Are you married? No, we’re not married. At some point we might run off to Fiji and get waves and get married. We’ve been talking about it recently. Our kids are asking us if we’re married or not, and they kind of want us to get married. I think it would be a fun party for us to do as a family. We’d be doing it for the right reasons, and it would be a fun addition to our relationship. But it hasn’t been our highest priority. We’re committed— we’re completely committed to each other, so there hasn’t been any urgency to get married. Can you tell me about your kids? I have Paavo, who is 23. He is from an earlier marriage that I was in. He is doing awesome. Annette helped parent him and did an amazing job helping him from his grade school level all through high school. And he had another mom, basically—that was Natasha, [Lib Tech team rider] Matteo [Soltane]’s mom, who also helped with him. He has turned out to be a rock-solid kid. We had a day snowboarding about seven years ago where I realized that he was snowboarding better than I was. How did that make you feel? I had mixed feelings. I got an ego, so it hurt a little, but then I was also proud of him, so that felt great. He graduated from Western [Wash-ington University] a year or so ago and majored in digital design and business and creative writing. He landed a job as a content creator for a small company that does online brand management. He’s got a great girlfriend and a good set of friends, and he’s done amazing. As a parent, the scariest thing is your kids run the gauntlet of life and they have to make all these decisions and you hope they make good ones, and you have to let ’em go. He’s made me proud at every turn. Then, Annette and I have two kids, Hoko and Ailo. Hoko is named after a river that we really like. My last name is Finnish, and Ailo is the Scandinavian god of recreation and good times. Ailo is 7, and Hoko just turned 10. They both ski and snowboard and love it. I started skiing again, just for fun with the kids, and I love it. But I’m a snowboarder at heart. They’ve been surfing a bunch and loving the water. I’m not trying to put any pressure on them, but we’ve been fortunate. Ailo is picking up the piano and he is super-focused and obsessed, which is something he might have inherited from me—not the piano but the obsessiveness. Hoko is a natural artist and an organizer and a thoughtful person. She’s athletic, but she’s on all kinds of creativity along with sports. Those two together through COVID became an amazing team. We have a tight little family and things have been better than I could have imagined. I know that life doesn’t always go that way. When you’re a parent, it’s your job to keep the kids alive. And it’s a scary thing to do—it’s scary to bring a kid into this world right now between the discussions of civil wars in the U.S. and the radical politics and, well, I thought everything was gonna be calmer [laughs]. But Mike and I grew up as Cold War kids and we didn’t think we were gonna live past 30. It’s scary no matter what. The love you get from your kids is mind-blowing. It’s hard to even fathom. You just gotta live in the moment. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Switch layback at the Mt. Hood, OR, summer testing grounds, circa 2014. Photo: Tim Zimmerman Cold and happy with the family, 2021, on the Washington coast. Photo: Chris Coralline Gravitational pull with Hoko, 2016. Photo: Tim Zimmerman Wacky old man and the groms. From left to right: Hoko, Paavo and Ailo. 2022. Photo: Annette Veihelmann SPLITBOARDING WITH TEMPLE These days I live 30 minutes from the Olympic mountain range. When the snow is good, it has amazing terrain. No one has the place more dialed than Temple Cummins — he has been living out here for 10 or 15 years and has explored every nook and cranny. He knows exactly when and where to go. He goes alone a lot because everyone has dif-ferent schedules, and his parenting/shred windows often don’t allow anything but efficient use of time. I am down for some uphill suffering, downhill thrills and quiet time in the woods, so the past couple years he has taken me under his wing and given me a partial grand tour of his favorite spots. We tend to stick to the forested areas, choosing tree-well haz-ards over big-crown avalanches. It’s steep, raw and uncontrolled, but mostly fun, choose-your-adventure, backcountry pow shredding. I am in pretty good shape, but Temp crushes me on the way up and on the way down. He is so smooth and effortless — gracefully skipping through pillows and trees, powering through turns at max speeds — that it’s hard to understand the subtleties of his snowboard mastery. Still, he is always there making sure I am all good at the bottom — other than the fact that he likes sending me off things I shouldn’t hit and quietly laughing at me when I tell him how fucked it was. It’s like having your own personal splitboard pow guide. You al-ways sleep well after a day of uphill skiing and downhill snowboarding. And you guys live near the factory, near the mountains, near the ocean. You’ve got it all nearby. We love being close to the water and that was always one of my dreams growing up. With surf, you gotta be there when it’s good. Being here is a calming thing for me. With the mountain, you can read it a bit better. My dad and I share a cabin up at Snoqualmie Pass; we go up and stay at Hyak all the time, and Hyak is my home mountain. But when I’m out on the Peninsula, you got the whole Olympic mountain range. You have to work for access there, but it’s great for splitboarding and there’s Hurricane Ridge, which is open sometimes on the weekend. Even though it’s getting busier everywhere nowadays, there are still places to be discovered. If you’re willing to work, you can find empty surf, empty lines. As I’ve gotten older, I’m not as desperate. I enjoy the whole adventure. 086 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4: Page 86
