Up Up, Down Down by Cheston Knapp

Author:Cheston Knapp [Knapp, Cheston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Something’s Gotta Stick

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today?

—Elizabeth Bishop

I.

Orientation. It’s Sunday, June 16, 2013—Father’s Day and the first of Windells’s Summer Session 2. Late afternoon and the sun’s out and the sky’s a kid’s picture of the sky, with great big cotton-ball clouds seemingly glued to a lucid blue. I’m sitting with the other skateboarders along the coping of a drained pool in the Concrete Jungle part of campus, which is tucked in the woods off Highway 26 in Welches, Oregon. My board is in my lap and my helmet’s beside me and I’m wearing my favorite of the new T-shirts I bought for camp. It says RESEARCH across the chest. My legs are dangling beneath me with that pleasant sense of groundlessness I loved as a boy, perched in too-high chairs, and didn’t know I missed. Until recently, I hadn’t realized that it was possible for one’s body to miss something that one’s mind didn’t also miss. That one’s mind wasn’t even actively aware of.

After a brief camp-wide introduction in B.O.B., the Building out Back, a hangar that houses the indoor skate park, the trampolines, and the pit of foam blocks, we were split off from the snowboarders and skiers for our sport-specific briefing. The facts here are simple enough: a month back I signed up to attend Windells’s Adult Skateboard Camp. I paid online—a thousand bucks for the week seemed a steal at the time—and e-mailed over the twenty-page packet of waivers and my insurance information, as well as a physical form my doctor had to fill out. But like so much about my life these days, knowing these facts doesn’t diminish a certain shimmery unreal quality that clings to them, and I almost feel like I need proof that I’m really here. The best I can find is the neon-yellow wristband I’m wearing, its adhesive so strong that it’ll likely depilate my forearm for days to come. This takes me back about an hour, to when I checked in and learned, among other things, that to remove the wristband would bar me from all camp-related activities, including meals and the dodgeball tournament. The wristband is a small yet comforting reminder of where I am, but I’ll take absolutely anything I can get in the way of continuity. Feeling lately’s been that whatever ligatures were used to knit me together have stretched thin, if not snapped entirely.

Because I was going it alone, one of my unstated goals entering the week was to make a friend, a buddy. Best-case scenario, to get a nickname. I’d read about the Adult House’s hot tub and had imagined having a soak and swapping stories with my fellow campers, slightly embellished tales of how we’d slain our local spots growing up, shredded ledges and conquered sets of stairs. I’m perhaps a skosh overeager to make this happen, which must be why I venture, to no one in particular, that we’ve all gathered here to get our “bearings.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.