The Beach
(alternate title: Heavy Mental Parking Lot)
“Two hundred years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential, but it was the minds of 11-year-olds that could see that potential.” -Craig Stecyk, 1975- from Skateboarder magazine
In one memorable mid-eighties summer, a convergence of events considerably re-routed the direction of my life :
I numerically and biologically became a teenager, and among the many inconveniences this transition facilitated, none brought it home more than no longer being legally eligible to select from the “12 and under” menu at Shoney’s Big Boy Restaurant
I had a “spiritual experience” at my Baptist church’s youth camp and was professed by my community to now be “born again”, which was a construct imposed on me by the church but nevertheless referenced a true and authentic shift in me toward openness and curiosity about the divine unseen, which would require more alone time to process and explore
My parents blindsided me with the disclosure that they were getting a divorce and I took it…well…badly
I watched U2 play the Live Aid Concert on TV and saw something of my emerging self reflected in the unflinching earnestness of the fiercely mulleted Bono
I got my first legitimate skateboard
Any one of these alone might have been enough to adequately explain the tone shift that ensued, but the convergence of them all at once was seismic. The divorce in particular really rocked my world, surprising me, and fermenting my workaday male adolescent brooding into a refined state that years later, people would popularly refer to as “Emo”, though my personal favorite term for the hard, sullen introversion I adopted is “Navel-gazing”. By the fall, I had leaned into this darkness and started eighth grade at a new middle school with little energy for assimilating with my peers, but surging with the drive to differentiate from them.
Once the school bus dropped me off at my neighborhood stop, I felt like I could finally breathe. Seeking freedom from constraints societally and personally imposed, I was then driven outdoors by an instinctive escapism, an impulse to explore and find some place of my own, where the heavy feelings I was carrying were free to be, and where I owed it to no one to be anything but unapologetically, unwaveringly depressed.
For reasons I’m only now starting to understand from this aged gray beyond, I gravitated to the unlikely serenity of the half-empty strip-mall parking lot at the far edge of my neighborhood. With few non-privately-owned natural spaces accessible in residential suburbia, this parking lot was where the free space was. I would say that this exploration took place while I was alone, though in a way, Bono, Morrissey, and a smattering of their mopey musical contemporaries of the day, via belt-clipped and pavement-scuffed Sony Walkman AM/FM Cassette Player, accompanied me too.
And of course, there was my skateboard, which, while not a living organism, was essentially a deputized imaginary friend, and this friend’s native habitat was the parking lot. The more deserted the lot was, the better I liked it. I was anonymous and I was free, which was a relief from my day job of being one of only a handful of skaters in a public middle school at a time when wearing Vans opened you to unwanted questions such as what the hell are those shoes and why is there duct tape on the side like that and why are you like this in general?
This paved, blacktopped Eden had begun as raw materials poured to harden and facilitate the great promise of automobile-accessible commerce: the once-ubiquitous Strip Mall. But when the stores they accompanied underperformed, the lots where cars now weren’t were then left to grow wild and feral. So I found this fitting, as I too was following the same adolescent instinct for rewilding: I yearned to devolve. I could skate and create there, unbothered, escaping into the play of my kinetic imagination.
I’d experiment with any noticeable recess or protrusion in the asphalt, using it as a launching ramp to get momentarily airborne, a thrilling feeling. Every crack or flaw in the pavement invited a new way to use it. I’d pretend the block curb was the lip of a wave, or the edge of a pool or ramp in sun-drenched California, where I saw the pros surfing and skating in the magazines, instead of gray, overcast pre-millennial North Carolina, where tobacco was sustenance and NASCAR was king and everywhere smelled like hot dogs. After a couple hours of shredding, I’d inevitably fatigue, so I’d find the best part of the curb for sitting- a deliberate (and, frankly, performative) type of sitting in which one commits to a concentrated display of esoteric defiance. Sitting With Attitude.
Ironically, a by-product of this practice was that I came to learn which direction faced the sun’s movement across the sky toward its colorful descent, a light show that felt, from the uninhabited lot, like a play performed just for me. My ‘tude was involuntarily softened, my seething was soothed, my discomfort comforted. The sky cared nothing for my scowl, my resentment, my loneliness and hurt, and seemed to say, “Fine, bro, but this too is happening”. It was my first lesson in “Yes, AND”, the first time I was aware that sadness and anger and beauty could make strange and fitting bedfellows. Entranced in this experience and the Cure cassette soundtrack usually in rotation at sunset hour, I came to know a new feeling called happysad.
The discarded asphalt beach, an eyesore to most, became my refuge. I wasn’t bothered one bit about a peer or schoolmate seeing me there, alone in a parking lot, or whether or not they or their parents might deem that a respectable place to situate oneself on purpose, for skateboarding or otherwise. If, on the next day at school, anyone told me they saw me from the passenger's seat of their mom’s Ford Tempo while leaving K-Mart after shopping for knock-off Air Jordans, I’d give them a look of resignation and sigh “Well, that’s my beach”.
As middle school yielded to high school and beyond, as I aged out of adolescent expectations and toward adult responsibilities, I did start to care that someone might spot me hanging out in a parking lot by myself, which might arouse suspicions of nefarious intent, so I stopped doing it as much. By then there were designated skateboarding parks where one was supposed to go to skate and I’d internalized some pressure to “behave as an adult”. By my 30’s, I’d been domesticated, a housecat, and I left the lot-life almost entirely, in both practice and mindset.
But lo and behold!..in my 40’s, the COVID-19 pandemic caught me and the lot of us by surprise, and the whole gosh-dern human race experienced a collective form of arrested development. Indoor living became a mandatory safety parameter, and much of the external world that had been accessible was no longer accessible. I tried to adapt, like everyone, and eventually, I came to the conclusion (like everyone) that there was only so much indoor living I could do without losing my ever-lovin’ marbles. My wife and I were living next to a high-traffic thoroughfare that made sidewalk-walking noisy, dangerous and undesirable. So the parking lots, in the faintly-audible bellow of ancestral lands, called to me again. The quarantine rekindled our connection, and so, I went back to the beach.
I found a place off the Blue Ridge Parkway that served as a parking area for a popular trailhead. Ironically, because the trail was so crowded and narrow, you couldn’t effectively social-distance at the recommended six feet apart. But nobody was in the parking lot, so I hung out there. I laughed that it made for a poetic kind of joke, like I was a cat who had been given a new toy and all I wanted to play with was the package it came in.
At the time, I journaled: “ When you spend enough time somewhere, you get to know it. It’s a relationship. Like you and that place communicate. In quarantine, this experience has been heightened. I know the square cubic space of our house in a whole different way. When I need air, I now have a place I go to walk or journal or skate or move around. It’s just a parking lot, nothing special. But it’s my place. I remember this feeling from adolescence. I only had access to a few places then, so I created a life there, in my own private way. There are so many things I absolutely hate about this devastating period of history, but this is a feeling that I’m really, really grateful for.”
These days, having crested Mount Fifty, I find myself, as explained in my last essay, luxuriating in the surprise mid-life deliverance of having roughly zero interest in the judgements of others, so I’ve reclaimed and re-habituated this experience, and I feel compelled to inform you that it is THE BEST. Except now, the forces of aging and the associated lumbar disc-degeneration have necessitated that it’s in sensible, cushy walking shoes. Make no mistake- My skateboard is still at the ready- dusty but not rusty, though these creaky knees and achy, stiff hips have relegated it to a garaged 9 by 33-inch Cadillac, taken for occasional Sunday drives only.
These days, I walk the perimeter of the looped parking lot and the paved tributaries of our apartment complex, as if it were something I designed and had built it for this. I walk clockwise, on the left side against any traffic, usually, so as to be visible and swerved around by incoming drivers. I also walk this direction because, at a certain hour, I discovered that the sun sets over the row of distant mountains, best viewed when coming from that direction.
I have come to know the sections of pavement where there is slight incline and decline, and where there is flat, so that I might adjust my stride in accordance with the guidance from my physical therapist to minimize lower back strain. I know where the shade will be in the morning and in the afternoon, where the sun will be warmest, I know which cars to look out for because certain youthfully invincible neighbors drive too fast when they run home from work on their lunch break to walk their dogs and vape or whatever. Located in a high part of town, almost above the treeline, this parking lot sits under broad, plentiful sky, so there’s space for my stress-based thoughts or intense emotions to dissipate into and be floated away. I walk with a revived form of that once esoteric defiance, I walk with ATTITUDE. I probably look quite silly and I could not give fewer shits.
Since Morrissey is apparently a fascist now, podcasts and audiobooks are now part of the headphone rotation along with music, and mental landmarks are formed by association. This part where the manhole cover sticks up crookedly reminds me of Lucinda Williams’ memoir where she’s talking wistfully about her relationship with her cool, poet dad. This sidewalk crack reminds me of the part in Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible where they find out their kid sister has been cheeking all her malaria pills. This curb cut is where I stopped to watch the sun go down while listening to Fleet Foxes and it synced up like frickin’ magic. Sometimes it’s even the soundtrack from the strip-mall days which both puts me right back in that frame of mind and somehow also illuminates how far I’ve come.
I go to the space of parking lots because they are available to me- that is to say that I can walk out of my door and be in one in seconds or minutes. Would I rather be in the woods or a trail or natural space? Well, yeah, duh… but there’s something delightfully deviant about the effortlessness and resourcefulness of planting a flag in a land that nobody wants. I don’t have to have special trail shoes or gear, or snacks or a fanny pack (although I sometimes choose to because, y’know…fashion). There’s a wilderness at the heart of these paved spaces too- a still invitation to see what it is like to be here and be me in this space. The acceptance of what is here and available that navel-gazing skateboarding taught me inducted me into a whole different way of seeing, an alternative relationship with the world around me. I learned to see and find value in the contours, the edges, the pathways and especially the obstacles of the external constructed world.
What I’m realizing in mid-life is how, instinctively, this way of seeing is showing up to help me through this confusing season of life, its challenging inner terrain, the contours, the edges, the pathways and obstacles within me. I can now observe my mind automatically wanting to classify challenging feelings and experiences as unwanted, unusable, unworkable. And then, a pause descends, and I hear “Well…maybe there’s something here”, as a hard-earned adaptive willingness helps me surf yet another wave, and another sun sets inside me saying, “And this too is happening”. From the beach, I breathe yet another breath, still rewilding, still devolving, the divine still curious and unseen.