Normal Wear for a Rider

I'm thirty-one, and in October I bought a skateboard. I bought it direct from the brand's website, because the page said the deck was strong and the shipping was free.

The first evening I took it to the parking lot behind the garden center on Route 9. After six it's empty and flat and nobody can see you. I put one foot on the board. The board went east and I went west. I did that eleven times.

The second evening I got about ten feet, arms out, hands like a man carrying two full cups of coffee. Ten feet. Then the front wheel hit a stone and I sat down hard on the wet ground.

The third evening the deck broke. It didn't break in two. There was a long crack under my left foot, and after that the board sounded wrong, like a door in an old house.

So I made a claim. The brand has a form on the website: date, photo, what happened. Somebody from the company wrote back two days later. They weren't going to replace it. Cracks like this one, she said, come from landing hard again and again. It was normal wear for a rider.

A rider. A week before that I couldn't stand on the thing for four seconds.

I bought a better deck the same night, a wider one, from a shop in town this time. I still fall. I just fall a lot further down the parking lot now.