A few pushes to happiness
Reigniting the skate flame.
More like this...
"What?" I ask, taking off my headphones having missed it the first time.
"Would you like a tow?" asks the groundskeeper with a mischievous grin.
I pause for a second to take in what's on offer - the groundskeeper is sitting on a green quad bike, I have a longboard by my feet.
"Uh, yeah! Cheers mate," I yelp.
Ok. So I've never been the best skater. In fact, I pretty much walked away from it for the best part of a decade after a failed ollie down a set of steps left me with a purple lump on my ankle the size of a tennis ball. Ironically enough, the set of steps belonged to the local doctor's surgery. As I lay there on the concrete, screaming my adolescent face off, the appeal of skateboarding just disappeared. I limped home with tears in my eyes and a few days later, traded my once beloved Blind Car Crash deck for a lump of hash. In hindsight, that was stupid.
Fast forward many years of skate-celibacy and I'm randomly introduced to a longboard at a party. After a few beers, I asked the owner for a go. The crusty guy said "yes". The first tentative pushes bought back that familiar knee-clenching wobble and nagging fear of a painful concrete collision. But there was something else too - it was smooth. The big wheels cruised over lumps and nooks in the pavement like silk, and I wanted more. The next six months flew by. Cue montage music: shots of clumsy pushing, carving, falling off, trying out switch, slipping up, crouching grabs, narrowly missing a dog (but hitting its owner instead), and ultimately, smiling...
And so here I am, hanging onto the back of this quad, ripping around my local park in the late evening sunshine, the board rumbling under my feet. This is awesome. I'm fulfilling that Marty McFly fantasy that captured so many kids of the 1980s, getting bemused looks from passers-by. Suddenly, a small child runs out of the bush and the groundskeeper slams his breaks on, stopping less than a metre from the tiny girl.
"I probably shouldn't be doing this," he says anxiously, looking around to see whether anyone witnessed it.
The coast is clear. The girl runs off oblivious to the world of pain she narrowly missed.
"Nah, that's cool," I say, shaking his hand and skating off, elated.
And it's there again; the appeal that hid itself for so many years flows through my veins and captures my daydreams. No matter what shit happens in the future, I will always know that I'm only a few pushes away from happiness.
Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £20 (UK) / £43 (EU) / £58 (Rest of the World).
A few pushes to happiness (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (3)
Please note: Your comment may be held in moderation for approval by an administrator to prevent spamming. This usually doesn't take long, please be patient.
Clissold Park, N16 is my local spot. There's a few gentle slopes to get up some speed and a maze of paths to cruise round. And if you are lucky, the groundskeeper may give you a tow on his quad!!
you caught the feeling i get when i get on my longboards. I too used to skateboard when i was younger but was never brilliant but loved the feeling and have always loved board sports from snowboarding to wakeboarding/wakeskating and when i got on a longboard aged 37 it all came back. Richmond park has nice places to glide about especially if you stick a set of these on your stick the world becomes and even better place. http://www.skateasylum.co.uk/a.....0a.html
sometimes my three and six year old stand on the nose and we cruise about. I taught my wife to skateboard aged 40 and she loves it.