Sometimes our best lessons are our hardest lessons. Respect for slowly working your way back into the mountains. For sure. That day before it happened, we were stressing on time and trying to get our runs in. I think the crew was uncomfortable, but we chose to ignore that and pushed on. It was Louif ’s [Paradis] first time riding in a helicopter and snowboarding that type of terrain, and I was trying to calm him down because he was scared about riding Alaska. I was trying to lead the path. “No, it’s all good… Things are chill… It’s not as gnarly as it seems, maybe.” But before [the burial] happened, we were riding a face that didn’t have a lot of entry points, so we were doing toe-ins, jumping out of the helicopter onto edges and ridges that the helicopter couldn’t land on. Louif was like, “What the fuck are we doing?” But everyone was like, “Oh, we got to get our runs in.” Looking back that was a big part of it. We should have been like, “Let’s slow down. Let’s as-sess. Maybe this run isn’t worth it. Maybe we just look at the signs, or listen to the mountain a little more.” We ignored some of the warning signs for sure. And I felt like a lot of that was on me. I’m sure they’re not holding it against you. Nobody does, but it’s so often that in hindsight, and hearing a lot of different people’s stories about backcountry accidents and avalanches and things like this, that we see those signs are often ignored. With all the training that we do, there is that side of things that is just so valid. When you bring filming into the mix, there’s a sense of urgency that is blinding sometimes. If we were just freeriding it wouldn’t have been as stressful, and maybe we would’ve been more patient and safer. There’s a lot going on in our heads and it’s not always visible. Aside from the accident, you have dealt with anxiety and depression over the time that we’ve been friends. How do you see that manifesting for yourself at this point? I’ve always been very awkward and nervous about interacting with people that I’m not comfortable with, and that’s a big gen-erality right there. But there’s only a certain amount of people in my life that I feel comfortable with being around. Outside of that, a lot of times it’s really hard to interact with the general public, or people that I look up to, or people that I don’t know well. It makes me a recluse sometimes, and hard to get things done and manage my life, honestly. It makes me feel a certain disconnect from snowboarding. I feel like I don’t connect with the younger generation. I’m almost scared to try to interact with the younger generation and the kids coming up. And I want to share snowboarding with them and be a part of snowboarding for a long time and be in the mix. But it’s so hard sometimes for me to feel like a part of snowboarding when I shy away from those interactions and those functions and events that put my-self in a state of vulnerability. It’s really hard for me to go and try to shoot the shit with people, because I don’t feel like I belong there anymore. And that really hinders me from trying to con-nect with that side of things. But, at this point, I’m trying to put myself into more situations where I’m uncomfortable, because I think that is a good thing to try to cope with and manage. I always come back to you being a snowboarder—you simply be-ing who you are—you are always a part of it. You mentioned sad music. How does that tie into things? I noticed you’ve even been peppering emo into some of your edits. Recently I’ve been making it a point to mix my Instagram posts with the music of my roots and growing up as an emo kid. It’s been fun leaning into being myself more on social media like that. I think that emo, the term and genre, has a kind of dirty stink to it in a lot of ways. But I love it. Because emo music to me is not what emo music is to somebody outside of the circle. People think that this shitty mall pop punk wave of a thing is real emo music and it’s totally not. Those bands like Panic! at the Disco. That’s not emo music. But before that, there’s a long his-tory of actual emo music that people don’t know about. Emo music stemmed from hardcore music in the 80s. The hardcore scene in the 80s was super extreme. It was hard hitting. There were some people in the hardcore scene that were like, “I want to bring out a little more emotion to this music,” but along those [sad] vibes. So, the first bands that started playing around with this were Rites of Spring and Embrace, and they started bringing more emotion into their guitar riffs as well as their vo-cals. At first, emo was dubbed emo-core, which was an extension of hardcore. And what’s funny is that name, emo-core, was first dubbed by Thrasher Magazine . Two guys from those bands, Rite of Spring and Embrace, went on to form Fugazi. A lot of people credit Fugazi as the original emo band that influenced the whole emo revolution. That was the late 80s, early 90s. Then came all the bands that to me are really the quintessential emo music in the late 90s, early 2000s. Bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, The Promise Ring, Piebald, Texas Is the Reason, Mineral, American Football. That’s real emo music. Then we saw a kind of the explo-sion of emo and bands like Saves the Day, Brand New, Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday—those are some of my favorite bands. The mid 2000s and 2010s was when it all went to shit, and it was more of a scene with Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance. That’s more pop punk, and what some people call “mall emo,” which I don’t like as much. 076 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.3: Page 76
