Will Burns meets his dream-self on four urethane wheels.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that about once a month all of my adult life I have been visited by dreams of it, dreams that consist, as all dreams do, I suppose, of half-feelings, images, powerfully felt physical sensation. These dreams would come uncoupled from any others, without narrative. They were snapshots, shards and fragments from my memory — setting up a new board, riding away from a perfect kickflip, or simply pushing, fast, along the perfect tarmac of the street I lived on as a teenage boy. Skateboarding and being young again, lithe, the tall, rangy self that I once knew so well (ha!). And perhaps, in truth, that’s all it ever was — the recurring dream of youth and young manhood, of lost time.  

I find myself wondering now, is there not some aspect of this in what I have found in my compulsive, repetitive walking here in my home county over the years? Some tang of a long-gone feeling in half-recall — the feeling of a particular kind of freedom that attends those mid-to-late teenage years — carefree and perhaps careless. It’s certainly true that walking these hills and woodlands that I feel an almost eery and regressed safety, a cocooned comfort of feeling hidden or obscured by the canopy of beech leaves, by the trails and footpaths and the miles that I can put between myself and the world’s troubles for a few hours while I’m out there, away from things, unseen. It’s a feeling that always re-routes me back into childhood, into the comfort that I felt then in these woods and in this unimportant little town, sheltered from the grief and horror that adulthood brought so violently and unexpectedly. 

So there it is. And there it has always been, ever since I last stepped on a skateboard aged, I reckon now, about 21 — an aspect of the dream-self. And if I think back now to that moment two years ago, towards the end of summer, I can’t recall with exactitude the line of thinking which brought me to the decision to remove the skateboard — and its relationship to those long-lost versions of ‘me’ — from its dream-state and re-introduce it to my waking, material world, but nonetheless that is what I did. I got a skateboard. Solipsism always carries risk of course, but it never felt so dangerous as it did in that moment.

It must have been twenty years since I had stood on one for any significant period of time. There had probably been a minute or two on a friend’s kid’s boards in a garden here or there, maybe even a drunken push down the street, but owning a board — and going through the rituals of setting one up — seemed to mean something else entirely, it had a deeper resonance, the attachment of ownership, a shift in something — perhaps even a shift in identity. There was a tacit commitment in the act of owning a board, a contract between two parts of myself that I was going to put something, whatever that might be, into this thing. At first I thought maybe I’d go out and have a half an hour roll around a car park somewhere, get frustrated, then melancholy, then bored, and finally laugh the whole thing off. The board would sit in my writing shed, another little totem to one of the many out-moded versions of my own self to go along with the old sports kit, the books by writers I no longer want to read, the guitars that now never come out of their hardcases. And yet that’s not how it went down. I went out that first day, naturally furtive at the prospect of being seen — the large, lumbering old man with the white hair carrying a skateboard up to the empty carpark — stood on the board and pushed off and became — almost in that very first instant — hooked again just like I had been at 14. 

My body and its board slowly start to take on the shapes of their own, shared, history, begin to enact movements that re-position me back into my own recollections, into stories I had forgotten or stopped telling, portions of memory that had at some point stopped being meaningful to me, but which were suddenly potent. I find myself sitting on my board on a grass verge at a spot that I used to skate when I was a teenager. My arms resting on my knees in the same position I now recall so vividly from all those years ago. I recognise that boy, a voice in my head seems to say. I look up into a reddening sky as the sun sets over the hills. The same sky, the same hills, the same carpark, the same struggle with the physics of the body and its material antagonisms with the wooden toy beneath me. I think about how the gestures of art-making are essentially childlike, how all children draw, paint, make poems, stories, songs. And how at a certain point we decide to jettison these aspects of ourselves or to carry them with us — to pursue them into adulthood — whatever that means.  I think of the constant negotiation between our adult world, our mature self, and the substance of our pasts — the cast of a fishing rod, the summer days given up to standing out by the boundary of a cricket pitch, the first notes of a certain song. 

Landscape tones, Lawrence Durrell called them, and mine are the pinkish light at the end of the long days at the height of summer, the deep grey dust that has gathered in the angle where the curb meets the tarmac of the road and that I sweep away each evening, the yellowing grass on the verge, the terracotta of the little brick bank, blood and grit on my hands, the backdrop of those hills that have loomed over all this for all these years — those hills that thread themselves through all these selves that I am and have been, sitting here on my board in the dying light, again and again. Sounds and smells and images come back to me from a well of memory that suddenly feels truly alive, somehow — the noise of the urethane wheels on the ground, how that noise changes with the quality of tarmac, how it rattles and clicks over cracks and seams in the pavement, the sound of the bearings running on the truck axles, the smell of the bearings’ grease, the clean line of the griptape against the top layer of the board’s ply. It sometimes feels like a trick of its own — this conjuring of objects and sounds and visions from a before-time.

No gang though now to come and meet me at some point in the evening — no Stefan, no Nick, no Paul, no Matt, no Tom, no Greg. No Jonny of course. Only me and the board and the hot mid-afternoon concrete of memory, in which I find myself strangely, unexpectedly present again — literally re-living — moving as I once did before, attempts at a kind of grace, across the surface of this little patch of the earth.