injury

If you skateboard, then you get used to scrapes and bruises.  You can’t expect to dance around on a plank of wood screwed onto roller skate wheels and not fall down.  Add a few ramps and rails into the equation, and you do the math.  Helmets are mandatory.  Pads are wise.

Today, Logan broke his arm.  At skate camp.  He skated off one box and did a 180 onto another, landing fakie.  The next thing he remembers is scampering in panic to the camp office dangling his arm shaped like the letter S.  They iced it, called me, and drove him to the hospital.  It turns out he snapped both bones in his left forearm pretty hard.  A red cast now runs from his knuckles to his bicep.

If this were a skateboarding propaganda blog, I would post his X-rays above a video of Logan, smiling and riding the half-pipe with his arm in a sling.  (Drama this acute offers a big chance for heroism in the spin.)  But there is no glory in this injury.  He doesn’t want to talk about it, or hear my “when I was a kid” broken arm story.  He’s pale and distant.  His voice falters, and I can tell that he is wishing the situation were erased and everything was all right again.  It’s rough to learn at age eleven that bones break and deeds cannot be undone by regret.  What looks so easy and glamorous on YouTube can actually put you in the hospital.

I asked him if he’s ready to quit skateboarding, expecting a response with more conviction.  He hesitated and then allowed, tentatively, “just until my arm heals.”