For two years, I’d been thoroughly gaslit by my brother into believing I’d lost my beloved longboard — until I spotted it in the background of a photo he sent to the family group chat. Needless to say, I demanded its immediate return.
So, after I clocked out on Friday, I smiled at the sunshine, thinking it would be the perfect day for my official longboarding comeback. I drove to a downhill stretch of the Legacy Trail near Truckee, stepped onto the board, and as I picked up speed, the wind rushed through my hair, the sun hit my shoulders just right, and for a moment I felt seventeen again.
Then — the trail curved quickly. “Shoot, I’m not going to turn in time. Wait — how do I stop this thing again?” I panicked. “Maybe if I just —”
And just like that, I was sprawled on the side of the trail, my summer overalls ripped at the knees and hips, hair tangled and sweat-soaked, gravel embedded in my skin, blood on my shoulder, arms, knee, and toes — looking like the physical embodiment of poor decision-making.
Eventually, I managed to hype myself up enough to limp back uphill to my car and drive home.
Standing in the kitchen was my roommate. Luckily for me, she’s a ski patroller, which basically means she can magically transform from regular person into wilderness medic at a moment’s notice. She had everything an injured longboarder could possibly dream of. She cleaned my wounds and patched me back together with the kind of patience usually reserved for wounded wildlife.
And that was the start of my weekend. Now that we’ve established the setting — me hobbling around like a wounded Victorian child — I can move on to the actual fun part.
A couple months ago, I got a call from Trails and Vistas, a local nonprofit, asking if I’d run a few community poetry workshops. I was immediately excited. No one had ever just reached out asking me to teach before — usually it meant pitching myself, sending emails, and trying to convince people I knew what I was doing.
“Of course,” I told them, trying to sound more composed than I felt.
So, this weekend, still half-bandaged and moving like someone three times my age after my longboarding disaster, I got to teach alongside Karen Terrey, Nevada County’s Poet Laureate.
Karen — or Kat, as everyone calls her — is a poet I’ve looked up to since moving to Tahoe. She’s an incredible writer, an incredible teacher, and somehow also one of the warmest people I’ve met here.
On Saturday morning, I limped over to Church of the Mountains. I introduced myself, learned a little about our students, and set the theme: nature and environment — which, if you know anything about my writing, makes complete sense. Nature sneaks into almost every poem I write.
My favorite part of teaching these workshops is getting to know people twice — first as people, then as writers. There’s something special about hearing work written only a few minutes earlier. You start to see how they think, the images they carry, the questions they live with.
One Truckee High student, Charlie, wrote: “I think of the bird, who stretched her bony, downy wings, and whose feet grasped the edges of her wiry, too-small nest. I ask myself, did she hesitate?” As her mother sat beside her, tears immediately welled in her eyes, reminded that her daughter would be leaving for college soon. “Did she consider the fall beneath her perch? Or did the possibility of a wild, blue sky whisk those thoughts away?” she read.
And while Charlie’s poem was stunning, the truth is everyone in that room wrote something beautiful. People are endlessly creative, endlessly surprising, and helping someone discover a new way into their own writing is a special thing.
Kat later taught students how to respond to each other’s work with more depth than “I really liked this;” the art of revision. And honestly, I was just as excited to sit there learning as I was to teach.
The few times I’ve written or worked with Kat, I’ve left wanting to crack open every poem I’ve ever written and reimagine what it could become. I hope our students felt something similar.
At the end of the day, as I limped back toward my car, I knew there was very little left in this sore, scabbed-up body that I could realistically accomplish. I postponed my twenty-mile bike ride and multipitch climbing plans for another weekend. Sunday would be reserved for rest.
All my road rash will be long gone by the time I have to fit into a wetsuit next weekend for a three-day kayak guiding course, right?
