I’ve always felt a bit guilty about not being in a closer relationship with the natural world. I don’t know the names of all that many trees, plants, animals, or insects. I encounter these things, sure, in day to day life, on nature walks with my family, but at the end of most days, even after reading books about trees, I’m more often than not thinking about skateboarding.
Sometimes it’s Cardiel on the gold rail. Sometimes it’s Julien over the Louisville hip on the bloody knife board. Sometimes it’s Gino stringing together no-complies in a parking lot. Other times, it’s wheelbases, urethane durometers, and all sorts of other mundane but still oh-so-important things.
Occasionally, I just like to sit and look at my board at night, retracing where the marks on it came from. In a way, I suppose a skateboard is similar to one of its parents, the tree. You can read the rings on one; you read the slide and grind marks on the other.
I never got into watching for swells, checking tide charts, monitoring snowfalls, or ponying up for lift tickets and all the other gear. At times I’ve felt, or been made to feel, not so much that I was missing out, but that I wasn’t going far enough, wasn’t taking the peripherally available opportunities to connect a board with the natural world like so many other people I’d meet in shops and at tradeshows. But the fact is, I’m a skateboarder. There’s always been a skateboard at my front door and a city filled with concrete just outside of it. That’s always been enough for me. —Jeff Thorburn
