You’ve got to do whatever you can to stay healthy. It all comes down to health and taking care of your body. They say your body is the place you start from, that’s your vessel for this weird thing we call life. You gotta keep that thing in tiptop shape. Especially as somebody who is so in love with being active. Have you found that skateboarding and snowboarding became therapeutic as well? Yeah, definitely. They were always therapeutic activities, but I guess in a way I didn’t give them the reverence I should have. I didn’t treat them as sacred as they are. I was taking them for granted. And once I realized that, I just started doing them differently and treating them with more respect. I want to make sure my intent is pure because the act of riding down a hill on a plank of wood is as pure as it gets. You’re flying, basically. And you’ve been getting to do this for most of your life. Thanks to snow-boarding, you’ve traveled the world since you were 15. I’m a weirdo because I’m more comfortable in other places than I am at home. I don’t feel like I really have a home. Laguna is where I like to be, but I’m really the most comfortable on the move. Traveling is what makes the most sense to me. I’m not good at, you know, having your local bar you go to every week or having the same people you always hang out with. That is really hard for me to grasp. Sometimes I think maybe I missed out a little bit on school or that aspect of life, but I wouldn’t want to trade in all that I’ve learned by traveling all the time. It’s really eye-opening to experience different cultures at a young age. Snowboarding has given me so much to be thankful for, and it just so happens that snowboarding is my vehicle to travel to all these crazy places for free. And you’ve been traveling with Brown Cinema lately? It’s basically our perfect snowboard world. We’re doing it the way we want to. Evan Lefebvre at Adidas really had our back and hooked it up with enough money to get Butters [Brock Nielsen] to film. We got Scott [Blum] and Harrison [Gordon] to come along and we went to Japan. We didn’t have anybody telling us where to be or what to do. We just did the whole thing ourselves. Butters filmed and whoever wasn’t snowboarding would film a second angle. It was a very natural style of snowboarding, I guess. Like filming a movie, but not writing any script. You kind of roll into it. It’s like jazz. You never really know where it’s going next, until you’re there and then you go somewhere else. The excitement of that, the element of surprise, tends to produce fruitful endings. You can almost feel the energy. It seems like you’ve always kept snowboarding strictly on your own terms, whether with projects like Brown Cinema, or Givin , or when you walked away from sponsors and paychecks. Not a lot of snowboarders would be as bold or as dead set in their ways. Is it stubbornness? Where does that come from? My dad’s the nicest dude and he’ll give everybody so many chances, but he’s also like, “If you don’t respect me, I’m not going to respect you.” Photo: Jerome Tanon I always start with full respect for anybody right off the bat, but if you try to play me like a chess piece, then that pisses me off. I’d rather work at the shittiest job than have one where someone thinks they own me. Freedom is a lot more important than money at the end of the day. And that’s the situation you’ve created for yourself with snowboarding, it’s a job, but you don’t have that many “bosses” to answer to. Yeah. I have it about as good as I’ve ever had it, or I’ve ever known anybody to have it. As far as complete freedom, there are still days when I have to put on a pink jacket, maybe once a year. There’s a degree of compromise I have to make, a degree I’m willing to accept. But I just draw a line—I can’t tell you exactly what that line is, but I know it when I feel it. Plus, when you turn the thing you love into the thing you do for work, there’s this trade off. There’s an Oscar Wilde quote, “Each man kills the thing he loves.” It seems like you’ve tried hard to steer clear of that scenario. I have a friend who always says, “Hold on loosely, but don’t let go.” It’s from an old rock song. It really resonates with me. If you squeeze it, you’re going to kill it. KEEGAN VALAIKA 061
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 15.4: Page 61
