Spotlight on Forrest Wood
/BY CARA SCHAEFER
As the years pass, you may find yourself spending time outside in different ways, but there’s often a connective thread between the activities we love. We spoke with Forrest Wood, one of Out There’s production interns for the spring of 2021, about skateboarding, rock climbing, and storytelling.
Photos courtesy of Forrest Wood.
OUT THERE: You spent a lot of time skateboarding as a kid. How did that come about?
FORREST WOOD: I went to a small public school in New York City that didn't have a school yard. For lunch, they would close off the block and just let us play in the street. There were some kids in middle school that rode skateboards, and one of them gave me their old skateboard one day and I kind of just never put it down.
OT: Was it difficult to learn?
FW: I think everyone who skates will be willing to share their gore stories. I've broken my elbow twice. I've hurt myself dozens of ways from skateboarding. People can go on and on, about how it’s a fine line between it being a healthy way to get exercise and a way to really hurt yourself. But for most people, the benefits outweigh the risks, like a lot of outdoor activities. There's an element of risk sometimes, but the people who invented skateboarding in the 60s are still skateboarding now in their old age. There's a love for it that you can't really get away from.
OT: Did skateboarding around the city feel like exploration to you?
FW: Yeah, definitely. It was a way to get around. I was also getting into longboarding, which is bigger boards, softer wheels, and you can go a little bit faster. I commuted around the city on a longboard for a long time in high school. And then I went to college in Boston, and I almost exclusively commuted around Boston on a longboard or a bicycle, because I just really didn't like public transportation there.
It’s definitely a way to explore and see the neighborhoods that you're passing through in a different way. The communities are so welcoming, in those kinds of scenes, so it was a great way to meet people for me.
OT: What was the culture around skateboarding like, and how did you feel about it?
FW: There's a lot of subcultures within skateboarding. Some people like skating in state parks. Then there's street skating, which is what a lot of people think of when they hear of skateboarding. There's also a lot of disciplines within longboarding, different styles of doing tricks. There's a lot to learn within all of those disciplines, so the communities around them are a niche within a niche.
When you share a common interest like that with anyone, you can look past other differences. Age and socioeconomic background were really not even that much of a factor. When I first got introduced to the longboarding scene, I was a little high schooler from the Upper West Side. I was meeting people 10 years older than me, and we were just outside, pushing around to have fun. And no one really cared where anyone you met came from, or where anyone was going. It was all just about being with each other.
OT: Fast forward a bit to when you traded in your skateboard for a climbing rope, what was that transition like?
FW: I wouldn't say traded in, obviously, because I still try to skate. About a year after graduating college, I had moved back to New York and I was working in the theater industry. I was doing a lot of construction and labor, and I just wasn't happy. I really wanted to get out of the city and spend more time outside. I met a girl. She taught me how to rock climb, and I just really fell in love with it.
I see a lot of similarities between skateboarding and rock climbing. It's about really pushing yourself and pushing your body to its limits, to try to find what you're capable of. And trying the same very specific movement over and over again, and training your body to be able to do that movement. It's about a personal challenge. There's no winning or losing, it's just about pushing yourself.
Since I left New York City, I started spending more time outside. I would find myself in the woods, and there's no pavement out there. But in the same way that as a skater in the city you're constantly skating around and looking for spots, you're walking around the woods, and you see a little boulder and you think, “Can I climb that?” You just find these little places in the woods, these rock walls, or you hear about a climbing location and check it out, to see what you can do.
OT: You’ve been interning at Out There for the past few months. What drew you to storytelling?
FW: The importance of storytelling is ingrained in me through my time in theater. Some of the first real theater experiences were a way for people to share stories. At the time, specifically religious stories, but that’s how people were educated back then. Before there was even common literacy, before people could even read, we were sharing stories. These stories that we put out there are more empathetic than the things that we learn in school, and empathy is the real teacher. So when we can share stories from people's personal lives, get a glimpse into people’s lives, we're learning a lot more from it than just the little tagline lesson that we'll put on to the end of an episode. We're learning about each other's lives, and we're learning how to see things differently. And that's really important.
OT: I know when it comes to being outside, we all have certain stories that we like to tell or that we think about a lot. How do you think we decide what stories kind of stick with us when it comes to nature and the outdoors?
FW: Well, I don't know if we decide, I think that nature influences us to make those realizations. The fact that we, as a podcast, get so many stories from the outdoors is just a testament to how powerful the outdoors are at giving us perspective about ourselves. Some of the greatest lessons that I've learned as an individual have been from my experiences outdoors, and just putting myself in an environment that isn't going to necessarily be the easiest environment to deal with. Trying to compare living in a tent to living in a well-furnished apartment, you recognize the things that we take for granted in society a little bit more.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You can find Forrest on Instagram.
