If Emily Jackson keeps kayaking at the level she is now, she will soon become the top female freestyle paddler out there—and she’s only 17. -- By Cristina Opdahl

I unroll a long piece of brown packing paper in front of Emily Jackson, who sits at the kitchen island in her family’s new log house in Rock Island, Tennessee. I ask Emily to write down the important moments of her life so far, which she happily does.

There was 1997, when her family moved into a 36-foot RV and began a life on the road, driving from river to river, where her father competed in kayak competitions and worked designing and selling boats for a kayak manufacturer. There was 1999, when in New Zealand she was in a port-a-potty that got pushed over. “Scarred forever,” she writes; she then turns to me and in her typical good humor explains with a wry smile, “I wasn’t supersmothered in feces, but there were feces on me. The problem was we didn’t have a shower so we were wiping it out of my hair with paper towels.”

In 2001 there was a happy family vacation in Sort, Spain, where “Dad won Worlds.” In 2003 Emily “fell in love with kayaking.” In 2004 she competed on the U.S. freestyle kayak team for the first time, in the Junior Girls Division, which went to Australia for the International Freestyle Championships. In 2005 she developed confidence in her kayaking; “First big win—Teva Mountain Games!” she writes. And she “went to Africa and refurbished a school.” The timeline goes on to list her second win at Teva Mountain Games in 2006, the conquest of her current boyfriend—“convinced Nick Troutman to date me”, and another big event in the life of a 17-year-old girl who has never had her own bedroom: “House in Rock Island finished. First room to myself.”

Emily is the top female freestyle kayaker in the United States. Last fall she scored the highest points of all women at the U.S. Team Trials—competing as a junior. She competed at the trials in the Junior Girls Division because she’d decided to compete in this year’s World Championships as a junior, something that’s perhaps devised to keep some pressure off of the rising star. In the past two years on the freestyle kayak circuit, she’s started taking big wins in the women’s professional class from the top international competitors.
Emily—in faded jeans, a gathered cap-sleeve T-shirt, and pearl earrings—is also a typical teenage girl. Her upper body is only slightly more muscled than that of the average teenager, and she walks with confidence, slightly up on her tiptoes, her shoulders back. Despite growing up in an RV and having traveled to Africa, Europe, New
Zealand, and Australia—to follow her kayaking father and often to kayak herself—Emily has an air of innocence. She could easily pass for 15. She turned 17 in March while in Uganda, training for the
World Championships on the White Nile.

Freestyle kayak competitions, or “rodeos,” as they are also
called, are a numbers game. Perform the highest-scoring tricks in
a specific period of time and you win. Whereas freestyle skiers perform big aerial tricks launching off of a ramp, freestyle kayakers perform theirs in large river waves or hydraulics, river features
that look like enormous crashed ocean waves, with huge, frothy masses of roaring foam. Today freestyle kayakers paddle into large hydraulics that kayakers used to avoid. They spin their boats around and perform blunts or loops or the helix (all of which look quite
similar to an untrained eye) or a PanAm, an upside-down trick
executed with one’s face hovering a couple feet over the water.
The sport has been around for only 25 years or so, but for the past 10 it’s taken over as the rock-and-roll discipline of kayaking,
attracting young boaters seeking sponsorships and fame. While it
has yet to gain status as an Olympic sport, a number of freestyle
kayakers from the United States, New Zealand, Europe, and even Japan manage to pull together enough money from sponsorships
and prize purses to live on while traveling from competition to
competition, river to river.

Emily is the daughter of Eric Jackson, known to all but his
wife as EJ. He’s a ubiquitous figure in freestyle kayaking, hands
down its most successful competitor and by far the one with the greatest longevity. At age 43 EJ, who also owns and operates a kayak manufacturing company, is competing against boys more than 20 years younger—and winning. His personality looms as large in the sport as his athletic ability, and he is as equally known for his ego as his accomplishments. (This year’s Jackson Kayak promotional video features a shot of EJ dancing bare-chested in tight shorts for the camera.)

When Emily was a young girl, her father was traveling a lot from their Maryland home to compete and teach kayak clinics. Emily’s mother, Kristine, stayed home to raise Emily and her brother, Dane, who was born in 1993, and to answer the phones for the family-owned kayak school. It was an unsatisfactory arrangement. EJ wanted more freedom to travel; Kristine wanted a husband who was home more to help with the kids and the business.

And then Kristine had an idea. “Eric was lamenting one day about his friend Dan Gavere who had the life,” she remembers. “He wasn’t always returning home. He could go from one place to the next without having to be somewhere else. And I thought to myself, we can just pack up. We can go, too.”

The couple sold everything they had, dismantled the kayak school, bought a 36-foot RV, and hit the road. They minimized expenses. They parked as close to the rivers as they could. Kristine took the children on hikes and home-schooled them at the RV kitchen table.
“It was a great learning experience for the kids,” says Kristine. “We had them take their favorite toys and put them into four buckets. Then the next week it was three buckets, then two. Then we got it down to one bucket. They realized they didn’t need much.”

Dane had taken to kayaking from the earliest age, actually running his first class IV rapid when he was just shy of three years old. But Emily didn’t care for it, preferring to stay off the water with her mother, playing board games and reading books. The family was on the road year-round from 1997 to 2002, from when Emily was seven to 12 years old. During that time she didn’t have any friends her age or feel connected to the other, older paddlers who were also traveling from one competition to the next.

When Emily turned 12, she lacked confidence. “It’s definitely a bummer, but I got influenced by magazines and other people’s ideas of the way I should look. I was unhealthy,” she says. “I wasn’t active. I weighed 140, which is a lot for a 12-year-old. It was definitely a tough time for me.”

Suddenly, it seemed like a good reason to go kayaking after all. One day, after the family began spending winters in Rock Island, she asked her father to teach her how to roll. Having watched kayakers roll her whole life, she learned right away. Dane learned the same day.

To see Emily kayak today is to see that anything is possible. Here is a baby-faced teenage girl who paddles powerfully into large hydraulics that most kayakers only admire from afar and flips around and around in them, twisting and turning and catching air off the big foam pile. When she flushes out of the hole—what must be like getting flushed down a very powerful toilet—she rolls up downstream, smiling, eyes bright.

Emily started competing in very small kayak competitions in 2003 at age 13, just one year after she learned to roll. She entered her first international competition the following year, when she traveled to Australia to compete in the “Pre-Worlds,” the name for the international championships on an off-year, on the U.S. Junior Team. She placed second. In 2005 Emily had a kayaking breakthrough. She started to nail more tricks and develop more confidence and, despite a disappointing finish at the World Championships that year, placed first in the professional women’s Freestyle Kayaking category at the highly competitive Teva Mountain Games. In 2006 she won again at Teva and placed second in the Downriver race. In preparation for this year’s World Championships, she outscored all of the U.S. women at the U.S. Team Trials last August.

Two things come up often when I ask Emily’s family and friends about her kayaking abilities. One is that with more drive she could be even better. The second is that she is a killer in competition. “Emily could be the best if she had a bit more motivation,” Clay Wright, a senior member of Team Jackson Kayak and a longtime family friend, wrote to me in an e-mail. “She shines when the crowd shows up . . . even more so than her dad.”

This is not something Emily particularly cares to hide. When I seek to confirm with her that, as her father has told me, she is so good because she has been paddling every day for the past five years, she laughs. “No.” “Every other day?” I ask. “Let’s say every third day,” she answers. Regardless of her training schedule, there is no doubt that Emily has a knack for turning it on during competitions. Last year at the Reno River Festival, one of the bigger singular kayak competitions on the circuit, Emily got blown off the wave immediately. She had time to paddle back up and get in the hole again, but she got blown off a second time.

With the clock ticking, she charged back in the hole a third time and pulled off enough big moves to rocket herself into a third-place podium finish. “She’s got a tremendous competitive brain,” says Kristine, who doesn’t kayak but can describe a helix or PanAm and tell you their point scores with no problem. “There are people who do their worst in competitions, and she is definitely not one of them. That’s really a gift. She’s able to pull it together when she needs to pull it together.”

When I ask Clay to list some of Emily’s kayaking weaknesses, he says, “Everything comes so easily to her. Oh my god, I can’t believe she can do a McNasty!” (an upside down aerial spin) And yet there are aspects of kayaking that have not been particularly easy, as one might imagine for a 17-year-old girl with a father as her coach, and a singularly driven father at that. “Dane pushes closer to the edge of his abilities,” says EJ. “Emily wants to perfect moves before she tries another. It used to be that I’d push her to try something new. I’d make her cry a lot. I’d ask her, ‘Do you want me to stop pushing you?’ and she’d say, ‘No, just push me medium hard,’ and then I’d do that and she’d cry anyway. Now I don’t push her at all. She’s going to do what she’s going to do.” “It’s hard when you’re in the eddy with three coaches and they are your father, your brother, and your boyfriend,” Emily explains. “Sometimes I love it, and sometimes I just want them to be my father, my brother, and my boyfriend.”

As her timeline reveals, however, there is more. At last year’s Teva Mountain Games, Emily was awarded the Full Throttle, an honor bestowed on an athlete who “gives back to their sport or community.” Emily gave $10,000, a combination of prize money and donations she’d gathered, to Soft Power Health and Soft Power Education, two nonprofit organizations based in Uganda that fight malaria, run a health clinic, and rebuild schools. This year she plans to give prize money and donations again, which will build a playground at a renovated school near the White Nile and help put a female Ugandan student through medical school. Giving money to a nonprofit certainly does not hurt an athlete’s image—or the image of Jackson Kayak, the company EJ started in 2004, which, according to EJ, last year was the top seller of whitewater kayaks over all other manufacturers.

In the Jackson family’s photo albums and videos, Emily is often pictured with a child on her hip. She seems genuinely drawn to the kids and, in a teenage idealist sort of way, to the idea of doing good. “I thought at first that the giving money and Soft Power Health and all that might be largely for publicity,” says Clay. “It’s good publicity, no doubt. But I’ve realized she’s really into it. It’s genuine. She loves those kids. Emily was all over the kids in Africa. I’m thinking tuberculosis, AIDS, hepatitis. I shake their hands—don’t get me wrong—but she’s just all up in those kids. She teaches them patty cake, lets a little baby slobber all over her head.”

On the Jackson Kayak website at the bottom of Emily’s bio page, the last item listed under Accomplishments reads: “Convinced Nick Troutman to go out with me!” “My father is the top kayaker in the United States, and my boyfriend is the top kayaker in Canada,” Emily tells me when I ask her about Nick, then grins, “and they are training partners.” Nick Troutman, 18, has a contagious smile, a mop of straight blond hair, and a soul patch. He is practically family at the Jacksons’ since he started spending winters with them a few years ago to train while his home river, the Ottawa, is frozen over. Nick is, by EJ’s estimation, EJ’s biggest competition at the upcoming Worlds. He also happens to be a diversion for Emily, who sneaks hugs with her boyfriend throughout the day.

I ask Nick if he pushes Emily. “On swings,” he replies, smiling. The family still spends six months a year in the RV, traveling from river to river. Rock Island, where they spend the winters, is a tiny town near Rock Island State Park, where a dam at the confluence of the Collins and Caney Fork rivers has created two scenic lakes. It offers much in budding dogwood trees and training hydraulics but not many teenage diversions. “There’s no mall here; there’s nowhere to go. I have no friends here, no houses to drive to,” Emily says to me, to explain why she isn’t in a hurry to learn how to drive her white Subaru Outback. But, if she finishes up her high school studies by sometime next winter, she says, “I get to go to New Zealand with Nick!”

Living and traveling and training with her father, brother, and boyfriend can be claustrophobic at times. The bonuses of living and traveling and training with her boyfriend make up for it. “What are playboaters’ fears?” I ask Clay Wright, while we watch EJ, Nick, Emily, and Dane trade turns doing cartwheels in the Rock Island hole. “Worry of blowing a shoulder, breaking a nose on a paddle, cracking a rib, tearing rib muscles—these are playboating experts trying to do aggressive tricks in low-volume boats. There’s fear of pain,” he answers. We’re being pleasantly misted from Twin Falls, two thin veils of water cascading down the cliff on the opposite side of the river. Dane was first in the hole this training session, Emily one of the last. The hole is nearly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and, should I get in a borrowed kayak and paddle around, I’ve been advised to avoid it.

Emily takes a turn but sticks to the gentler, kinder shoulder of the hole and gets flushed out immediately. “Go to the middle!” yells Clay out of earshot of Emily. He finishes his answer to my question about freestyle kayakers’ fears. “And for Emily, there’s fear of disappointing her dad.” The Worlds, to be held a month from my visit to Rock Island, will be located on a big-river feature, a crashing wave on the Ottawa River known as Buseater. “Are waves relatively benign?” I ask Emily and Nick. “No foam pile to throw you around?” “No way,” says Nick. “This one’s like the point on an ocean wave when it’s crashing down.” “Yeah,” says Emily. “Blow a McNasty and you’re falling like 4 feet right onto your face.”

Other aspects of kayaking are pretty scary as well, like running waterfalls. “I’ve thrown up before I’ve run waterfalls,” Emily tells me when we’re going over difficult rapids she has run. “I am scared of heights. Rock Island Falls is a 20-foot waterfall that I don’t like to do but I’ve done five times, maybe 10 times.”

Two winters ago in Uganda, while the family and friends were running the White Nile, Emily started to walk around a particularly nasty run, 20-foot high Kalagala Falls, and then changed her mind, turned around, and ran it. “I swam, which is fine—I was glad I did it,” she says. “It was the first time I swam in three years. My paddle got ripped out of my hands. I thought I was in the hole on the left. The hole hits a big wall and basically if you swim there, you die. I freaked out. I figured if I got out of my boat, I could go down and out rather than over there. I tried to handroll. My whole entire boat was submerged underwater. When that happens it’s very confusing.” If Emily has fears of disappointing her father, or of high waterfalls, or of landing 4 feet onto her face in a crashing wave in the ice cold Ottawa River, as no doubt she must, there’s no hint of it now, as Emily, Nick, and I chat in the kitchen. Above a door there is a woodcarving that reads: “Be a star. Cherish family. Go places. See the world.” In two weeks Emily and Nick will climb into her white Subaru and drive north to the Ottawa River and the Worlds, where she’s favored to win the Juniors. (Emily did end up winning the Junior women’s event.)

I’ve got the brown paper out again and write, “Five years from now?” “Kayaking!” She writes, with a star at the bottom of the exclamation mark. “Nonprofit work. Have a house with my boyfriend, who will take me kayaking as a date.” She stops writing, thinks for a moment, and then adds: “Get an RV! Travel.”