"Kablammy it´s Jackie" :

Jackie was born in Royal Oak, Michigan in 1984. The first eight years of her life she moved from house to house in various suburban areas around Detroit, and spent a great deal of time with her grandparents. She also went to camp at Upland Hills Farm, a full working farm operation that doubled as a summer camp. Here she spent time with horses (she’d been riding since she was six), learned the workings of farm life, watched piglets being born, and studied insects. Her first bicycle was a blue and silver BMX, which she rode daily. Once she crashed so hard going down the steepest neighborhood hill that a stain of blood remained on the sidewalk for the entire summer and she would take the boys she rode with to the spot as if it were some kind of trophy. When her parents divorced, she, her mother and her mother’s boyfriend moved to the Florida Keys in a big old brown ford truck with their new home, a fifth-wheel trailer, attached to the back.

The Keys was certainly an interesting place to grow up. Somehow the transfer from calm stable suburbia to a trailer park called Jolly Rodger Campground didn’t affect Jackie in the least. In fact, she loved running around barefoot, catching fish for dinner, and jumping off old bridges for fun. She had no concept of the poverty they lived in; what could be better than fresh fish and a trailer park full of kids who don’t mind getting dirty? While living in the islands, Jackie learned everything she could about the surrounding ocean and gulf. She spent more time with her head in the water snorkeling or out on deep sea fishing boats with her mother’s boyfriend than anything else, but as always she loved school. From a young age, Jackie was a writer and a reader—always keeping a journal and never without a book. She started writing her first “novel” at ten years old and by then, had notebooks full of poetry and stories. She attributes her desire to read and write to the many hours her parents spent reading with her.

While living in The Keys, Jackie went back to Michigan for summers at Upland Hills Farm as a counselor, and it was during this time that she developed her fondness for kids and farm work. Counselors had farm duties every morning and nine or ten kids to watch after. Everything about life on the farm appealed to Jackie. Although living in the Keys and spending summers up north was enchanting in many ways, the growing drug scene in the Keys lead Jackie and her mother to Venice, Florida. Here they could escape the island culture, and she could attend a better high school.

There really isn’t much to say about Venice. It’s a provincial island on the gulf and it’s full of old people and privileged Caucasians. High school passed with many books read, lots of walks to beach, and a lot of writing. Jackie was placed in honors academy classes when she questioned the statistics documented in a paper that her regular English class was reading. Her high school summers were spent in Seattle, Washington where she worked as a full time nanny for her two cousins. The Great Northwest became a huge part of Jackie’s life. Here, she learned to sail, hike and bike over mountains and sea kayak. Without the opportunity to start a life with her family in Seattle, Jackie would surly lack a lot of the adventure skills and desires that she has today.

She moved from Venice to Tallahassee, Florida where she attended Florida State University to get her degree in Creative Writing and a minor in Anthropology. She always knew she’d be a writer, but it was Anthropology that saved her in college. This is not to say that writing poetry ever left her life, she continues to write and has been published several times. Although she enjoyed the thick-southern ways of Tallahassee, Jackie was ready to see the world. The only way she made it through the four years was her discovery of the amazing Anthropology department. These studies lead her to research many different cultures and become fascinated with the various ways people choose (or are forced) to live their lives. She developed a strong awareness of symbolism and myth, and her Anthropological studies began to affect her writings and plans for the future. During this time, she started collecting bones, feathers, insects, spore prints, seashells, rocks and any other small treasures she came across. By the end of her college career, she had a huge assortment including a deer backbone and mandible, a beaver skull, glacial rocks, various spiral shells, and a mummified infant sea turtle. Every object in the collection is precious in its own way due to the story attached to finding it or simply its aesthetic and inherent value.

When Jackie graduated, she spent a month in the woods of Quincy, Florida reading and writing before she left to tour with the performance group The Ear Is The Brain. They traveled throughout the Midwest and the South— their performances involving many ideas she and her collaborator had developed in their Symbolism and Myths courses. This experience inspired her to go on more tours playing music with various bands (Jackie plays the banjo among other instruments; and all pretty poorly), take a trip to Canada, live a month in Asheville, visit Seattle and head to Central America. Jackie was hooked on traveling, but it was this last trip that changed everything.

While in Guatemala, staying in a hostel in Xela, Jackie met Goat, Jacob and Sean. She had just been talking about her current life goals: to take a long bike trip, hop a train, take a homemade boat down the Mississippi, and build and live in a tree house on some sustainable land…most of which these boys had already done. She was inspired by their trip, filled with respect for their choices and intentions, and wanted to join them immediately. Days passed and their friendship grew, but unfortunately Jackie had to get back to the states because she had promised to move to Seattle. Besides, her overwhelming altruism would have never allowed her to ask if she could join their trip. But then, after Jackie took a road trip across America and back with a friend, lived and worked in Seattle for six months, toured with Hair Envelope down the West Coast, the Riding The Spine group came back to the states to generate income, and Goat asked Jackie if she wanted to ride the rest of the trip with them. Without any hesitation she said yes, as she does to most things in life that seem appropriate, and when people ask why she wants to ride her bicycle from Costa Rica to Tierra del Fuego she says, “for perspective.”

This trip will surely provide that and much more. Jackie cannot imagine doing anything else with her life right now, “it’s about living the life that you respect,” and that is exactly what she intends to do.