Two AM Skate

We were skating at almost two thirty in the morning. There’s a couple of strip malls by the Krystal that have a perfect, gentle slope to them. During the day, their parking lots would be filled with cars and business. But at night, if you start up by the bowling alley, you can have the run of the place.

Now the first question, for me anyway, was which board to bring to this location. True it wasn’t my first time skating there. But because we were skating at night, and because I wasn’t too familiar with the place, I decided to bring my Evolve Bamboo Series Two, with the all terrain tires.

With orthodox skate wheels, there are many things that can crash you, especially in the dark. The best advantage of those all terrain wheels is that they can handle just about anything a bicycle can, which makes me much more comfortable skating in the dark.

My friends were both on orthodox longboards, of course.

One of the guys there had never seen an electric before, and asked if he could ride mine. I set the remote to the low speed and let him make a few turns, while I tried out his board.

Let me tell you, as an electric skateboarder, his longboard sure felt like it had some kind of magic to it. Probably because of the friction of the drive train, I’m not used to boards rolling like his did. It rolled like a banana peel over butter. Because of the slight and perfect tilt to the asphalt, simply pointing the board in the right direction would cause it to roll -- magic!

While skating, we encountered several speed bumps. That’s one of the things you learn to do as a skateboarder, is to judge speed bumps. Because in a car, for the most part, all speed bumps are created equal. But on a skateboard, you sure learn to see the many different varieties. There are some bumps that I can go over with no trouble whatsoever. But there are also some other speedbumps that could scrape against the bottom of my board. Which is something I *really* don’t want to happen.

Have you ever watched a youtube video of someone puncturing their lithium battery? The result doesn’t look good. The battery, when exposed to the air, essentially becomes a tiny bomb. You wouldn’t want your phone to be in your pocket when that happens, and you probably wouldn’t want to be riding an electric skateboard when that happens.

So avoiding damage to the battery is a good thing. As a result, whenever I come to a speed bump, I hit the brakes, hop off my board and let it take the bump all by itself, then hop back on. Every time I did that, the board cleared the speed bump. Yet I’m too chickenshit to stay on the board over a speed bump, for the aforementioned reason.

And of course that makes me think that as electric skateboarding becomes more popular, as more and more of these boards go on the market, eventually, somebody is going to puncture their battery. Right?

I mean that’s a headline right there. Man skates of flaming board.