Nice Work--If You Can Take It

Roxy the cat had the right idea, curling up in the sock drawer for a midday snooze. A light rain was falling outside; Stevie Nicks was on the stereo. The moment couldn’t be more mellow.

“Mom! Mmmom!”

Cara-Beth Burnside was shouting from the kitchen. Relax? Who had time? Burnside had a plane to catch. Bags to pack. Calls to make. Calls to take. Forget the rainy day atmosphere--a professional snowboarder like Burnside can’t afford to snooze.

“Mom!” Burnside moaned. “I think this camera’s wrecked. Shoot! My passport. What’d I do with my passport?”

Mary-Love Burnside rushed in from the living room, looked at her daughter and sighed. Cara-Beth’s schedule, typically frantic, zipped into hyperspeed the past two months. A World Cup competition in Switzerland. Another in Austria. Photo shoots in Utah. Appearances in Japan. Trade shows in Vegas. The U.S. Open in Vermont. . . .

Cara-Beth? Try Cara-Blur.

Visits to her home base--her parents’ house in Orange--are little more than pit stops: Hi Mom. Here’s my laundry. Gotta go. Now she was off to Oregon and after that . . . where was it again? Colorado? New Zealand? Her mother couldn’t keep track.

“I don’t even know where I’m going,” Cara-Beth Burnside said, stuffing goggles, jackets and knit beanies into her snowboard bag. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Maybe a month, maybe not. Who knows.”

Burnside, 27, managed a weary shrug. Months of jet lag were taking their toll. Don’t get her wrong, she said. Snowboarding is one fine way to make a living. Her sponsor, Vermont-based Burton snowboards, provides her with equipment, pays her travel expenses and recently began manufacturing her own signature board--a dream come true for any aspiring boarder.

There are days, though, when all she wants is time. Time to hang out, take Mom to lunch, have coffee with friends.

“Some people think it’s really easy to do what I do, but it gets to be like a job,” says Burnside, who figures she’s on the road 90% of the year. “Sometimes you just don’t want to go.”

The phone rings. The caller details a recent party Burnside missed. “Really?” Burnside asks. “Was it a rager?”

Her bedroom--you’ll know it by the wood-bead curtain over the door--features a bookcase of Nancy Drew mysteries and titles on acupuncture and self-esteem.

Her closet is stuffed with trophies, not from snowboarding but skateboarding, Burnside’s first love. Many consider her to be the best female skateboarder in the country. Her snowboarding skills--especially in the halfpipe--were honed from years of rolling up and down steep walls of pools and skateboard parks, of skating “the vert,” of catching big air.

She has so many skateboard trophies, in fact, she has to keep her clothes on shelves in the hallway--right beside her collection of incense and perfumed body oils. “Stuff that’s not tested on animals,” she says.

A world map stretches across one wall. Blue pins mark Burnside’s travels: from Bogota, Colombia, where Burnside skateboarded in a soft-drink commercial, to Tokyo, where autograph seekers chanted her name.

A flier from a holistic health center hangs on a bulletin board. Burnside’s favorite treasures hang close by: her college diploma (bachelor’s in human development) from UC Davis, and a small, metal trivet that bears these words:

Wherever you wander

Wherever you roam

Be happy and healthy

And glad to come home.

Corny? Kitschy? Burnside doesn’t care. Her parents’ house holds special memories: learning to skateboard, waking up in her backyard fort, and riding Sugar Babe, her Shetland pony, deep into the hills of what was once rural Orange County.

“I miss those days,” Burnside says.

But who had time to reminisce? With the rain, traffic to Los Angeles International Airport was going to be hell.

*

Snowboarding, in its purest form, has been around since the mid-1960s. Skiers bolted two skis together. Surfers took to the slopes on scaled-down surfboards. Skateboarders tried replacing wheels with metal runners.

Today, snowboarding is a $600-million-a-year industry, bound for the 1998 Winter Olympics. Its hip quotient makes skiing look downright stodgy.

Some believe it will overtake skiing in popularity within the next 10 to 15 years. Parents are signing up for snowboarding lessons with their kids, lest they be left behind.

But the greatest focus this season may be on women. Snowboard equipment for women. Snowboard clothing for women. Snowboard camps for women. Ski Industries America, a trade organization of ski and snowboard manufacturers, reports that women make up 25% of the market. That figure is expected to surge.

The result? Many companies are clamoring for female boarders to sponsor. In the latest issue of women’s snowboard magazine Fresh and Tasty, seven companies are listed under the heading “Riders Wanted.” Contracts can be lucrative; some of the top pro riders earn $100,000 a year or more.

The hoopla hasn’t been without controversy. Some female boarders complain that the male-dominated industry puts more emphasis on how they look than how they ride. Advertisements have portrayed female riders in prom dresses, swimming pools and bathtubs.

Snowboarders as sex kittens? Burnside wants no part of it.

She’s seen plenty of sexism in skateboarding, which in its early days encouraged female riders but now practically shuns them. A woman who shows up to skate an empty swimming pool risks being greeted with unwelcome remarks. Some skateboard magazines routinely portray women only as sex objects--and some do so in the crudest ways.

Snowboarding will never reach that low, Burnside believes, because women are taking leading roles in its development. Industry types--such as Darcy Lee, owner of Costa Mesa snowboard clothing company Cold as Ice--are proving themselves on the business end.

And female riders are showing they can be as strong and gutsy as male riders.

*

Tara Dakides loves to soar. It’s what drew her to gymnastics as a kid. It’s what makes her eager to jump out of airplanes.

It’s what landed her in a steel neck brace earlier this year.

Dakides, of Laguna Niguel, was on an Idaho snowboard expedition with some friends in December. On the last run of the day, she hiked to the top of the mountain and attempted a back flip off a wind lip. Dakides, a fledgling pro, landed on her head.

It took nearly an hour for the ski patrol to reach her. As she lay in shock, hearing her friends say, “Breathe, Tara, breathe,” but unable to move, Dakides’ brain locked on one thought:

Will I ever snowboard again?

Doctors told her she had a compression fracture of the spine. But she was lucky, they said. She might easily have been paralyzed.

Seven weeks later, she was surfing Hawaii’s North Shore.

And riding dirt bikes.

And considering a friend’s proposition to go skydiving.

“I basically want to do everything,” says Dakides, 20.

That attitude seems common in snowboarding, a sport that continually sets new limits. Higher, faster, more gnar than ever--the credo of the snowboard generation.

Dresden Howell is terrified of heights. Her favorite part of boarding? Skying off some major cliffs.

“I just went off this pretty big rock while making a video,” says Howell, who grew up in Newport Beach and now lives in slope-close Salt Lake City.

“It was about 45 feet high. I did it. I was so stoked. It was so neato. I love that feeling, going through the air. Seeing how high you are off the ground.”

And her fear of heights?

“Oh, I don’t look down,” Howell says. “Well, I do. It’s such a rush!”

Like Dakides, Howell, 19, hopes to make it big in the sport. For now though, she’s happy just boarding every day in the Utah mountains--even if it means scraping by. She eats Top Ramen for dinner, shares a five-bedroom house with seven people and works occasionally as a janitor at a ski resort to make ends meet.

She often boards at Snowbird, she says, because she can pass for 12--and kids 12 and under get in for free.

“I’m definitely a snowboard bum, but I’m not complaining,” Howell says cheerfully. “Right now, I couldn’t ask for anything better.”

*

Burnside is calling from an airport. It’s been a rough couple of weeks.

She pulled a hamstring snowboarding in Oregon, flew home for a couple days of intensive physical therapy, then rushed to Vermont in time to compete in the U.S. Open snowboarding championships--winning the Big Air title by soaring off a jump 35 feet.

Now she is off to Vail for a charity event, then on to Canada to do some filming. Her hamstring is still hurting.

“I’d like a day just to do nothing, but. . . .” she says.

There’s promo work needed to help push her new signature board. And photo shoots to arrange. And snowboard camps coming her way.

Burnside sighs.

Snowboarding is awesome. Carving a mountain, gliding through fresh powder, blasting a jump and soaring through the sky. . . . Those moments make it all worth it, she says.

But, right now, she could use a good, long snooze.