Click images for caption and to enlarg

Click to close Image by: B. Z. Kondracki

We walk up the little-used pavement, rough with patch-jobs, rumpled with age and frost heaves. The air has that gentle bite of early autumn night in the high-country, and the blacklight moonglow repaints the meadows and bluffs and aspen with a cool, dream-like depth. The only movement are the ghosts of elk crossing a luminous road-side meadow, trailed by the sound of bugling that peaks in otherworldly squeaks and squeals.

After an hour, we cut off the road and climb into the woods. We jump fences and move through the shadows, skirting lit windows in one of those new mountain subdivisions popping up like zits on the faces of so many foothills these days, until we break out onto the broad roadcut of the main highway.

Here we stop, taking a shared moment to take this in: this piercing Cyclops eye of the moon, this after-glow-like look of the cliffs above us on one side, and this dark maw of shadowed valley on the other. I strap on my knee and elbow pads. Then we zip our jackets and buckle our helmets. It is time to roll.

All this started with just a brief, innocuous e-mail - as so many interesting things do these days, eh? "Anyone interested in skateboarding tonight or tomorrow? Harvest moon."

Hmm. Interesting.

See, I've got some history here. A year or so ago I published an article in this magazine ["Old and Going Downhill Fast," Oct./Nov. 2006 ] rendering my experiences and reflections endeavoring to learn to ride a big-wheeled, 3-foot long, maple and birchwood skateboard. My drive and objective was to learn to turn well enough to join some of my zanier friends as they make their annual pilgrimage to ride their boards down a long high-country highway in the moonlight. This venture is generally carried out in the fall, when the nights are cool, the roads dry, and the traffic light.

I finished the article, but I never made the Big Run. As my deadline approached, last year's monsoons lingered late and kept the mountain roads wet and slushy. So for the big field experiment described in the article, we made a challenging but much more tame excursion through the foothill neighborhoods above Durango.

The fact remained, though: I had stated in print my intention to one day - or, one very late night, actually - carve and turn, and hopefully not burn, my way down one of those fall mountain roads. And here was my chance to fulfill this documented yet unresolved resolution. I had to do this.

"Right. Uh huh. Yeah, okay. I'm in. Sure," I replied. Or something like that. Fortunately, in cyberspace no one can hear you scream.

And that was that. Committed.

Or ought to be, I'm thinking now, standing in the middle this wide highway - blessedly so, thanks to my friends, who were kindly thinking of me when they chose this well-shouldered, newly resurfaced, three-lane stretch of road for tonight's foray - watching my companions swerve and swing in smooth, meandering lines down the face of the roadway until they dissolve into the general vagueness of the night, leaving behind only the soft sound of polyethylene on pavement. The road spilling away before me, I know, does not flatten for miles.

I drop my board, set one foot on the deck, take one last deep breath, and push off, following my friends' wakes into the cool, deep, water-like night.

It's more than just having written an article, of course, that got me into this. And it's not really because I made a vow - even if that excuse helped me compel myself into accepting the invitation to do this. Yet again. And it's not even because I want to do this, because I'm not so sure "want" is the quite the right word to describe this loopy cocktail of emotions I feel as I sink ever deeper into this surreal spectral world with each hard carve, with each increase in speed.

I know: It's because I need this. And my need for this is a psychological, physical, tangible, clinical addiction.

I don't mean this in particular - this skateboarding down this big empty highway in this moonlight, or this criss-crossing painted lines I usually sail over at 60-plus miles an hour, or this alternating grimacing and grinning as I grind through dozens-upon-dozens of linked sweeping turns. This just happens to be a particularly outlandish "this."

I mean "this" as in . . . thisness.

I mean this as in my seeming need to suck the thisness out of whatever this is right then, because some this is always right there. Anywhere. Any this.

Still, it seems my kind of need sometimes requires I stalk deeper and richer thises.

Like this this, for example: In the distance a roadside outcropping suddenly bursts into view in a beam of light. Seconds later, headlights appear around a bend in the road some distance away, and I catch the fleeting shadows of my downslope companions veering toward the ditch. I crouch, body-english my board toward the roadside and ride until my wheels hit dirt, then eject from the board and land, running low, until I drop and roll to the ground. Seconds later, the car hisses by in a bubble of light.

I jump up, gather up my board, and walk back out onto the empty road, the car's taillights running away up the mountain, the silence flowing back into the hole in the night.

Particularly outlandish? No this "this" is truly whacked, I'm thinking, grinning to no one. To this.

And I'm thinking, How did I get into this? Again?

And standing there, awash in the dim light of night on this dark mountain, it becomes bright and clear: I'm doing this not because of vow, job, assignment, or duty, but because this is what I crave, and so this is what I do.

I do this.

I do this.

Just this.

Ever more this.

Ken Wright does this and that to get by. He is the author of A Wilder Life: Essays from Home and Why I'm Against It All (Raven's Eye Press). You can email him at monkeywrenchdad@gmail.com.