Feeling The Heat In Sedona, AZ
I seem to only travel to Sedona when I’m unemployed. Whether COVID or budget cuts, I will assuredly kick rocks until they turn red. So driving through the vacant blackness of the nocturnal desert did not bring me excitement, but a sense of abandonment and dread. Staring into the night, watching bugs and various beasts cross the headlights in front of me, I wished life had a GPS to navigate me toward better days.
Looking for jobs, especially when you don’t have one, can be grueling to say the least. A torturous situation filled with constant rejections that can make you feel as if you’re on your tenth slam, tired and defeated. But skateboarding prepared me for times like these.
There’s been plenty said about the great education that comes from skating’s “trial and error” ways. Comedy royalty Jerry Seinfeld even commented about the community’s tenacity in his show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. But leading up to the achievement, there is an intense struggle with skaters dealing with the “error” part of these repetitive trials. We’ve all seen the few screaming, tossing, focusing, and even punching boards. All this can be viewed as important to achieve the trick.
It's this mindset that forced me to head out to Jack Malmgren Skate Park when I finally arrived in Sedona. An interesting section of concrete, poured to perfectly capture the gorgeous red mountain and strips of green running around the rocks. The park itself had a massive bowl bordered by various ledges, benches, ramps and roll ins. Everything was elevated even further due to the intense heat striking down. Now, most parks tend to have little to no shade. But Sedona was a different beast entirely. The phrase “hot as hell” seemed too cool for this session. I prayed for a single cloud to make moves between me and the sunrays, if only for a moment. Pressing on into the Hades landscape, I ripped around, as if I was trying to outrun the unread rejection letters that built up in my inbox.
We tend to forget what physical activity can do for us. It provides not an escape, but a platform to bleed out every bit of bad emotion, especially skateboarding. It tells us that if you’re mad, be mad. You want to fight? Fight yourself. Work through the struggle as loudly as you want, but remember to always keep the aim true. The slightest misdirection can turn things from bad to worse.
Finally feeling the weight of the temperature, I dragged my drenched self to the black fencing at back of the park to catch my breath. Looking out beyond the empty ramps and rails, I gazed out at the mountain tops piercing the endless open sky that hung above me, putting it all into perspective.
