Jonny, Skate Life
For all you Americans: a motorway is an interstate. 100 kilometers per hour is about 62 miles per hour. 60 kilometers is about 37 miles per hour. 350 kilometers is about 217 miles.
After a week of being in Auckland I am constricted and bored. I miss the freedom of the open road and the majesty of the outdoors so on Wednesday morning I take the motorway over the harbor bridge, around the North Shore and all the way until the motorway turns into state highway. I see a skinny Asian man carrying a pack on his back holding a skateboard with his thumb out hitching for a ride outside of Wenderholm Park north of Orewa. As with Claire and Gus, I initially pass him but a sudden well what the hell makes me turn back and pick him up.
“Where ya headed?” I ask him.
“Uh, just that way,” he responds, pointing north. “What about you?”
“Also just that way,” I reply. “I’m actually living in this car and I’m just wandering around the Northland peninsula for the next little while.”
We laugh over the coincidence and excitement of meeting a fellow traveler. We decide to go to a beach and begin to chat on our way to Mahurangi.
Jonny is an American traveling the length of New Zealand from Bluff to Cape Reinga by skateboard to raise money to buy his birth mother in Vietnam a house and to fight human trafficking in his community in Vietnam. The goal originally, he tells me, was just $25,000 to buy his mother a house but so many people have donated that with the excess he’s also able to provide food and education to the kids in his village for a year.
We talk about adoption and Jonny tells me
“People think they wanna stand out but when it’s all the time it sucks. You constantly feel like the odd one out, the weird one.”
I think of my cousin Emily who was adopted from China and I ask him if he has any advice for her in navigating adoption and her identity.
“Find your community,” he says. It’s good advice and not just for people who have been adopted. Belonging to a community makes life easier and more fun for anyone.
Jonny seems to be missing the fear component in his brain: he skates at speeds of up to 60 kilometers per hour down hills with traffic coming both directions at 100 kilometers per hour. To be able to control his speed he needs to carve his way back and forth across the entire lane. He says it’s hard to trust that he’s traveling fast enough to be in the flow of traffic; to trust that cars behind him won’t hit him.
“I think I might be an adrenaline junkie,” he says. No shit.
He tells me about skating down the Remutakas north of Wellington and how the rubber soles on his shoes turned liquidy from the heat of the friction of using his foot to brake. He tells me about a “ghost car” method that he uses to help keep himself safe. I don’t completely understand it but it’s how he decides whether to bail from the skateboard or not when going around a curve where he might get hit by a car. He plans meticulously, checking the seal and altitude of every road to make sure he can skate over it safely. Skating on the motorway is not allowed so he had to take the ferry north to get through Auckland. When I pick him up, he’s only about 350 kilometers from his goal and he feels invincible. He’s had people try to run him off the road and he’s been picked up by gangs and stopped by police. None of this has stopped him. Nothing can stop him.
I give Jonny a hitch to his friend Jake’s house in Warkworth and since I’ve no place in particular to be, spend the day with them. We borrow some skateboards from one of Jake’s friends with a plan to hit the skate park after going to the beach. Jake is tricking out his (much more sizable than mine) car to be able to live in it and Jonny has to lie down in the backseat on our drive to Tawharanui. Tawharanui is one of the most beautiful beaches in New Zealand and we spend the day peering in tide pools and clambering over the rocks. After so many interactions with men being negative, I am absolutely refreshed that Jonny and Jake are just normal dudes and wholesome ones at that. We stand in a circle for a language exchange: I teach them the small bits of te reo that I know, Jonny teaches us some Chinese characters and Jake teaches us some Portuguese.
They take me to the skate park at Snells Beach and teach me where to place my feet on the board before setting me loose. While they practice their ollies and tricks, I tackle balancing on the board. Fairly quickly, I’m skating wide circles around the park and I try the half pipe after seeing Jonny do a cool trick. Even bracing myself for the change in momentum at the top (like a pendulum, I think), I’m taken off guard by it and fall on my ass. I try it over and over at low speed trying to get the foot and eye coordination right. I skate down a hill, what’s known as hill bombing. It looks much slower on video than it feels in real life. Towards the bottom of the hill the skateboard starts to shake under me and I bail. Jake and Jonny tell me I must have good balance to be able to hill bomb and go on the half pipe on my first try on a skateboard. I can’t tell if they’re just gassing me up but it doesn’t matter. It’s fun, an adrenaline rush of balance and speed.
Jake lives with his mother Emma and we have a drink at the local tavern with her before she fixes us the first home cooked meal I’ve had since my farmstay with Brian and Rosalie Hutton in Balclutha. Emma is cool, the kind of mom I want to be. She never saw the logic in splitting toys by gender and would let her sons play with dolls in the 90s. Her bathroom walls are white and there are pencils and markers for people to leave notes and artwork. I stay the night in her guest bedroom and in the morning, see Jake and Jonny off on their skate to Wellsford, the next town up. I head to Te Arai beach and then to Mangawhai where I stay the night. The next day, Jonny says he’s going to be in Mangawhai so I meet up with him again after spending the morning and early afternoon climbing around the cliffs at Mangawhai Heads.
It turns out that Jonny isn’t the only one crazy enough to travel the country by skateboard. There’s a whole community of people who do things like this. We hang out with a longboarder named Dan in Mangawhai who shows us a video of him skating with some other members of the skate community down the ski mountain near Mt Ruapehu (also known as Mordor from the Lord of the Rings films). They are absolutely zooming down the mountain at 100 kilometers an hour and none of them are wearing protective gear which I think is insane. It looks cool and I’m sure that the adrenaline rush from it is like no other but I’m just not sure if the risk-to-reward calculates in favor of me taking up this hobby. One mistake at that speed and it’s goodbye to having skin. It’s a very eco-friendly way to travel, though, and I wish that there were paths dedicated specifically to this. It makes me angry and sad that I could never travel the way Jonny is traveling even if I wanted to—I have enough trouble with men when traveling by car. How long would I last while defenseless on a skateboard before never being seen again? I’ve been a woman my whole life, you’d think I’d be accustomed to certain experiences and parts of the world being unavailable to me but I get a hot flash of anger with every new thing I realize I can’t have.
I know that Jonny is smart right away but when he tells me that he received scholarships to St. Olaf’s in Minnesota, I know we must’ve run the same rat race of ACT/PSAT/AP high-achiever stress. I ask him how he feels about the achievement culture now that he’s way from it but he says he doesn’t have an opinion. I wonder if that’s true, though, because he left university after two years. He didn’t see his purpose there and was frustrated by the socioeconomic dynamics. He’s got things set up perfectly now, he says. He gets to skate all day and do some good in the world. I have a feeling that more than the class dynamics or the issues of access to education, it’s the structure that Jonny resents: be at this place at this time, take these classes in this order, complete these assignments by this date. He says that days pass on the road where he doesn’t speak to anyone and enjoys living entirely in his own head. I know and revel in this solitary independence too and chafe at restrictions. It’s fitting, then, that this is the thing that made me leave Auckland and how I ended up meeting Jonny. I think that independence is also maybe what makes skating so addictive for him—sure, the adrenaline rush is great but the sync between body and mind to be able to control the board is the true power. It’s a focus state that takes away all else.
It’s always cool to meet another American while abroad, fellow transplants from the homeland. It’s cool to meet someone I relate to and fall into friendship easily with. It’s cool to be shown a new hobby, a subculture of people mastering skills and having fun with each other. I love many things about New Zealand, one of them being that it’s safe enough to pick up hitchhikers and meet people I might not normally meet. I hope Jonny makes it to Cape Reinga and that he keeps skating as long as he loves it, which I suspect might be forever.
For all you car drivers, please help keep Jonny and his friends safe by going a little slower around curves and not cutting corners.
Skate life, bro!
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