Ben Poechman is a snowboarder, artist and a true-grit farm kid who finds a way to make things happen with the resources he’s got. As summer winds down and we start looking at the pow days to come, Ben chimes in with his story, his ideas, and some good advice on what to do when all you have to ride is a ditch in the middle of the country.
Watch Ben in the North Face flick Halation if you wanna see him shred before listening to this pod, or look at his artwork.
Highlights from Ben’s conversation with Feet Banks:
Snowboarding and Early Days in Ontario
I didn’t have access to coaching and the whole competitive side of it. And I would have loved to play hockey. It looked pretty fun. All my buddies were doing it, but it was too expensive. There were too many kids in my family. I didn’t have time with the farm and everything. And snowboarding was this thing that I could kind of make on my own. I could go and make my own terrain park in the cow pasture.
And that was a liberating feeling of like, “OK, I may not be able to play on this hockey team with all these guys and go to these tournaments. But I can make something in the backyard where I can do my sport and push it, take it as far as I want to.” There’s no one saying I can or can’t or how far I could go. I think the arc of my career has been very gradual and slow and I don’t have the fancy big tricks…
Q: How often did you get to go to a hill when things were starting to click?
Once I got my [driver’s] license, then it was like pretty game on. I started to make some friends who were down to carpool and we would go. But even then it was only once a week. There was also this hill 10 minutes away in Walkerton with a pretty famous rail. I would go and build a jump there. So if I couldn’t get to the mountain, I would go to this park with a hill that was steeper than the cow pasture, and build a kicker.
Moving West
When I moved out west right after high school, my parents were probably worried, like What’s he gonna do? I was just partying and a little bit lost and just having fun and not sure how it’s going to work. I didn’t have sponsors, no shop hookups or anything like that.
And so I was just like, All right, I’m just going to go to Whistler and get better at snowboarding and put my days in. My first season I rode 150 days. All park. I didn’t know the mountain at all. Unless someone took me, I wasn’t going anywhere else.
Q: And then I think we had a crappy season out here and you went home to Ontario for a winter.
That might have been the year I did the Selfiestickman video. It puked snow in Ontario. We had originally planned to film like an urban video. So it’s funny. My first few seasons, I did one full season my first year. And then from then on for a few years, I would only come to Whistler for the spring and the summer to kind of extend my Ontario season. I was still focused on urban riding. That’s what I was good at.
Q: And you were starting to film with some buddies.
At that point we had a little film crew. We were just doing it because we loved it. And if we could get some free gear, we were stoked and we’d go on little rail trips and stay six guys in a hotel room.
Turning to Art
There were moments where I was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing in this world, but I know I love snowboarding,” but …it just wasn’t filling up my cup. So I started looking and I found a Craigslist ad for a stone carving apprenticeship. I went to the interview, got the gig, did it for three months. And then the guy who owned the gallery just asked if I wanted to keep doing it.
Q: You didn’t grow up as an artist, right?
No. My my oldest brother, Matt, was a really talented sketch artist, which was a good and a bad thing because it was like, “Okay, I see what’s possible…” But also I was comparing myself to him and thinking, “I suck. I’m not even going to try.” So I stopped drawing when I was seven years old or eight years old. And I never tried again, basically. I couldn’t find a medium that was working for me. And so I just was like, All right, I’m just gonna stay focused on snowboarding. It wasn’t until I started making stone art that I said, “Okay, I guess I could do this.” And then from there, I started painting.
Hear the full conversation here. This episode was sponsored by Citizen Watch.
