Every morning when I wake up my lower back feels like a bear trap—tight steel ready to snap. I have an old swellbow that's enduring as a pocket of fluid filled with firm ropey things—it shows all the signs of being with me into eternity. As I sat at my desk the other day absentmindedly fiddling with stuff, I discovered a small, hard thing floating around near my kneecap. Scar tissue? A calcium deposit? A tumor? I don't even want to know.

        The real truth—one that I'm in no way ashamed to admit—is this: I'm falling apart. I'm 27 years old, and I'm falling apart. Years of rag-dolling down 45-degree pitches with both feet strapped in, of cradling a knee I wacked on ice or slab concrete, of icing a bruised hand after smacking masonite an accidental death-wish high-five—all that has or is or definitely will catch up with me. And I'm not alone in this. Most people I know are the same. We're a bunch of half-broken humans hobbling around after decades of powder days and skate-park road tours. Because that's what you do if you're us, if you call yourself a snowboarder or a skateboarder or lover of watching the sunset as your sweat dries into absolute exhaustion.

        I sat in the City Of Portland courthouse at jury duty recently wondering what the hell this perfect cross-section of your average citizen does with their life, with their few fleeting free moments. I tried to imagine what it was like to be a dentist or an insurance-claims officer, and I just couldn't—but trying gave me the chills and cast an inexplicable gray glow of gloom over me. The ordinariness of it all.

        As I stood up and felt that little painful pinch in my hip flexor—it always does that; I'm sure some day it'll give out on me completely—and started the long march up the stairs toward my "civic duty," I shivered and felt so glad I was me and that I had my life to live. Because no matter what terrifyingly mundane job or crappy housing situation or even dysfunctional relationship I might get myself into, the truth is, I'll still be free. I might be half broken, but an endless expanse of concrete is mine for the taking—and so are the mountains come winter. They're mine. And if that's all I have to say for myself when the big light goes out, well, honestly, that's even more than I could hope for.