LEFT TO RIGHT Rock fishing in Nootka Sound, BC at age “6 or 7” on the family boat known as Carmanah. Robin spent a good chunk of her childhood sailing the Strait of Georgia. Photo: Van Gyn Family Archives Performing as a sailor at Disneyland, age 10. Photo: Van Gyn Family Archives FREE-RANGE LIVING Snowboarding wasn’t really on Robin’s radar as a child. Most every-thing else was. A plethora of team sports, camping and sailing filled her free time, as did piano and violin lessons. She took voice lessons and musical theater and performed song and dance routines (to this day she’s still liable to break out in song-and-dance at any moment). Alongside twin sisters Jill and Lindsay (two years her elder), Robin carved out her own space and learned to laugh a lot. Her mom, Geral-dine (aka Geri), recently retired from her tenured professor of physical education position at the University of Victoria—her dad, Frank, is a dentist. With both of her parents working, Robin would shuttle from activity to activity. It was, as Robin says, “free-range living.” “I grew up swimming in rivers, hiking in old growth forests, sailing off the coast of a little island archipelago, jumping off sandstone cliffs into the ocean,” Robin says, remembering her upbringing in Victoria, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, BC. “It’s so rich in biodiversity and outdoor space.” She “didn’t have a curfew” and roamed the little city, nearby beach-es and mountains with her crew. At one point in her teens, there was an illicit border crossing or two. “I had access to some really nice luxu-ries as a kid—especially boats,” Robin says. “My dad had this Zodiac dinghy and me and my girlfriends loaded up in it and drove it across the strait [of Juan de Fuca] to San Juan Island multiple times. No passports, just life jackets. At one point, we had to bum some gas off somebody. We would just go. We had friends there, in Roche Harbor.” One of those friends was Javas Lehn, a well-known snowboarder in the Pacific Northwest. In high school, he invited her to Mt. Baker, WA, where she didn’t even ride—she didn’t know how. But it got her thinking about snowboarding. She eventually rode a bit at Mount Washington a couple hours north of Victoria. Then, upon graduating from high school, Robin moved to Whistler. “I was a full-on beginner and I moved into a studio apartment with four women—two of them were strippers from Australia,” Rob-in says. “They were so much fun to be around. But it was, as a young person, kind of sexually awkward. They were older and there would be random men at our place. I wasn’t attached to sexuality in that way. We had a great time snowboarding together that summer, that winter, then I moved out.” Robin worked random jobs and rode as much as she could. Despite her late arrival to the sport, she wanted to become a pro snowboarder. “Some things in life are just so clear,” Robin says. “It seemed like a long shot because I was so late to the game. But there was no half-assing it, coming from a family of professionals who might have liked to see me follow their paths. I thought, ‘If you’re going to do it, you better fucking do it.’” Yet Whistler wasn’t the place for her to do it. “I saw a lot of party-ing—hard partying—in Whistler,” Robin says. “And I have had addic-tion in my family, with my twin sisters and my grandparents. It was enough to almost tear us apart at times. I’m able to party, but I do draw the line at a certain point. Hard drugs were everywhere and I didn’t want to be a part of that scene.” Indeed, Robin’s move to Whistler was about more than snowboard-ing. She also saw it as an escape. “There were some really tumultuous years with my sisters going through drug addiction and the toll that takes on your family,” Robin says. “My parents were close to separating because they were fighting about how to deal with the addiction. I be-came really angry and confused—I needed to leave. I needed an outlet and I poured myself into snowboarding—Whistler was my way to get away from the family roller coaster that I felt was out of my control.” It took years for Robin to process the complications addiction brought to her family. “I was super angry for a really long time,” Robin says. “That showed in my personality. I hated everything. Finally I got sick of being angry. I realized that I had some demons and some forgiveness to get to, because I really love all of my family so deep and dearly that I didn’t want to be angry at them anymore. I realized that I don’t actually need to forgive them for anything because they went through something as bad or worse than what I went through. There were traumatic experiences that triggered their addiction, the guilt of doing the rest of the family harm. “Family is all you have, the deepest love in your life. I wanted that love back. My whole family wanted it. A few years ago, we made our way through it and we have this beautiful thing. My parents are still together, my sister started a peanut butter company [named Fatso] that is slaying and her twin is doing the exact same thing, killing it in business. They’re all happy and healthy.” ROBIN VAN GYN 067
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 19.1: Page 67
