Rollerskating as Spiritual Practice (Don't Laugh!)

(Well, okay, you can laugh -- but I'm not kidding...)

I grew up in Santa Monica in the 1970s, when urethane wheels were new on the scene. All those Dogtown Z-Boys were busy carving up the pavement on their skateboards, but my friends and I were rollerskaters -- to school and back, all over the schoolyard every afternoon, up and down the bike path along the beach to Venice when we got older.

When I was eight or nine years old I persuaded my mother to let me spend my life's savings -- $130 -- on a pair of top-of-the-line rollerskates. My father was appalled at this extravagance, but went along, perhaps figuring it would be a learning experience for me to blow my hard-earned money on something foolish.

But those skates turned out to be, dollar for pleasure, the best purchase of my life, hands-down. Not only did I use them all the time, for years -- I often tell people that I put my skates on in 1978 and didn't take them off until 1983 -- but the purchase price included this incredible deal where you could go back to the store and trade up the boot as your feet grew. I did this every nine months or so until I was 17, when they had to special order a pair of size 10 1/2 black lace-ups for me.

I took my rollerskates to college with me, but Swarthmore, PA didn't offer much in the way of skating venues, and I never used them there. I wound up giving them to my friend Peter in Berkeley the summer after freshman year: I'll spare you the long Grateful Dead story that surrounds this incident; suffice it to say that he was on his way back to school in San Diego and said he'd drop my skates off at my parents' house. I'm not sure what happened, but I never heard from Peter again -- and the skates vanished too.

Years went by, and periodically I wondered about the fate of those skates (not to mention my friend Peter -- who, you'll be happy to know, recently surfaced on Facebook... and no, I haven't broached the subject of my skates with him yet). Then during Josie's kindergarten year, I went to my first Orca All School Skating Party. I'll freely admit this annual event might be fairly characterized as Hell on Earth by many people: a cavernous, black-lit room full of pounding music, flashing lights, a peculiar stench (part locker-room, part greasy pizza), and hundreds of wobbly, shrieking children orbiting a disco ball -- and periodically thudding to the floor, individually and/or in writhing piles.

For me it was ecstasy -- a revelation -- a reunion with a lost part of myself. I strapped on the ugly orange-wheeled rental skates and stepped out onto the floor, and fell almost instantly into a sensory-overload-induced trance -- totally focused on the sensations of speed and rhythm, of weaving in and out, coming up behind four giggling girls holding hands, with a windmill-armed fourth-grader closing in on my left and a kindergartner about to face-plant right in front of me, and somehow swerving behind one person, darting in front of another, seeing the open spaces coming before they even happen, finding a way through, and breaking away in a burst of speed on the other side. I know it sounds ridiculous, but skating that day tapped some deep metaphor in me that made the whole thing pretty much a religious experience: Zen meets Tao meets the Quaker maxim "Way will open."

Since then I have taken up skating again in earnest. After a brief, failed experiment with rollerblades, I miraculously came across what I truly believe to be my old skates at the Red Light on Broadway. Josie and I were there in search of a Mary Poppins hat for Halloween, and I saw them on a shelf: 10 1/2 new black boots, old trucks, navy blue wheels -- no way to be sure, but as soon as I put them on I knew. I bought some snazzy purple wheels at the skate shop & started swooping around the schoolyard again while Simon practiced riding his bike. I even tried out for the rollerderby (in a desperate attempt to avoid PTA service) but I wasn't in shape enough to compete with those bad-ass 22-year-olds.

Eventually I started making regular trips to Alki, which on a sunny day has just enough of that beachside bike path feel to evoke my youth without making me too homesick. This kind of open air, straight ahead, solitary skating isn't the same dark pounding tribal swirl that you get in a roller rink, but it induces its own kind of trance and embodies its own metaphors.

The other day I had this thought (while zooming south along Alki Avenue past the volleyball nets on the way to the Statue of Liberty): that skating isn't so much about keeping your weight over your skates, as it is about flinging yourself forward into the space above the spot where your skate is about to be. But by the time your skate gets there, you've already hurled yourself even further ahead.

So you keep moving forward, with your weight always two steps ahead of your footing, and after a while the whole process becomes unconscious, your body seamlessly turning intent into action -- like shifting gears while you drive, or typing while you think. And it seems like eventually you ought to be able to look down the boardwalk and just cast yourself half a mile ahead into the patch of sunny fog at the end of the beach.

It somehow tied in with a Rilke poem I heard once:

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly