the man who skated across America.
after having undergone electro shock therapy following a suicide attempt DeMarcus James quit his meds, and sat out to perform self induced shock treatment the only way he knows how. pushing his skateboard. The journey was a long, unbroken sentence written by the foot in the dust of the United States.
He came out of the Bay under a sky the color of wet tin, four wheels of fire turning against the damp asphalt of the coast, his face set hard toward the continent to the east. There was no grandeur in the rig, no engine, no harness, only thirty-two inches of laminated maple suspended over metal axles and the raw leverage of bone driving into the street. He was a lone creature pushing through the great concrete arteries of the republic, a moving point against a landscape that stretched immense, indifferent, and old.
Out past the high granite wall of the Sierras the earth fell away into pale alkaline flats where the heat sat on the horizon like burning oil. In the salt sinks of Nevada the air was dry as furnace breath and the sun hung overhead like an unblinking white eye, fifty miles a day carved out of the desert floor, the bearings inside the wheels clicking out their frantic arithmetic against the earth.
The road was not a path but a virus of vector and speed, a cut-up montage of cracked lane-lines, shredded radial tires, and the bleached skeletons of jackrabbits decaying in the weed-choked margins. He moved through the country like a signal passing through bad wiring. His sleep was fitful and stolen in the jagged shadows of the highway system: under the low concrete belly of interstate overpasses where the eighteen-wheelers thundered through the dark like iron monsters, in the tall dead grass behind county road stations, inside the flickering halogen glow of twenty-four-hour truck stops where the coffee tasted of copper and old grease. The body ceased to be a home and became a machine stripped down to its essential hydraulics. His right hip fired like a piston; his left foot remained anchored to the black grip tape; his spine absorbed the endless high-frequency chatter of bad road beds. It was an exorcism, a slow, violent attrition of muscle and marrow designed to strip away the psychic noise of the cities and find whatever silent core lay beneath the wreckage.
Across the Great Plains the wind blew relentless out of the north, cold and smelling of crushed clover and diesel exhaust. The towns came and went like phantom reels of film projected against the flat grey rim of the world. Sunburned men in faded canvas caps stood by grain elevators watching him pass, their eyes tracks of ancient skepticism. Dogs barked from behind rusted cyclone fences in settlements where the post office had long since burned and never been rebuilt. Children gathered at the edges of gravel aprons to gawk at this strange pilgrim rolling past on a wooden deck built for municipal sidewalks, carrying no pack larger than a dog’s shadow. He spoke to them when he stopped, his voice gravel-scraped from the dust of three thousand miles, broadcasting a simple message of endurance, of mental survival, of healing through the sheer repetition of motion. He was an apparition born of the shoulder, a man who had traded the safety of walls for the wild, lawless geometry of the open lane.
In the rust-belt corridors of the Midwest the air turned heavy with damp coal smoke and the iron tang of dying foundries. Rain fell in grey sheets, turning the highway shoulders to slick yellow mud and forcing him onto the narrow lip of the asphalt where the mirrors of passing freight trucks buzzed inches from his shoulder. Yet he kept the cadence, pushing through the industrial ruins, past abandoned assembly plants glowing under the spectral violet of mercury-vapor streetlamps, past dead amusement parks overgrown with sumac, past the endless neon signboards flickering their desperate consumer algorithms into the void. The journey was a long, unbroken sentence written by the foot in the dirt of the lower forty eight states. He transmitted his log through small handheld screens in the late hours, sending impulses of light back into the digital ether—glimpses of blistered feet, shattered wheel cores, and the infinite stretch of road fading into the evening haze.
When he reached the Appalachian crest the world turned dark and dense with timber, the road winding down through damp hollows where the fog lay pooled like milk. Here the pushes were long and grueling, the ascents a test of pure static willpower, the descents a perilous flight down narrow ribbons of asphalt with no brakes save the drag of a shoe heel against the pavement. And then the mountains fell away behind him, and the smell of the world changed. The dry dust of the interior gave way to the heavy, salt-laden breath of the Atlantic littoral.
He rode into New York Christmas Day 2025 on a morning when the sea mist hung low over the harbor, the four wheels coming to a final, whispering halt on the pier pavement. Behind him lay three thousand miles of continent—scorched desert, endless corn, rusted iron, and mountain pass—all crossed by hand and stride. The machine of his body stood still at last in the roaring shadow of the city, the silence inside him complete and unassailable, forged in the heat and dust of a million rolling revolutions.
FULL STORY IN CHAINSAW 3
