Flying Skateboard Crash

Last Thursday I was skateboarding on the Presidio (Army base) in San Francisco, and inadvertently got into a faster-than-is-safe-for-me situation. Accelerating, gaining speed, not able to carve back and forth enough to slow down. When it gets past the point when I can no longer bail and stay on my feet, I’m in trouble. In my mind for months has been Cliff Coleman’s mantra regarding a skateboard crash:

Just remember 4 words:

Get

On

Your

Hands,

which assumes you are wearing gloves with hard-disc palm pads, and that once you’re sliding on pavement, get on your belly (or knees) and let the pads take the friction.

As I got down to the end of the blocked-off block, with a lot of cars to pile into, going maybe 25mph, I headed for a grass bank, jumped off my board just before it hit the curb, and did a skimming front-first dive onto the grass. Just lay there taking stock of body parts. Pain in right shoulder, but not bad. I just lay there in the sun, glad to be alive and unbroken. No one had seen me.

Something I learned from competitive diving in high school: go right back and do the dive again if you blow it, especially there’s pain involved. So I took my board back up and started from a more reasonable spot, and had a nice multi-turning in-control downhill run.

It was a great day. On the way home I went for a run on the mountain, and went down a canyon to a creek where there are pools with waterfalls, ducked into one, revitalized by the spirit of Mount Tamalpais.

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

One Response to Flying Skateboard Crash

  1. Take it easy Lloyd, we'd hate to lose you at such a young age!
    Thanks for the blogs ,I always like to check up on you every now and then, you're an inspiration to a lot of people.From one Lloyd to another, all the best.
    Lloyd Crawford

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