Chad Brown stood waist deep in the brisk current of the Clackamas River, just a few hundred yards upstream of the Estacada Bridge. On this temperate midsummer afternoon in 2010, he was casting his line for trout. As the rapids gently washed up against the sides of his waterproof waders, he contemplated what it all meant, and how to put into words the emerging endeavor that seemed to be the perfect culmination of his past 39 years.
“Soul river runs deep,” he thought to himself. He had found his answer.
A few months earlier, Brown was dangerously close to taking his life with the pull of a trigger. After losing everything he had worked for as the result of his long-fought battle with PTSD – the byproduct of time served in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Restore Hope – he was ready to give up.
But then he discovered fly fishing, and that changed everything.
On this fateful day on the river, he was thinking about the future. It was there he had finally found relief from his crippling mental anguish, and he knew he could help others do the same.
Fast forward five years and today Brown is focused on raising enough funds to take a couple dozen inner city kids up to southern Alaska’s picturesque Kenai Peninsula for a fly fishing adventure with a handful of war veterans.
The summer of 2015 will be his second season of connecting urban youth and veterans with nature through his favorite sport. He now operates a small, stylish fly-fishing boutique in North Portland’s Kenton neighborhood, called Soul River Runs Deep, and sales from the store help support his nonprofit, Soul River Inc.
Brown says his business and nonprofit work together to sustain his peace of mind and teach others how to the same.
“It’s a way of connecting to youth,” Brown says, “who are fighting for their lives in underserved communities, and veterans, who are fighting for their acceptance in society again after what they have come through with PTSD.”
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Born and raised in Texas, Brown was the product of a broken home, a reality that he says troubled him deeply. As a teenager, he joined up with the Latino gangs that hung out in his corner of Austin. He started getting into street fights and committing robberies.
A mentor from his childhood eventually stepped in and straightened him out. Capt. Freddie Maxwell with the Austin Police Department, or “Captain Maxwell” as Brown knew him, picked him up and threw him in jail to teach him a lesson. The police officer had been his big brother in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program a few years earlier. Brown was not officially under arrest, but he got the message, and eventually finished high school and then enrolled in the Art Institute of Dallas.
“I had always been into art and design,” says Brown. Despite his gang affiliations and troublesome ways, his mother had always made it a point to expose him and his younger brother to the arts, taking them to the symphony and theater, and encouraging his interest in drawing. But before Brown earned his bachelor’s degree, he had to drop out for financial reasons. Out of money and out of options, he joined the U.S. Navy.
“I was actually anti-military at the time, but I needed to survive and I didn’t want to go back home,” he says, “and that was really the only option that I had.”
It was a decision that took him around the globe to 14 countries and into two wars. He won’t go into detail about his time fighting in Somalia and Kuwait, he only says he experienced extreme environments and lost some people he really cared about.
Once discharged, he used his GI Bill funding to finish his bachelor’s degree at American InterContinental University in Atlanta, Ga., and then went on to earn a graduate degree at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. From there he worked a string of prestigious jobs at various design and advertising agencies in New York City, and designed shoes for Phat Farm. He eventually opened his own boutique ad agency, but he says he was becoming overwhelmed with the “hustle.”
“It was crazy,” he says. “I was constantly dealing with certain things mentally, but wasn’t really aware of what I was dealing with, throughout this whole time.”
He closed shop and took a sabbatical, hiking, hitchhiking and walking through Japan for two months. Upon his return he was offered a job as a senior designer at an ad agency in Portland.
Portland’s laid-back vibe was in stark contrast to the chaotic grind of life in New York, where his day-to-day schedule didn’t allow for a lot of reflection and introspection. Without the distractions of the big city, symptoms of his undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder began to surface.
“There were things happening with me, and I didn’t know what was going on,” he says. “It was stronger now, and it was really coming out into my work.” He says he began to drink, and holding onto to advertising jobs became impossible.
“I started fighting a lot of my demons,” says Brown. He was able to land jobs at three or four other Portland ad agencies, but quickly lost each one. “It was like night and day: walking in and getting a high-level job – six figures – and then the next day, I lose it. It was a mind trip. I was losing it. I started having a lot of anxiety issues, I was losing my mind, my thought process – there was times that I remember getting into my rig and, three miles from the house, I would lose my way,” he remembers.
Brown had gained more than 100 pounds and was selling plasma every Tuesday on Southeast Holgate Boulevard to pay for gas. “I had lost everything. I was borderline homeless, and I was also ashamed for what had happened, because everybody from New York – my colleagues – knew me at this level,” he says, raising his right hand above his head. “My ego got the best of me and I didn’t go home. I fought a battle by myself.”
He began to see therapists and was misdiagnosed with everything from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder, he says. He finally went to the VA where it was determined that he was most likely suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. It would be a year and a half before his paperwork would be processed and his benefits granted, a process he says was like riding a “roller coaster from hell.”
“It was a terrible time in my life – it was crazy – me dodging cops left and right, trying to stay out of trouble. It was so extreme – it really wasn’t that long ago – I actually had tracks from where I would give blood,” he says, “I covered that up with some tats, basically because I didn’t want to be reminded."
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For four years, Brown hazily clawed his way through life. “I was a complete wreck,” he says. “I was popping around 10 different pills a day: a couple to keep me awake, a couple to keep me from not having nightmares, a couple for anxiety, and I was taking so many I was just like a walking zombie.”
But one day in 2009, a concerned acquaintance took Brown to Clackamette Park to go fishing. “I hooked my first fish on that same day, and I was very, very excited – I was happy,” Brown says. The excitement, he says, broke through his medicated state of mind and made him feel alive.
At his next appointment at the VA, he told his doctor he wanted to take less medication and fish more. Then he did everything he could to immerse himself in his new form of therapy on the river.
He befriended several fishing guides at the now-closed Kaufman’s Streamborn fly shop in Tigard. “I was like a roadie,” he says, tagging along on trips with clients, soaking it all in.
“I started getting good at it, tying my own flies, building my own rods, everything started becoming my therapy, and I got better and better at it,” says Brown. “And then I started showing and sharing and teaching. And that was when I got to that place – standing in the water.”
In that moment five years ago on the Clackamas River, he pondered his inner conflict – from his troubled youth and time spent in battle – and he thought about how others carrying those same burdens might also find solace at the water’s edge.
Around the same time the VA approved his disability benefits – with back pay. “It was an opportunity to start, and that’s what I needed – a good start. I didn’t want to screw it up,” says Brown. “I paid the immediate stuff, took the rest and put it into my dream.”
That’s where those four words were put to work. Soul River Runs Deep began as an online store in 2012, and two years later, Brown opened his retail space in North Portland. It was the perfect combination of his passion for fly fishing and his knack for design. His original plan was to funnel most of the profits directly into his nonprofit, but after some friends in the entrepreneurial world convinced him that wouldn’t be sustainable, he settled on 15 percent.
The idea behind his nonprofit is simple, yet brilliant: Take a group of veterans and inner city kids on fishing trips together. For the veterans, many of whom suffer from PTSD, fly fishing acts as a natural “medicine for the soul,” he says. For the inner city youth he brings along, interacting with nature is often a brand new and awe-inspiring experience.
He says the first time he helped guide youth on a fishing trip along the Deschutes River, “It was like witnessing the first of firsts. The first time putting on a hiking boot, the first time sleeping on the ground, the first time putting together a tent – everything was the first of first. It reminded me of my first of first, which was catching a fish, and hooting and hollering. It radiated that and made me feel good. It’s not about the end product of catching fish: It’s those first of firsts that’s medicine to the soul.”
There’s a science behind the awe youth and veterans often experience on these trips, Brown explains. In several studies conducted in recent years, psychologists have found awe, such as experienced in nature, has many positive effects on the beholder. According to a paper by psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Fleeting and rare, experiences of awe can change the course of a life in profound and permanent ways.”
The awe of inner city youth on the river for the first time paired with the veteran’s natural leadership tendencies fosters an environment for mentoring, learning and becoming a steward for environmental protection, says Brown.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has become one of Soul River Inc.’s, biggest supporters, choosing it for a five-year cooperative agreement in which it funds and helps plan fishing trips and events.
This year most of those funds are going toward the trip to Alaska, but Brown is scrambling to find new donors and adjust the budget to cover all expenses for the trip.
Brian Lawler, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife representative working with Brown, says that with 80 percent of Americans living in urban areas, programs like Brown’s are helping to connect many people to nature who otherwise wouldn’t have access. That’s “planting a seed,” he says, that could grow them into future environmental stewards and conservationists. “Maybe they won’t grow up to be a biologist, but maybe they’ll grow up and love to fish,” he says, and that will help them understand that nature is something we need to protect.
In addition to learning how to fish, tie flies, read the water and study the science of nature, Brown says he’s providing a space for people to learn leadership skills and most importantly, to heal.
Mark Roberts met Brown at a fly-fishing Meetup group Brown initiated four years ago to bring local fishing enthusiasts together. Now Roberts, a Vietnam War veteran, actively volunteers with Soul River Inc. He says youth and veterans come back from Soul River fishing trips “changed and energized.”
He remembers a four-day rafting trip he took with Brown and several other professional guides on the Deschutes River. Every one of the youth who went along had been involved in gangs, he says. “They were all in challenging life situations, and I would say the first half day on that trip, a lot of them were pretty much like turtles, with their heads pulled in,” he says. “But by halfway through the first day, they were very involved, they were very enthusiastic.”
He says it’s incredible to watch kids who had very limited or no outdoor experience before signing up for Soul River’s free fishing trips, grow quickly into environmental stewards. “They’re all becoming mentors, and they’re all becoming very educated and very skilled, not only with fly fishing but with understanding the entire environmental aspect of understanding what’s around them, above the water, under the water, and they’re changing their lives.”
In April, Brown stood before a group of 500 fly-fishing industry leaders giving him a standing ovation at a conference in Missoula, Mont. He had just accepted a 2015 Breaking Barriers Award from Orvis, an international fly fishing retailer. Senior manager of Orvis Adventures, Simon Perkins, said the company had received numerous nominations for Brown. After reading from so many people how Brown was changing lives through fly fishing, Perkins says it was easy to see that “Chad’s story was truly exceptional.”
Since the summer of 2013, Brown has taken groups of youth and veterans on fishing trips along the Deschutes River and up to the Olympic Peninsula. He’s also conducted fly fishing workshops and executed the first annual Celebration of Wild Steelhead. The free reggae concert and fly-fishing event attracted thousands of people to North Portland’s Peninsula Park in 2014. Brown hopes this year’s celebration on Sept. 13 will do the same. He plans to give away fly-fishing kits to 200 children in attendance.
“Whatever we are going through in life, whatever our challenges, whatever our dark places are,” Brown explains, “it runs deep within all of us. And the river has a way of connecting us and helping us get through that process, and getting us the answers that we’re looking for.”
To learn more about Soul River Inc., and its 2015 events, visit soulriverinc.org.