Track Change
It was sometime after moving twenty-five-hundred miles across the great open spans of America that I finally started doing things for the sake of the doing part. Before that, I must have just been “going through the motions,” as they say.
I’d gone through the motions my whole life. Always doing the thing for the future reward. The future reward that I’ve always believed would surely come. The future reward that I’d come to believe I was due. I was owed. But that’s not how any of this works. Nothing is charted and once you get enough good-boy points you level up and get that thing you want. That thing you’re owed. Maybe it’s just the video games and goal setting I learned in high school football that’s tainted my mind with the idea of deserving. I’ve kept score for as long as I can remember, expecting my karma to accumulate and all at once I’ll slip out on top and find the exact thing I want. I’ll finally be at the place where happiness and achievement hang out. I’ll sit on their couch in their star-spangled room and smoke a joint with ‘em and we’ll all kick it back and that will be it. The end of the road. I will have gotten what I’m due. What I deserve. It’s too bad that I seem to be the only one that’s keeping score. No one else cares, no one up there in the clouds and near the sun cares. At least, not about the number. Not about the loading bar. Here’s the number of good things I’ve done, and that number should mean something. But it doesn’t. Again, I beat my forehead and wish I could understand that quality outlasts quantity. But I think I’m getting there, and it only took moving twenty-five-hundred miles across the clam of these United States to find a thread and pull on it.
It was 2020. Covid-19 was in full swing—we were three months into “two weeks to flatten the curve.” The longest two weeks I’ve ever seen. Everyone was wearing masks and scared and at the faintest sign of a cough everyone spun their chicken-necks around and shot dagger eyes and you had to remind them you’re fine. Just fine. Nothing to worry about here—I just can’t seem to swallow my own spit.
I moved to Salt Lake City from the far northern parts of Utah back at the end of February. Out from my own little hometown and down into the big city, where the lights twinkled on through the night and bars actually existed and stayed open late and the possibility of girls and dates compounded as the population around me grew and grew. Young and right in the smack-middle of my twenties and living in a studio that overlooked a parking lot where bearded homeless gremlins came to throw away piss-bags and roll up under tarps. One block around the corner was the Little America hotel, and one more block was the Grand America—the nice side of Salt Lake. The city was climbing inside my head and I let it. I wanted to be a city boy and fought all my natural urges to scurry back into the great rocky mountains and live a life of seclusion.
Then March hit and the world shut down. All the fun city-going activities I planned on doing closed up tight and the city slept like a jet-lagged, anxious giant. Nothing ever seemed like the day it was. Weekends and weekdays blurred together, and my studio became more of a prison than anything else. A one-roomed, white-walled insane asylum where I could watch the silence of heat-splitting afternoons from on high, hear the red and blue sirens scream around the streets, going to pick up overdose victims laying on the ribbons of grass between fast food restaurants and the curb. And then with the sudden strike of a lighting bolt, the streets filled with howling people, signs in tow, protesting about black lives, and Covid slipped out the back door of their minds for a moment. I kept watching from my little nook, and grew restless and wanted out.
So I started skateboarding again. Just like every day when I was in high school, skating around the parks, school, the garage at home—anywhere I could, anywhere that let me. I got a new board, a new set of wheels, and went to my local concrete-ramped jungle. None of them cared about the protesting, the Covid, the madness—they just skated. It was nirvana. I went four or five times a week. After work, with the five o’clock sun pounding us all like sweat-coated nails into the pavement, we shred all around and carved up the concrete like it was cream. I’d broken the prison and reminded myself about what I loved.
I kept going, week after week. I’d get home every night with a salty sweat-paste caked to my head and arms, all my clothes soiled and damp from skating. I was sleeping like a baby, albeit a bit sore every morning when I’d climb out of bed. I had a few more bruises, scrapes, and cuts—but I was for it. The blood showed me all about how much I was doing. And then the injuries turned internal and everything took a dive.
It was a scorched day at the end of May, still the Covid year, 2020. I zipped around the Cottonwood Heights skatepark, trying a grind down a cement box with a wafty little one-eighty snuck in at the end. It could have been my fiftieth try, I didn’t keep count. I hit the grind, board trucks scraping against the metal iron, peeling off wax and it was smooth as butter. Then the one-eighty. I turned, twisting my torso, lugging along the rest of my body. And something popped. Deep in the lower gears of my spine, something clicked hard and I felt some tingles and knew I pulled a muscle. Thought I pulled a muscle. I wish I had just pulled a muscle. From that point in my lower back, pain started resonating out and down and up and all around. I hunched over, sat on the sideline bench and stretched and pretended I was fine, I just pulled a muscle. The pain got worse.
Thirty minutes later I was sitting on my friend’s couch, stunted in an awkward position, half leaning forward, back arched like I’m about to start some living room yoga. It got worse. I told my friends I needed to go home and lay down, something wasn’t right. I hobbled out to my car and drove home and the whole time a pit in my stomach gnawed viciously. Something was really wrong, not just a pulled muscle—but I didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see it.
I sludged back into my studio apartment, all alone. I could hardly walk. I found myself in front of the bathroom mirror, shirt and pants off, just dressed in my underwear. My body was shifted over from the waist up, locked in a Z shape. It hurt to stand, it hurt to sit—and it was just getting worse all the while. I shambled out into the mini kitchen crammed in my apartment, and a string of electric zaps shot down my legs and I fell to the floor and couldn’t move. I was the old guy in the commercials that had fallen and couldn't get up. I was him and he was me and I hated it, and still didn’t want to admit that something fundamental had been twisted up and wracked in my back. I found the only way to decrease the pain was to lay on my back and bring my knees up to my chest. So I did that for hours and tried to watch T.V. but just cried instead. There goes my summer. There goes my 2020 young-loving summer of living downtown in the city. There I saw it going with Covid and the rest of it went with the degenerated disc herniation that I just found out I had. Found out the hard way.
It was degenerated disc disease, as they soon told me. The worthless back doctor I paid to go see. He prescribed some physical therapy and put some pressure on different parts of my legs and knees and nodded and said, “Yep, it sucks—you shouldn’t be having to deal with this, you’re so young!” And I’d hear those words a hundred more times in the years to come. You shouldn’t have to deal with this, you are just so young. And I was young. But I was dealing with it, all the same. Wishing it away didn’t help, it only made it worse, only made me feel like a victim to stupid circumstance. So I started doing a little exercise and figured I aggravated the disc because I went from sitting sedentary all day, working and playing video games, to skateboarding for hours on end. Skating with all its hard hits and twists and aggression on the joints. That must have done me in, I was convinced.
Months later, it was August and I was healed. At least, I thought I was healed. I went to the chiropractor all the prescribed times and did the physical therapy and was feeling better. Not enough to dare to skate, but better.
We had just gotten an eighteen-pack of Coors Light beers, they were sitting next to me in the back seat. We pulled up to my friend’s house. I turned, grabbed the punched-in handles, and lifted in all the wrong ways. Twisting and lifting and there it went pop again, and I knew I’d done it in seconds. I told my friend something didn’t feel right. He laughed, told me I’m fine, what am I? An old man? Can’t lift a case of beer out of the car? I made him carry the beer, and I shook my head and I found the gnawing pit wrenching around in my stomach again. Found it because I knew what kind of pain I was in store for. Radiating, sharp, nerve-splitting. The pain got worse and I sat on a folding chair at a friend’s party and tried to smile and have fun with everyone else, but it wasn’t working. It was just starting to set in deep, like a hot knife was jammed right into my lumbar. I told my friends something didn’t feel right. They just chuckled and said I was so old, a grandpa in a young man’s body. Told me I shouldn’t have to deal with this. But I was, and I knew I would be soon.
I left. Drove home. I remember calling my mom, who lived on the other side of the country at the time. I called her and I just said, “It happened again.” And then I burst into a sobbing fit, trying to swerve around red and green lights and make it home before my legs would stop working and my body would be twisted out of shape. She cried with me and wanted to do anything and everything to help, but couldn’t. I was going home to my studio, alone. I hoped to God I would make it down the hallway and into my bed before it became unmanageable. I screamed, but flexing the yelling muscles just hurt my back worse.
So it was double herniated and I started really living in fear. I couldn’t do the skating, the hiking, the snowboarding, the boating—all the fun rough-and-tumble things I’d grown up doing. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to them, but hell—lifting an eighteen-pack of beer out of the car is what did this. Twisting my upper half fast in a skate-trick one-eighty did this. It took so little to hurt so much. My world was closed up tight, just like the outside world around me. I didn’t care about Covid, didn’t care about catching it, giving it, dying from it. I didn’t care, because most of my days were plagued by pain already.
The back is a pillar of movement and stance. The back is used in everything. Sitting, laying, walking, running, bending, stretching. Everything. And this second herniation wasn’t like the first. This one lasted longer, hurt deeper, healed slower. But I went through the motions and did the things I was told to do. The things the YouTube videos, chiropractors, back doctors, and physical therapists said. I ran the motions like you wouldn’t believe. I hate fear. It’s a disgusting emotion and I wouldn’t have myself living in it. So I ran the motions and they ran me until I was ground to a nub and started thinking that life would always include some back pain. Life would never be as rough and rowdy and physically dangerous as it had once been. I started to accept that maybe I wouldn’t be able to do all the things young men do. Gone were the days of tearing up dirt bikes and four wheelers. Gone were the days of spending ten hours on snow-covered mountains, snowboarding and hitting jumps and slamming into the powder and freezing my fingers, but laughing all the while. Gone were the days of planning out backpacking trips, hiking tall mountains. Even the days of sitting and playing video games for eight hours straight, as too much stillness twisted it all up, too. I started accepting that my motions had to be different, and I hated it but tread the thin line above a pit of pity and did my best not to fall in. I still did sometimes.
In April 2021 I was going to a clinic where they help you stretch all your muscles out. You lay on a bed and strap in and they twist your legs around and bend your arms and leave you feeling like an old, worn out rubber band. In reality, it was probably a bit of Utah snake oil. Pay them a few hundred dollars for eight sessions of glorified stretching. Stretching that I could do myself at home. But I figured if I went through the motions of spending money to fix my back, it’d heal sooner or later. I was banking on sooner, and draining my bank for the sake of it.
One of the stretcher ladies at the clinic told me about a boxing gym where she worked a second job. She told me to go, it was free your first time anyways. She was cute and fun to talk to, so I went one afternoon. It was thirty minutes of revelation. I did push ups, sit-ups, punched bags, kicked, did jumping jacks, jump-roped—and they yelled to keep going, don’t stop, all in some oddly energizing cycling-class style of workout. And after it was all said and done, I walked out under the orange sky on a spring evening and breathed deep and felt months of pressure leak out of my back.
Now it was August 2021. I slammed my car doors, having packed up everything I owned inside. I sold all my shelves, bed frame, desk—everything that wouldn’t fit inside my car. I packed my Volkswagen to the ceiling, strapped my kayak to the roof, and set out to move twenty-five-hundred miles away from the place I’d always lived. I wasn’t doing it for anyone but myself. It was one of those moments when all the motions of everyday life culminate and you stop and look out into the twilight evening and see a future and want nothing to do with it. And I wanted nothing to do with it. I conceptualized where my future went, living in Salt Lake City, and I couldn’t see it. It was all the same, the same now, the same later. There was nothing for me. And in one moment, I knew it down to my core. Nothing for me here, nothing resting in the motions of this everyday life. I’d gone through the motions, and if I stayed, it would always be too easy to keep going through those motions and I’d always end up back at the rear window of the house, looking out at twilight, seeing no future. Not willing to do anything about it. So I made a track change.
Sometimes I think that the reason I have a hard hockey puck between two of my lumbar vertebrae is because I need a reminder to do things for the sake of the doing part. Because when you get too wedged between the bricks of everyday life, you forget that less is more. Quality trumps quantity. If the motions of life add up to be quantity, then being present in those moments, appreciating them because they are your life is quality.
It’s easy to forget and let cruise control take over. Let the momentum of your forward motion in life carry you onward. Let your habits and routines control you. Time does what it’s best at—it passes. Often enough, that passing gives a false sense of progression. It leads us to believe that if we simply go through the motions, we will get what we deserve. What we are owed. But I’m not convinced that’s how any of this works.
Feature photo by Christopher Beddies
