LEFT TO RIGHT Jess drops into a sketchy backyard setup at the infamous Whistler, BC “Art Barn” in 2007. Some of its visi-tors made it big, some quit, some became legend. Jess is among the latter. Photo: Jarrod Au 2 a.m. at a remote location in Anchorage, AK. The generator had run out of gas late into the session, so Andre Spinelli ran out to to get more. “This was the ender in my breakout part,” Jess says of her segment in Think Thank’s Right Brain Left Brain (2010). “I ate shit so bad the first few tries but when I landed it, [Jesse] Burtner was so not ready for it that he didn’t even pan out. Go check my ender shot. The camera didn’t move. Do you see me now?” Photo: Alex Mertz Were they pretty supportive? They were supportive in gymnastics and all the other sports I played, but I don’t think they saw snowboarding as something worth-while at first. I quit gymnastics for it. I quit everything for it. I quit school for it. But now my mom will be like, “A new building went up in town. I saw some ledges and handrails, maybe a really cool roof you could jump off.” There’s this handrail in front of our house and if she sees skiers or snowboarders setting it up, she’ll run out extension cords with lights and bring them hot chocolate. Back then, I think they felt like I was throwing away a lot of potential. I was in enriched learning programs, they thought I was going to be a doctor, something that looks good on paper, and I was wasting that. You shifted away from all of that though. I always knew, for some reason, that my life was going to have some hard times in it. It was like I was trying to prepare. I moved out when I was 16 with a sketchy boyfriend and quit school. I was working at Wendy’s, walking all the way across town to get home after my mid-night shift. I didn’t want help. I just wanted to be independent. You wound up going to an alternative school? There was a good ski racing program in Vernon, and they had a school that let them go to the hill all the time. We didn’t have anything like that for snowboarders. I was like, “I want that.” So, I freestyled it. There was this school for dropouts. I was identifying with the burn-outs and the outcasts, and that’s where they went. Vernon was super rough around the edges, and I’d pretty much grown up at the skate-park, where there was always sketchy shit going on—a lot of homeless people, a lot of meth. I went to that school and didn’t quite graduate— I went to graduation, but I still had a couple credits left. Were you still focused on snowboarding? From 14 to 17, snowboarding was all I thought about. When I was 18, I started fading out. I was hanging out with the wrong people and none of them snowboarded. There’s a period of my life between the ages of 18 and 22 that I’ve blocked out of my head. But I do remember that I was not really giving a shit, especially when I was dating that guy. I was just trying to survive. He didn’t snowboard, he was more like a metalhead, skate rat, and was into some bad shit. I worked to pay rent but didn’t have money to insure my car to go up to the hill. I didn’t think that I had any kind of freestyle potential, really, because as much as I was doing tricks, we didn’t even have a park. We just had a pipe. So I would do the pipe events and race boardercross. I felt like maybe I just sucked. No matter what I did at the competitions, I felt like the judges weren’t even looking half the time. But I liked boardercross because whoever crossed the finish line first would win. And you did well, right? Were you rolling solo and winning? It was me and my best friend, Karla Charlton. We didn’t have a coach. We’d be warming up each other’s legs and waxing our own boards and being super sketchy. I won a race once and I lit up a cigarette in the fin-ish corral. This guy runs over, rips it out of my hand. He’s like, “This is on TV! You can’t be doing this!” I was like, “I just won the race, dude. I’m going to have a smoke.” How did you afford it? We would do the Neil Edgeworth 1 every year because they had prize money. The Nor-Ams had prize money. I always had jobs, too. One dude at the local newspaper was hyped on us, so he’d write these ar-ticles like, “These girls really want to compete and they said that they’ll sleep on the ground if they have to.” People from Vernon, different businesses, would give us $100 here, $100 there. We had a hot-dog sale in front of Safeway that made enough to get to Quebec for Na-tionals and actually sleep in a hotel. 1 Banked Slalom at Big White, BC. 072 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 18.4: Page 72
