and that sound had become a sort of cue that pulled in my focus and reassured me, the same way banging my first on my thigh helped me get up out of my seat and out the door when I was a paratrooper.
So today I finally hit some sort of critical mass, dug out my pads and gloves, gave the wheels on my commuter deck a spin to make sure they were fine, and headed over to the playground.
It has a covered structure where I first learned to ride that cheap Amazon pintail: Out of sight of the neighbors, mostly free of pebbles, twigs, and cracks. I went in there and practiced pushing off, getting both feet on the deck, repositioning, foot-dragging to a stop.
I stuck to straight lines, back and forth. It was hard to relax, and I tightened the kingpin a turn to get a little more stability. But I just kept pushing off, stopping, pushing off, stopping, until I wasn’t really thinking about it. I caught myself in the middle of a lazy figure eight and realized I’d eased back into better form: Knees bent, managing easy turns, jinking away from the cracks, pebbles, and twigs.
It was pretty strange to find myself doing four or five pumps and gliding out from under the shelter and onto the asphalt. I had a moment of unease. There are a lot of little cracks and rocks and crabgrass that used to knock me off the deck or trip me off when I was starting out. But I was loose and rolled over them and started picking up speed, and went back to not thinking about much, just carving figure eights and occasionally dragging to a stop because in the back of my mind I thought I ought to be practicing that.
Then I relaxed enough to just feel, and had another moment of unease, remembering when I would get on the deck to not be in the house, trying to get away from everything going on during lockdown. I felt myself stiffen a little, and I wondered why on Earth I was out there on that cracked and pebbly asphalt. I remembered that ER doctor’s plain disapproval with 50-year-old me being out on a board. I remembered the sound Al made when they reset her elbow.
Then I shook myself off and banged the discs of my gloves together, listening to the echoes off the school walls. I got back to lazy figure eights, picking up speed, before deciding I was ready to try the street.