Chapter 1 Heidi Tiedemann Darroch “All Lithe Power and Confidence” Skateboarding in Michael Christie’s If I Fall, If I Die

Skateboarding debuted as an Olympic sport in the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games, signalling the legitimacy achieved by an activity first viewed as a children’s pastime and later as an emblem of urban youth counterculture (Willing, Green, and Pavlidis 2020, 832). From its inception, skateboarding has enabled the creative repurposing of city streets. One of Canada’s earliest portrayals of skateboarding, a 1966 National Film Board documentary entitled The Devil’s Toy, directed by Claude Jutra, juxtaposes the alarm that street skateboarding aroused in Montréal police and bureaucrats with the innocent exhilaration of young riders claiming space in the city. In keeping with the long association of youth and skateboarding, young adult fiction has featured the sport frequently, including in Nick Hornby’s first young adult novel Slam (2007), Blake Nelson’s Paranoid Park (2006; adapted to film by Gus Van Sant in 2007), and the Canadian novel Torn Skirt (2001) by Rebecca Godfrey, alongside multiple high-interest books for developing readers.

More unusually, Canadian novelist and short story writer Michael Christie explores skateboarding as a source of freedom and adventure in If I Fall, If I Die (2015), an adult novel that draws on Christie’s family history and his experiences as a professional skateboarder (Creagan 2020). Christie provides an accessible introduction to a notoriously jargon-ridden sport by minimizing his use of technical terms and emphasizing grace and fluidity through motion, portraying skateboarding as an act of joyful (albeit bruising) autonomy and an accessible means of intercultural understanding and solidarity, specifically between Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth. Christie does not idealize skateboarding’s potential for fostering reconciliation of settlers and Indigenous people, but he does point to the possibilities for allyship between young people who share values of community and personal excellence in sport. The novel presents skateboarding as an activity that is more collaborative than competitive, and that builds relationships of mentoring and care in which skaters celebrate one another’s growing prowess and develop their budding senses of self and autonomy. In Christie’s portrayal, skateboarding also sets its youthful practitioners at odds with the racially segregated and socio-economically fractured culture of Thunder Bay. By the end of the novel, the central characters have become part of a diverse and inclusive community that counters their city’s cultural and racial divides.

* * *

If I Fall, If I Die centers on the lives of eleven-year-old Will and his mother Diane Cardiel—a last name Christie borrows from one of his own skating idols, John Cardiel, who fought his way back into professional skateboarding after a devastating accident (Creagan 2020). They live in a residential neighbourhood in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in the 1980s. Diane is a former experimental filmmaker who has agoraphobia, an overwhelming fear of the outdoors that prevents her from leaving the house. Her disorder was sparked by a series of family tragedies, including her older brother Charlie’s death in an industrial accident for which Diane feels partly responsible. After the dissolution of her brief marriage to an architect and a frightening experience on a subway platform in Toronto, Diane flees with Will, then a toddler, to Thunder Bay where she grew up, hoping to regain a sense of safety. Instead, her world grows increasingly constricted. Panic attacks began to plague her in the car, at the grocery store, even in her front yard, and she retreats indoors.

When the novel opens, it has been several years since Diane stopped going outside. Will, now eleven, has not ventured outside either, to assuage his mother’s hypervigilance about his safety. Even within their home, Diane has adopted elaborate safety measures. She requires that Will don a helmet and wetsuit to change a lightbulb, limits their meals to foods that are not choking hazards, and insists on baths rather than showers to prevent fatal falls. Diane’s precautions are intended to protect Will, but in practice they impede him from developing an age-appropriate level of independence, including sleeping in his own bed and forming peer relationships.

As Will’s need for autonomy grows, the story begins to shift, soon becoming a fast-paced boys’ adventure story complete with dangerous bootleggers, an encounter with a vicious wolf, a tussle over a Treasure Island–like map, and a search for a missing friend. As David Berry’s 2015 review in the National Post points out, “one of the book’s background ironies is that the world Will steps out into proves . . . to be just as terrifying as Diane’s faltering mind has conjured it up to be.” When Diane finally, and belatedly, allows Will to attend school after years of largely unstructured homeschooling, he struggles with the sudden expansion of his world. To overcome the loneliness he experiences in his new environment, where he struggles to understand expectations, Will turns to sport, setting his sights on becoming “the most electrifying practitioner in the short but storied schoolyard pantheon of ice sliding” (If I Fall, 96). He sands down the treads on his winter boots so that he can skid even more rapidly down a treacherously icy hill, inventing a range of moves that he executes with fluid and controlled motions. “Helmetless and unafraid, Will could dance, spin, slide backwards, and do 360s on one foot” (95), his classmates looking on in admiration. Will’s skill attracts particular attention from Jonah, a classmate who is both a gifted artist and an adept skateboarder. When Marcus, another classmate, disappears, and authorities appear indifferent, Will and Jonah decide to embark on a search for him. Jonah teaches Will to skateboard so that they will be able to cover more ground more quickly, and this enhanced mobility becomes central to Will’s burgeoning sense of confidence.

* * *

If I Fall, If I Die introduces skateboarding as a practical means of transportation for boys too young to drive, but the sport represents more than pragmatism. It appeals to the novel’s socially marginalized characters as a broader part of their identity development as boys growing into young men without male parental role models. As sports historian Emily Chivers Yochim (2010) notes, skateboarding has predominantly been an adolescent and male activity from its inception, evolving over the course of the twentieth century from a children’s pastime created by attaching roller-skate wheels to boards, to the preserve of countercultural adolescents who dominated the burgeoning field of professional skateboarding from the mid-1970s on. The popularity of skateboarding waxed and waned from the late 1950s, when the first professional skateboards were produced, to the 1980s, when Canadian actor Michael J. Fox’s character Marty McFly famously skateboarded throughout the film Back to the Future. Skateboarding’s history is rife with concerns about safety and the purported anti-social behaviour of skateboarders, whose appropriation of public and privately owned urban spaces often involves trespassing or skirmishes with vehicle traffic. Given its limited emphasis on competition, and like surfing, its parallel recreational form, skateboarding was not initially recognized as a “sport” but rather as a leisure activity. As a solo form that relies on dexterity, speed, and grace, skateboarding is perhaps more akin to performance, much like figure skating.

The subsequent professionalization of skateboarding, and its heightened public profile, are closely linked to ESPN’s creation of the X Games in 1995, a competition for “extreme” sports. The categorization of sports such as snowboarding, street luge racing, and wakeboarding as “extreme” marks them as physically risky, and they showcase displays of hyper-masculinity (Wheaton 2004, 16). Though they shared appreciation for these elements, the amateur skateboarding community critiqued the mainstreaming, commercialization, and commodification of their sport through ESPN’s televised coverage of the X Games, viewing it as “a perversion of the core ethos that has driven skateboarding subculture since its inception” (D’Orazio 2020, 2).

By 2015, when If I Fall, If I Die was published, skateboarding was no longer the preserve of a subculture but was firmly entrenched in the mainstream, in substantial part thanks to ESPN. The book is set, however, in the 1980s, a pre-mainstreaming decade that saw some of the earliest efforts to create teams of skaters. The Bones Brigade, which included Tony Hawk alongside fellow future stars Ray Rodrigues, Steve Caballero, and Rodney Mullen, was perhaps the best known of these teams, finding renown within a then-tight-knit skateboarding community thanks to impresario Stacy Peralta’s films of their urban exploits (Willing, Green, and Pavlidis 2020, 836). Only later would Hawk—who became the first person to execute a “900,” two and a half aerial rotations, on a skateboard at the X Games—be derided within the skateboarding community for representing “the corporate face of the new skateboarding industry . . . a symbol of what skating is not” (Clark 2016). It is the subculture of dedicated, hard-core practitioners in a time before the X Games that appeals to Christie’s characters and from which they draw inspiration in constructing their own community of oddball outsiders.

In electing to skateboard, Will and his friends run counter to Canadian sports ideals, particularly in northern cities where hockey is central to the community. Unlike hockey, lacrosse (Canada’s official summer sport), or basketball, which have lengthy national histories, skateboarding has had a limited Canadian presence, substantially hampered by the climate. As Christie explains in an interview, his hometown of Thunder Bay, in the northwestern part of Ontario, experiences seven months of snow, limiting the sport’s appeal (Creagan 2020). Despite the climactic disadvantages, Christie, like his fictional protagonist, became passionate about skateboarding at the age of eleven, drawn to it because it had “no coaches, no teams, no registration fees. It took place out there, in the world” and offered a sense of freedom from his mother’s intense anxiety (in Rice 2015). Christie’s early start is characteristic of how most skaters begin skateboarding, without formal lessons or coaching. As a lifestyle sport characterized by its “nonconformist, free-spirited, self-directed, and creative elements” (Beal et al. 2017, 11), skateboarding is open to a range of participants for whom organized competitive sports have less appeal or accessibility. The downside is the activity’s intense physicality and high risk of injury. Videos of Christie filmed during his professional skating career show him “launching himself into the air, landing tricks that defy gravity—grinding on handrails and kick-flipping over park benches” (Medley 2015), but these feats came at a cost. Christie broke “wrists, fingers, a tibia, a fibula, chipped a handful of teeth, cracked a vertebra . . . snapped a collarbone,” and sustained multiple concussions (Christie 2015a).

While his novel documents skateboarding’s bruising toll, Christie wanted to steer away from depicting the sport as the exclusive domain of the “adrenaline junkie” (Creagan 2020). Instead, he focuses on two critical elements that reflect his own experience as a former skater: skateboarding as a form of community that bolsters physical courage and transcends racism and cultural differences; and skateboarding as graceful performance, akin to dance, where style and creative use of space are valued.

* * *

Christie examines Thunder Bay’s division between its white and Indigenous populations by portraying systemic racism’s impact on stereotypes, institutions, and personal relationships. Will’s mother Diane, who grew up in Thunder Bay, recalls how her own father spoke slightingly of the capacity of Indigenous people for hard work, how white children would recoil at the accidental touch of a racialized classmate, and how her beloved brother, desperate to get out of Thunder Bay, exploited Indigenous people by severely underpaying them to work illicit overnight shifts at a grain mill. Twenty years later, in the novel’s present, relatively little has changed in Thunder Bay—but Will, having grown up in isolation from this world, is innocent of prejudice.

Will ventures out of his home for the first time in the novel after hearing a small explosion. In the yard, he encounters Marcus, who is trying to steal their garden hose. While the boys’ conversation is brief, Will, who is familiar with peer relationships only from books and films, is left with the impression that by concealing Marcus’s attempted theft, he has sealed a bond of friendship. Marcus disappears shortly after his encounter with Will, having gone into hiding to evade a local gang of bootleggers (who believe that Marcus has stolen their map to the liquor they’ve stashed all over town). Marcus’s foster mother assumes he has returned to his extended family, and no one in a position of authority is keen to mount a search. Jonah, like Marcus, is Indigenous, and as Jonah points out to Will, who is concerned about Marcus, “Indian kids go missing all the time. Especially orphans. Nobody in Thunder Bay even blinks” (132).

Christie’s attention to the nonchalant way Marcus’s disappearance is treated is central to the novel’s exploration of systemic racism in policing, education, and child welfare. Thunder Bay has a long history of marginalizing Indigenous people (Fiddler 2019). Racist attacks are so frequent that, as historian Travis Hay bluntly puts it, “Thunder Bay, Ontario, is not a safe place for Indigenous youth” (2018, 1). In If I Fall, Christie focuses on how the city’s prosperous period as a shipping centre was followed by a long economic decline through the 1970s and 1980s, accompanied by increased racial tensions. As the largest city in northwest Ontario, Thunder Bay is also the only secondary schooling option for Indigenous youth in northern, fly-in communities. Students must leave homes to continue their education after grade 8, living in boarding homes where they may receive scant supervision. Tanya Talaga’s award-winning book Seven Fallen Feathers (2017) explores the deaths of seven such young people, assessing the complex circumstances of their families’ lives, which have been disrupted by colonialism, including residential schooling, over multiple generations. Like other observers, Talaga indicts the cursory investigations into these young people’s deaths; the police, relying on stereotypes, attribute the multiple drownings and other fatal incidents to alcohol misuse. Anti-Indigenous racism was also evident in the Thunder Bay death of Barbara Kentner, struck in the abdomen by a trailer hitch thrown from a truck by Brayden Busby, who was ultimately found guilty of manslaughter (Walters 2020). A litany of similar abuses has been documented in this city, the source of about 37 percent of Indigenous murder victims in Ontario even though it has only about 5 percent of the province’s Indigenous population (Jago 2017). In January 2019, after two detailed inquiries into systemic racism on the force, Thunder Bay police services issued a formal apology to the community and committed to improving practices (Fiddler 2019). This broader context is crucial to understanding the vulnerability of Indigenous youth depicted in Christie’s novel.

The dismissive attitude of the police toward Marcus’s disappearance is only one of the ways in which Indigenous children and young people in the novel experience systemic discrimination. Will notices that his Indigenous classmates are ignored by teachers. During his search for Marcus, he learns that the social welfare system removes Indigenous children from their families and places them in overcrowded, white foster homes. As If I Fall makes clear, every sector of Thunder Bay life is inflected by racism. For instance, when Jonah’s older brothers start a roofing business that does not attract customers despite intensive marketing efforts, they are chided by a government bureaucrat at the employment office who spouts racist stereotypes, claiming, as Jonah’s older brother repeats to him with heavy sarcasm, that “homeowners in Thunder Bay knew we haven’t lived under them for long enough” to know “the first thing about roofs” (160). Casual racism and racist epithets in the novel are voiced by a range of characters of varying social statures, suggesting the prevalence of anti-Indigenous sentiment in the city.

Even sport is segregated in Thunder Bay, with both ethnicity and social class playing a role. Will learns that the city’s sport culture is centered on hockey, but “none of the Indian kids at his school played because the Kevlar pads cost a small fortune” (77). Skateboarding is more financially accessible to young Indigenous people, but it lacks the community support and infrastructure available for hockey. In response, Will and Jonah initiate their own, alternate community. They ignore popular hockey players’ taunts and insults and spurn their classmates’ clothing styles in favour of “flannel button-ups and work pants” from thrift stores, which are better suited to the hazards of skateboarding (164). To bolster their knowledge of the sport, Jonah collects US-based magazines Thrasher and Transworld alongside a small cache of treasured skateboarding videos—a genre popularized in the early 1980s as home VCRs were becoming more affordable. Poring over their videos and magazines, the boys gain both a point of entry into skateboarding culture and role models for their own developing styles. They dream of escaping Thunder Bay after high school and moving to California to become professional skateboarders, just as Will’s mother and her brother once dreamed of escaping to Toronto for higher education.

While Will and Jonah are partly drawn to skateboarding’s connections to a broader world, they also appreciate it as an art form. Mirroring Christie’s own vision of skateboarding as “a kind of structured dance that’s enacted out there, situationally, in the world” (in Isaacs 2015), Will is awestruck by the “regal grace and fluidity” that Jonah exhibits while performing a common skateboard trick, an ollie: “[H]e crouched, frozen like a cat stalking a robin, before cracking the rear of the board down, rocketing himself upward with the apparatus clinging impossibly to his feet like a burr. After this, the silence of flight but for the sibilance of wheels spinning, then a growling return to the asphalt and his lackadaisical ride-away” (If I Fall, 120). Christie’s use of alliterative and figurative language in this passage conveys the activity’s poetic and graceful character through Will’s admiring eyes. Similar bird and animal comparisons are used several times in the novel to characterize Jonah’s skating, like when Christie describes how Jonah “was ever more elegant, languid, full of feline poise, all lithe power and confidence” (319). While Will’s initial attempts are faltering, he becomes more confident when he realizes that skateboarding is fundamentally “about mastery—a seizure of control, not a loss,” and experiences startling joy as the skateboard “danced or flipped or spun successfully” beneath him (166). Even Diane, who at first cannot bear to watch Will on a skateboard for fear of him hurting himself, increasingly appreciates the aesthetic element, finding the activity “as beautiful as any dance, with its arcing turns and graceful little leaps” (152).

Christie’s portrayal of skateboarding’s beauty and grace aligns it with what philosopher Jason Holt, drawing on the foundational work of David Best (1974), describes as the “aesthetic sports, in which aesthetic judgment figures into determining the outcomes” (2019, 19). In sports such as figure skating, diving, and gymnastics, “it is of the first importance that there should be no wasted effort and no superfluous motion” (19) and “form” is accorded credit when evaluating performance (22). Conversely, in the majority of both team and individual sports such as running, tennis, or hockey—sports that David Best terms “purposive” (1974, 201)—aesthetic appeal does not determine the activities’ outcomes, although grace may be appreciated as a subordinate element. For instance, as Holt observes, in hockey or soccer, “two garbage goals always beat one beautiful goal, although we still enjoy beautiful goals” (20).

Skateboarding is physically strenuous and requires a high tolerance for injury. Will’s early efforts send him crashing to the ground, “the board tomahawking off in the opposite direction, his knees and elbows quickly bashed and gored by the tyrannical pavement” (If I Fall, 137). Even with Jonah’s careful coaching, Will suffers countless accidents, “flaying the tender skin of his lower back, knees, and hips like an invisible monster was dismantling him cell by cell” and waking up in the mornings with “a symphony of aches” (137). The richly metaphorical language allows Christie to convey the physical experience of the skater as an alternative to the daunting, technical vocabulary of skateboarding’s dozens of basic moves. In an interview with Thrasher magazine, Christie explains his longstanding concern that “skateboarding couldn’t be represented . . . in a way that both remained true to the act itself while at the same time making it interesting for the non-skateboarder public” (Creagan 2020). Jonathan Russell Clark (2016) makes a similar claim in his discussion of fictional portrayals of skateboarding, including Tom Perrotta’s Little Children and Hornby’s Slam, which he argues fail to convey skateboarding culture and skaters with any degree of verisimilitude. Even skateboarding memoirs that provide detailed descriptions of technique do not, he suggests, capture skateboarding’s essential features. Clark wonders if “something about skating . . . resisted narrative description,” arguing that portraying skateboarding tricks “by explaining their literal movements strips skating of its unconscious wonder, its strange, dance-like beauty.” Christie demonstrates this in an interview, offering a parodic and jargon-ridden example of how an adept skateboarder might describe the sport to informed peers: “‘Will and Jonah waxed a ledge by the old gas station and Will learned switchstance frontside tailslides and had almost learned to shove-it out when his kingpin broke.’ How’s that grab you, general reader?” (in Rice 2015). By electing to emphasize skateboarding as physical experience and aesthetic performance while minimizing technical language, Christie alternates between the perspective of the skater and the spectator, ensuring the book is accessible and engaging for readers who don’t have specialized knowledge of the sport.

* * *

Will’s skateboarding places him on the opposite trajectory to his mother’s insularity. He explores forests and rivers, the waterfront, and abandoned urban areas, moving further away from home while achieving greater confidence and even joy in his efforts: “That the board did their bidding—danced or flipped or spun successfully beneath them—afforded the most sublime pleasures of their short lives” (166). In contrast to the fear that constrains Diane’s life, Will experiences a sense of freedom through expansive movement out into the world, relishing the “emotional and experiential dimensions that are an important part of the attraction of the culture [of skateboarding]” (Willing, Green, and Pavlidis 2020, 835).

Christie creates a vivid portrayal of Thunder Bay’s depressing, post-industrial decline and its paradoxical allure to skateboarders as a site of resistance to capitalism’s values. Architectural theorists have pointed out that skateboarding sets itself in opposition to the notion that urban space exists to create wealth: “[S]kateboarding shows that pre-existing uses of buildings and city spaces are not the only possibilities, that architecture can instead be consumed by activities which are not explicitly commodified” (Borden 2019, 225). When the novel opens, Thunder Bay, once heralded (as Will’s mother ruefully notes) as Canada’s own Chicago, is two decades into the economic decline prompted by the end of shipping that has reshaped the city. The downtown storefronts are “now mostly shuttered and vacant”; only the “strip clubs, strip malls, taverns, and hockey rinks” survive (22). On the deserted waterfront, with its decaying grain elevators, Will and Jonah seek out the forbidden spaces that skateboarders find most inviting, recuperating unused public or abandoned private property for their own purposes. Christie suggests that “skateboarding is at its very essence a creative adaptation to the bleak urban spaces of the world” (in Rice 2015). As Will and Jonah explore the industrial environment, they locate “the crannies of the city that no upright citizen had reason to frequent,” imbuing these “discarded nooks and leftovers” and “the abandoned, unused architecture that people preferred to ignore” with purpose and excitement (If I Fall, 164, 166).

Skateboarders also need to negotiate shared access to neglected urban spaces occupied by other marginalized users, including people who are insecurely housed. In Christie’s novel, the boys’ search for Marcus leads them to a disheveled hermit, Titus, whom they first meet in the woods. Later in the novel, Will and Jonah care for Titus in his new-found home in a grain elevator while he recovers from an attack by the bootleggers. To pass the time, they create an ersatz skateboard park in the grain elevator, a boon in the icy winter, “a time of despair and unimaginable yearning” for skateboarders. They borrow a design from a skateboarding magazine and scavenge wood to construct ramps on which to practice, “threading their way between pillars and hoppers and conveyance vents, back and forth at breakneck speeds.” Instead of suffering through the monotony of school, they suffer through “unplanned splits, shinners, debilitating knee whacks, wrist tweaks, bent fingers, hippers, elbow bashings, back scrapes, rolled ankles, and chin abrasions” (251). Christie’s vivid language conveys both the intense physicality of skateboarding and the boys’ contagious enthusiasm for hurling themselves around in space.

The boys’ friendship with Titus brings them to the attention of the Butler, the leader of the bootleggers, who believes that they either know the location of the grid map he’s seeking or can provide information about Marcus’s whereabouts. To ferret out the truth, the Butler imprisons the boys along with Titus and then pays Will’s mother Diane an unnerving visit. Diane quells her panic enough to seek assistance from Jonah’s older brothers, who rescue the boys. In a Dickensian twist, Titus is revealed to be Diane’s older brother, Charlie, who was believed to have died many years earlier. Will’s family is almost magically reconstituted: Charlie/Titus moves in with Will and Diane, who in turn establish a less suffocatingly interdependent relationship. Christie does not minimize the severe mental illness that both Diane, still suffering from agoraphobia, and her brother, traumatized by losses and grief, continue to experience, but things do begin to change for them. With Will’s support, Diane embraces photography and inches back into the world by observing it through her camera. While Charlie’s symptoms still emerge periodically, “most of the time he was all right” (316).

* * *

Christie again turns to skateboarding’s aesthetic qualities in the book’s final pages, in which Will shows Diane a film he’s made, also titled If I Fall, If I Die. In the film, Will juxtaposes skateboarding tricks with contrasting images of his friends, family, and the city of Thunder Bay. When Diane asks him why he has included falls in the final version of his film, wondering if this might harm his chance of using to film to attract potential sponsors, he tells her, “We don’t want to lie and make it look like we don’t fall. Because we do. All the time” (321). In producing his film, Will matches Christie’s own artistic achievement, celebrating skateboarding’s wild inventiveness and exhilaration while highlighting the impossibility of achieving perfection in either art or life.

If I Fall, If I Die is the story of a young boy on the brink of adolescence who negotiates a path to growth and self-discovery through the creativity and physical courage embodied in skateboarding. Will’s constricted life indoors is supplanted by his exploration of the outside world, a place that is terrifyingly unpredictable but where friendship prompted by shared love of the sport creates tight bonds. By the end of the novel, although they have not succeeded in locating Marcus, Will and Jonah have formed a thriving community with other young skateboarders, including “a Chinese kid who bruised easily and had to hide both his bruises and his skateboard from a strict father who taught chemistry at the college; an only-child girl whose father was the city’s best hockey coach”; and “a motor-mouthed Irish kid who used to be a soccer prodigy but quit when his mother died” (319). While this passage betrays some stereotyping, it also reflects Christie’s recollection of the diverse community of “wild, strange boys” he skated with as a budding professional—young people who turned to skateboarding as a refuge (Christie 2015a). The novel celebrates the athleticism, the beauty and grace, and the friendships that can be forged through the sport.