Nine Things I Learned about Nature on My Skateboard

1 It's totally extreme.

There's an old adage . . . well, it's not that old, like maybe from the '90s, that says "go big, or go home." I usually choose the latter. Major air never was super appealing to me. When I brought my skateboard to push around a campground in Sequoia National Forest, though, I started to understand. When you look at something absolutely enormous, something happens to you. Why did professional skateboarder Bob Burnquist grind a rail off the side of the Grand Canyon and deploy his parachute after five full seconds of free-fall? I thought it was dumb. But when I went west, I realized that the North American landscape is pretty dramatic, and that in a way, it calls us to be commensurate to it.

2 All surfaces are shred-worthy.

A righteous man named Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "We live amid surfaces and the true art of life is to skate well on them." Chipped red brick of old mill towns, a Vermont dirt road, even a petrified sand dune in Moab—with 78a soft wheels, I can skate them all.

3 The sea shaped the first board.

My board looks like a fat popsicle stick. It's shaped that way so you can do kickflips, pop shove-its. It's meant to be manipulated. But I found this book with big photographs of surfboards and if you flip through it backwards you see the boards get older and older until they're wood and some look like smooth oval pebbles you find on a shoreline. These boards weren't meant for manipulation. Precolonial Polynesians once had boards meant to be taken by the smooth hurtling of a wave's movement and to let the rider feel it.

4 It's antiauthority.

When I ride down cement squares of a sidewalk, I feel the heaves from frost in early spring, I feel the up-thrust of stubborn roots. Something there is that doesn't love a sidewalk, that wants it down.

5 Its past is never past. (Time travel's totally real.)

I ride my board down a sidewalk of smooth marble slabs in Manchester Village, Vermont. Marble formed from sediments compressed and lithified on the floor of the Iapetus Sea 575 million years ago. With loose trucks, I crouch low, turn sharp, and reach out my hand, letting bare fingertips feel what was once sand. I am a skater, shredding across the floor of a silent sea.

6 It has road rash.

I have been to LA, the skater's paradise. There is concrete and it is smooth and it is everywhere. Everywhere everywhere. Three billion tons. 250 tons per inhabitant. Dry and cracking, a giant road rash.

7 Private property is bogus.

People always kick you out of everywhere unless you're buying something. I'm from a town that is a ski town in the winter and our main street is lined with shopping outlets and it's illegal to skate on the sidewalk.

But I see milkweed grow in a parking lot. I see raccoons in the trash.

8 Wipeouts can make for good stories.

My board is made of seven thin sheets of maple wood that are coated in glue and stuck together. In my home state of Vermont, maple trees took root when 80 percent of the state's forest was cleared in the nineteenth century. Now maples dominate the landscape. My board is a reminder of this story.

9 The ground is hard.

KahCHUNK. I hit a crack too big to roll through. I am pitched forward. "Contact! Contact!" says Thoreau. "The solid earth! The actual world!" My skin hits asphalt. I am brought back down to a more immediate interaction. Unthinking. Only feeling the raw fact. In a way, this is good.