Lives On Board

My ears were the enemy. The sun was shinning brightly out in the valley, but thousands of feet above, behind my sail was a boiling mass of the young Cu-nim. I could not see it in my immediate vision; it was not a factor at this point. I knew that I would be well away from the mountain before it became dangerous to me. But looking out at the valley, even though it looked like a bright sunny day, my instinct told me there was trouble. My instinct turned out to be my hearing. The sound of the wind was that of a horror movie. Whistling, a quiet rush of swirling wind, hissing through the branches, the sound of the tall pines all around us on top of the mountain massif being pushed by the strong convection. Yes, it was my ears that gave it that emotion.

I was waiting to launch. Kneeling on the ground, holding on to the control frame, waiting until the time was right. Looking back, there was no real right time. The wind blew straight in to launch, just go before a big gust comes and ride it up. It will be one long ride, much like I would make endless carves in a pool except I won't be able to jump off my board and rest. I picked up my wing and that is just what I did. I spiral turned up the big column of rising air, trying to stay within its confines in order to stay upright. My circles were uninterrupted, the feeling very much like riding in a pool. The sensations of gravity being controlled by slight movements of my body. A direct vertical spiral flight path to the black cloud anchored above the mountain.

I am way too nervous to fly today, but this is what I know, commitment. It's much like the commitment that I use once I start pushing into a steep downhill section on my speedskate. I will not be able to jump off; this is a sport of perfection in commitment. The consequences of a mistake can be fatal but it is not the reason why I commit, it is my fate, the control of my life. You see, I am not afraid of dying, I am afraid of not living. So I use all of my focus to enjoy the strong ride, banking in the thermal, rocketing skyward in my wing towards the boiling blackness above me.

The cloud that was above is now the cloud below. I had flown over the backside of the mountain spine to the big flat valley upwind. The wind was being deflected up the face of the anchored cloud creating the ride that I was taking along the side of the cloud. Everything was the cloud now, towering, just a few yards to my right.

I am very much in the zone, my flight path already defined for the next few minutes, I start to relax and my mind drifts...

I started skateboarding when I was very young, five years old, the year was 1966. My mother gave me her clay wheeled board and I learned to ride it kneeboard style. As I grew familiar with it, I learned to skate standing up. Skateboarding offered me a way to depend on myself. I could always depend on having fun, an escape that I was in control of. I didn't need to have anyone take me anywhere to do it. I could ride on the sidewalk right out front of the house and enjoy the sensations of gravity. The act of leaning to turn defied gravity and that feeling was dependable.

As I grew older and more confident, I found there was so much more to learn on a skateboard. I graduated to riding hills where I controlled the inertia of my body instead of creating it by pushing my board and coasting. Riding a bank, I found there were predetermined paths, all I had to do was control the force of my own gravity. Falling down was not on the agenda although I learned many good lessons from falling.

In Arizona, there are many pools to cool off in the summer. Pools were perfect to have fun learning to control the force of gravity. The sensations of being held against the side of a pool on your skateboard are not uncommon to the public. One only has to look at places like Disneyland or fairs to know, people travel far and wide and pay money to stand in line to have this sort of fun but as a kid, this was a free ride. Here in the desert, water is necessary for life and as our cities grow, the planners must make aqueducts in order for the water to meet the needs of the population. Pipelines were built and many where at a downhill angle in order to move the water where it needed to go. These pipelines were perfect for skateboarding, perfect for going beyond the boundary of right side up, you could now be right side down...

Early in the seventies, I found out about surfing. Hundreds of miles away from the ocean, we had a place to surf in Tempe, it was called "Big Surf" and you could truly ride your surfboard for half a football field every three minutes or so. The motions found in skateboarding were also common in surfing. When I was surfing, I was skateboarding and when I went skateboarding, I learned that I could dream about surfing, now both mediums worked together.

On a surf adventure to California, I found an article in a surf magazine about a surfer who had figured out how to surf on snow. Many of the pictures in that article looked like skateboarding and surfing mixed together but only on snow. Like many of the things I do, I decided that I wanted to learn how to do this so I went to Utah where Dimitri Milovitch had his Winterstick shop and bought a board and learned to snowsurf the deep powder in Utah.

I'm a poly-sportsman now. When I ride the snow, I am surfing, skateboarding but I am now controlling a new set of rules for inertia and gravity. I can now carry my momentum farther into the air off of the edges, farther than I can survive if I jumped without the board. Speed allowed me to force the sensations beyond what I understood in skateboarding and surfing. I could fly off of a cliff and descend through the air to land softly in the snow, turning, spraying the snow in an arc. All this defined by the skateboard moves I learned as a child.

Near my home in Phoenix is a hill where hang gliders used to fill the air. I used to ride my bicycle to a field at the bottom of the hill where they landed. There were dirt hills where I could jump my bike and near by was an empty swimming pool where I could ride my bike and my skateboard. I knew that I would learn to hang glide, I loved watching them turn in the air like they were skateboarding in a pool but it was a continuous ride and they never jumped off.

Skateboarding is a huge distraction. It teaches me balance but at the same time, it upsets my balance. I am unable to control the force, the potential found in that skateboard. It pulls me to many places and often, when I should be at work, I am not. I'm at the coast surfing, chasing a swell or I am in the mountains driving in the snow following the storm, looking for powder. My life is a storm, skateboarding makes sense of what I want to do but it does not allow me to provide well for myself so like many young men, I joined the Army to balance my life with work.

The Army took me to Hawaii.

I learned to surf big waves and I also realized my dreams of hang gliding there too.

The wind blows over the Pacific in storms for thousands of miles pushing on the surface of the ocean making huge swells. I began to take hang gliding lessons and finally learned to fly on my own. There were times in Hawaii where I was skateboarding, surfing and flying the huge airwave above Makapuu. All of these things I did with the knowledge of skateboarding.

Many times at Pupukea on the North Shore of O'ahu, I would sit in the line up dreaming of standing or sitting on my board, just in front of the baffle at Big Surf, listening, waiting for the faint sound of the gate opening, and in one smooth motion, pushing forward and standing without paddling. The powerful waves in Hawaii contained the same force albeit on a different scale from that of the sidewalk out in front of the house I rode as a child. Those same motions I used through out my life on board, I would kick turn off the lip and carve around a section and tuck as I would in a downhill section, the lip throwing over me and I commit to the line found on the board.

In between waves, I would dream of flying my hang glider at home in Arizona, continuously surfing, flying through the air in a tube being blown skyward as I controlled the force with my body movement, the wing taping into the common force that all the board sports defined.

Now I return from my dream, the black cloud just a few yards to my right, I am surfing my hang glider near the madness of the cumulonimbus cloud. I am no longer controlling the force, I am within it.

It is 3a on a Thursday morning, I cannot sleep. I am growing older, my children are sleeping soundly in their warm beds. My hang gliding days may very well be over, so many of my friends have died in that sport, I'm not afraid of dying, I am afraid of not living so I sit at my computer thinking of my youth, wondering.

It all became from riding the sidewalk out front as a child.

There is a new skatepark in Phoenix, it has a full pipe with a capsule and lots of vertical walls to ride. But that is for later, in a couple of hours, I will kiss my wife, take the kids to school and I will go to work and I will dream about riding my skateboard, now, it is a balanced expression.