Why one Oregonian is traveling from Eugene to San Francisco by skateboard

831 miles. That’s the distance Mike Crespino, founder of the Emerald Shred Collective, will be traveling next month. But he won’t be making this trip in a car or plane, he’ll be traveling on a skateboard. As Eugene Weekly reported, his goal is to travel from Eugene to San Francisco to spread awareness about mental health. Crespino joins us to share the inspiration for this trip and memories of the two boys he is honoring, Ben Moody and Silas Strimple.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: Mike Crespino is going to travel from Eugene to San Francisco on a skateboard next month. 830 miles on four little wheels and a thin piece of wood. He’s doing it out of anguish and hope. As Eugene Weekly reported recently, Crespino wants to call attention to the importance of resources for youth mental health after losing two young skaters. 18 year old Silas Strimple was found dead in 2021 after he went to Austin Texas. He had been struggling with schizophrenia. Earlier this year, 17 year old Ben Moody died by suicide. Mike Crespino joins us now to talk about their young lives. I want to start with these two teens. Can you tell us a little bit about Silas Strimple?

Mike Crespino:  Sure. I first came into contact with Silas back nine years ago when Eugene had just finished completing the Washington Jefferson Bridge Skatepark Project. He was a little guy, as they all were, back then. I was already old, so I’m zipping around on a skateboard down there in my late thirties and the first time I caught sight of Silas, I think he must have been 10 or 11 years old. But what really drew me in is here he was with a big smile on his face and also wearing a pretty impressive, for his age,

Death metal shirt.  Of course, I love some death metal as well. So I just made a comment to him and I said, ‘that’s a really nice shirt’. I figured I would try and kind of ease into getting to know him better. Later on, knowing Silas and seeing him down there all the time, he’d always have all these great shirts and I’d say, ‘hey, nice shirt’, you know, or ‘give me that shirt’ and it seemed to crack a smile from him every time knowing that the park was world class, that these kids would basically be calling this their second home and growing up here and getting better at skateboarding. And that was exactly the case for Silas.

Miller:  How much were you aware of the issues he was facing as he entered his mid to late teens?

Crespino:  Pretty aware. I was down there often, 2-4 times per week I’d go down there just to blow off some steam. Being a skateboarder, you want to get out as much as you want or as you can, when the waves are up, as they say. So, it was night and day, pretty quick and interestingly enough, it happened a little bit before the onset of the COVID pandemic. And so watching Silas change from this happy, sweet and kind young man and finding him down at the park, obviously struggling with paranoid schizophrenia. His relationships, the way that he and I would relate had become different. It was definitely as if something entirely had changed for him and he was always down there often enough for us to check in. I know the community had noticed as well and did their best with Silas to make sure he was eating [and] he had a place to come in from the rain or stay or take a shower. People were definitely going to take care of him as best as we possibly could.

Miller: What about Ben Moody? How did you come to know him?

Crespino:  Alright, similar story, but a little bit deeper as I had been going down there and I’ve been in Eugene since 2008. So over the years of my skateboarding, I’d come across Drew Moody, Ben and Drake’s father. He’s a skateboarder as well, closer to my age. So, of course, seeing him down there and then coming down with his two young sons when the park was finished, we were able to see them both as just basically boys becoming young men down there. My relationship from there was instantly to Drake who was the first I’d noticed. He was getting incredibly good and incredibly fast and he just had a wonderful spirit, character, he carried the stoke on his face. So it was obvious that it was a generational thing passed down from his father and his mom that skateboarding was in the blood.

And then shortly after, you’re seeing little Ben come down with his helmet on and he’s got that same look. And so you’re seeing Drake getting really good and gathering the respect of his peers. And then Ben looking up to Drake. And Drake wanted to skate just like dad. So you’ve got this family aspect that was just -you know when you’re a skateboarder and you consider yourself a lifer, you look into that and you see how wonderful that is. I mean, it really is truly something special to be generationally involved with skateboarding. And Ben was an amazing skateboarder, full of bright and, oh my gosh, the dude was just as good as his brother. But other than that they were raised in such a way that they were definitely big parts of the community here. And it was because of their participation with their peers as well as anybody that came down there, they just skated like skateboarders and it was a great thing.

Miller:  What supports do you think would have made a difference for Ben and for Silas, supports that perhaps they didn’t get?

Crespino:  Well, I guess I’ll go off of what I’ve come to know from being told by the youth that I’ve come into contact with, since we’ve started this memorial push. [With] a lot of the kids here in Eugene, you have to consider, we had just come through almost three years of school in Zoom, which was very difficult. So you’ve got that added factor, that disconnect going on, not only between your peers, but between everything you’ve already known all along from school. You go to school for 6.5 hours a day and you come home and you hang out with your friends. And all that is gone, totally changed. And there’s really no certainty of when it’s gonna end, what it’s gonna look like. It felt like everybody was going by the seat of their pants through that.

But what I’m hearing now that we’re out there and speaking to the youth is that they feel like there’s not enough in the classroom regarding suicide prevention, coping skills, mental health with the focus. Speaking to Ben’s girlfriend, Vera, she let me know that she found her yoga teacher to be the most helpful in those ways. But that’s more of a one on one and Vera felt that the school could do more as a community for the classroom [than just] spending possibly one period per semester on such things and really try and integrate programming to be specific to address what we have now.

I mean, if we’re looking at the numbers nationwide as well as statewide in Oregon in general, we’re definitely in an epidemic of youth suicides. Higher here in Lane County than we’ve ever seen. And you can see in the Oregon numbers, it’s definitely not going down and they project that it’s going to go up for 2022 which is unfortunate to think. And I hope that our memorial push, the skate to San Francisco speaking to the community, listening to the youth and hearing them, that we could all stand to listen to what they need and focus on creating space - just a way that maybe the coping skills and overall kindness of taking a look at this really hard subject, could be addressed in schools a little bit better. That’s what I’m hearing from the young people I’ve spoken to.

Miller:  You’re hoping to construct a memorial in honor of the lives of these two young skaters. But my understanding is you’d like the City to do something besides a bench. What exactly would you like to see?

Crespino:  When I met with Summer, Ben and Drake’s mom and Dina, Silas’ mom down at the park, this was just fresh after handing them memorial skateboards. And we chatted about all the availability within the City, what their code for memorial conduct and whatnot. You look around our park now, there are black memorial benches already installed. They were installed nine years ago when the park was finished. The benches themselves that are there now, all the placards, the bronze placards had been stripped off by scrappers for money and they’re not being maintained to a level, which would lead one to believe that a single black bench would be safe or adequate for memorializing two people who mattered so much to so many here.

In asking Dina and Summer and, in my opinion as well being a skateboarder, they would definitely want something installed that could be skated on as well as appreciated in memoriam for them. And so we would strongly encourage the community to come together and design a skateable feature [to be] installed down at the park instead of a bench. [That] would be the adequate response to these young men. And I think it would make a huge statement, not only a memorial of them but also about their struggles. It would kind of be a permanent placement that we acknowledge young people and their struggles that they go through regarding mental health. So we’re getting a few submissions in now and we’ve got some pretty cool looking skateable features that have been shared.

I’ve reached out to Kelly Shadwick down with the City. She’s in charge of market relations. And I’m hoping to get a call back real soon so we can discuss. I found on their website that there’s two options - you can buy the memorial black bench for $5,000 and that makes the City maintain it for the life of the bench, or you can submit a custom bench. And that’s a little bit more vague. So we’re having people design what they’d like to see down there in hopes that we could submit a design and bid to have it built by April 14, which would be Ben’s birthday.

Miller:  Mike Crespino, thanks very much for joining us today. Mike Crespino is getting ready to skateboard from Eugene to San Francisco to call attention to mental health issues. This follows the deaths of two young skaters who had been active in the Eugene skateboarding scene. And I should note that if you, or someone you know, is struggling right now, you can call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

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