Skateable Hills

I bet I recognize some of those skateboarders, says my thirty-year-old son, whose Instagram followers see him fly over the hood of a pickup truck, land on his shoulder, then do it again and land all four wheels. We sit with his dad, at Illegal Pete’s on Colfax, warm smothered burritos and Baja tacos in front of us. My oldest child is well today, clear-eyed, and hungry for life.

Above the bar, a TV broadcasts skateboard after skateboard zooming down the hilly streets of San Francisco. They move at impossible speeds and accomplish death-defying tricks–leaping trash cans in narrow alleys, defying gravity on vertical “wall rides” before continuing down a handrail to a smooth landing. One young man scutters his board down a steep, block-long set of three-inch concrete steps. His white shoes vibrate, and his ankles shake all the way down.

I turn away from the flashing colors and lights of the video, worrying, as I often do, about injuries, about the devastation a blow to the head can wreak. I can’t watch scary movies, and that damn video of my son, helmetless, jumping the pickup truck, turns my ribs to ice.

When he was fourteen–already an avid skateboarder–none of us understood the bipolarity fueling his adolescent “behavior problems,” his inability to get up in the morning, his impulsive bursts of spring rebellion. Diagnosed at eighteen, much of the following decade of his life was consumed by paralyzing depressions quickly followed by brief, destructive manias. Only seven years ago, his atypical brain produced one of those spiking electrical storms that can kill. That almost did kill.

All the twists and turns, the jumps and falls in his pursuit of a livable life, a life out of reach for too many people. Today, we pay for our lunch from a full checking account; we wear the skin of privilege, easily forgetting how many ways the world is built to keep people like us comfortable. And here is this young man, so capable, so confident. Able today, able this year, able to do and be so much. 

Jesus, these guys are flying! he says now, as I, too am pulled back into the video.

His dad asks, How are they not getting hit by cars? A moment later, a skater does gets hit by a car, and the three of us flinch in unison. The camera zooms to the injured young man’s face. He sits on a curb, holding a bleeding hand, his face blank with pain.

I look away from the next cascade of young men twisting, jumping, flying.

My charismatic, athletic son passes for a person without disability. He teaches skateboarding to kids in schools, and he teaches behavior skills to young people on the autism spectrum. Nine months into his longest stretch of stable mood since he became a teenager, he can work three six-hour shifts per week, plus teach a few skate lessons. He needs hours of down time every day to play video games or read or nap. He walks over from the carriage house apartment where he lives to our big family kitchen that I compulsively stock with greens and walnuts, with organic kombucha and ripening avocados. He goes to meetings. He goes to therapy. He takes three psych meds–seven pills a day–to keep his mood on reasonably level ground. To keep him alive.

As we gather our lunch refuse, one more run pulls our attention back to the TV. At the bottom of a hill, after an especially fast and skilled descent, a group of skateboarders hug and fist bump, eyes shining.

It’s the love. My son says this about the sport that helped save his life. It’s all about the love.