Skating Through Mid-Life: Michael Valliant

Skating Through Mid-Life, Maryland and Beyond

by Michael Valliant

Warning: skateboarding may help prevent a proper mid-life crisis. Or, at least that’s been what some of us have experienced. At a time when there have been more reasons to be in front of screens, isolated and putting on COVID-19 weight, skateboarding offers a different way of being, connecting to a kind of Zen moment, or childlike wonder, outside.

A mid-life crisis can go something like this: after high school or college, you get a job, buy a car, buy a house; maybe you marry, maybe you start a family; debt builds, you experience loss or uncertainty, lose touch with what your dreams were; put on weight, feel out of shape, feel stuck in whatever you are doing, feel old, or like it’s too late to change or do something different, wonder what happened to the life you pictured long ago. And you freeze, existentially speaking. The answer, for some people, is to do something drastic, impulsive, illadvised, breaking with this strange life they seemed to have stumbled into. In the words of Talking Heads

singer David Byrne, “My God, what have I done?”

Yikes! Can skateboarding fix that? No. Let’s put that out there up front. What skateboarding can do is put us in touch with another way of feeling. It can connect us with childhood. It can get us moving. It can shift our mindset. It can provide escape, even if just for a moment. And maybe, that kind of connection, that kind of escape, that kind of fun, finding a place in our lives, can help keep us from reaching that existential breaking point.

I got my first skateboard when I was 12, the summer before going into eighth grade. It was a Sims “Flagship” that came from Sunshine House in Ocean City and was painted to look like the British flag. It made me think of the album cover

for The Who’s Greatest Hits. It was the gateway event that impacted my teenage years more than anything else. I went through many boards over the next six years, and skating shaped how I looked at the world. I never stopped following the sport through my 20s or 30s, though I had stopped riding. Then I bought a board when I turned 35, missing the feeling of skating. It took some tweaking over the next decade to find longboarding, long distance skateboarding and surf skating ~ a board set up that gives you the feeling of surfing on land. But skateboarding has reclaimed a space as one of my favorite things to do.

And, as happens with any activ-

19 Goldsborough St. · 443.746.3095 www.curlicuethestore.com ity or hobby, a small group of skaters began to emerge. They weren’t the no-rules, punk rock rebels of my youth; they were a pediatrician, marine biologists, a university administrator, a contractor supply store manager, a carpenter, a physician’s assistant, an art teacher. And they were all fathers, managing jobs, family, kids’ activities.

And that’s where something therapeutic begins to make its way into skateboarding: people connecting, laughing, dreaming, getting to know each other; people talking about life, the parts that matter. In cruising together at the Oxford Conservation Park, or the new trail at the end of Glenwood Avenue in Easton, or Kent Island’s

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Skating a sunrise, birds and birding photographers, you start to build experiences together. Something you do to pass the time begins to shape how time passes. Scenic skateboard cruising is not at all limited to the Mid-Shore. Landy Cook has made a two-night skatepacking (skateboard back-

Cross Island or South Island trails, or skating the paved loop at Blackwater Wildlife Refuge and catching

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Remember Mom with a Gift Certificate 410-822-6555 Main Salon: 413 Needwood Ave., Easton packing) trip of the Western MaryShapers Studio: 6 West St., Easton land Rail Trail in Hanover, Md., going out and back on the 28-mile www.shapershairsalon.com trail for a 56-mile two-day total. He

recently completed a single-day 30mile out-and-back skate of the C&D Canal, Ben Cardin and Michael Castle trails in and around Delaware City, complete with stops for lunch and sightseeing.

And so, a crew of would-be adventurers who have always sought dirt trails for hiking and trail-running now routinely looks for and scouts paved bicycle trails that would be suited for skateboarding.

A scientist who joined us for a morning skate this spring had recently purchased a new longboard. He hadn’t skated since he was a kid. He and his wife are both scientists who have been working from home during the pandemic, and they have a young son. When I asked him what made him buy a skateboard, he said, “I am tired of sitting, and sweating,

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in front of a screen.” Treadmills and Pelotons may be convenient, but they are more like a hamster wheel than moving outside.”

Skateboards are cheaper than Corvettes. Maybe spending a couple/few hundred dollars on a skateboard and a helmet and finding a way to stoke the dreams and wonder that have started to dwindle inside you as a preventive measure could stave off a bigger reckoning down the road?

This is not a universal truth or a guarantee. Not everyone will enjoy or look forward to skateboarding. But what it is and represents is looking at things differently. It gives us a chance to get moving, to be outside, to feel the pavement move under us in a novel way.

Adam Grant, an early-40s father of three, has fitted one of his skateboards with a scooter handle and steering bar for his young sons, who like to join him skating, or scoot/skate their way around the deck and garage. Adam is more frequently a kiteboarder than a skateboarder, finding chances to hit the water from Bellevue or Claiborne when the wind is up, and he and a longtime group of friends make a kiteboarding trip to the Outer Banks every spring that isn’t decimated by a pandemic. The videos they make of their North Carolina boarding trips reflect something of what many of us are looking for in skateboarding and life: adventure, camaraderie, fellowship and fun.

I don’t have life figured out, or mid-life, for that matter. But there is something that happens when skateboarding, up early in the morning with the sunrise, smiling, laughing, talking about anything or nothing, the sound and feel of wheels surfing on pavement, where I know that those moments are good moments. And it helps me see other moments in a new way.

Michael Valliant is the Assistant for Adult Education and Newcomers Ministry at Christ Church Easton. He has worked for non-profi t organizations throughout Talbot County, including the Oxford Community Center, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and Academy Art Museum.