Healing Waters
Chad Brown, a U.S. Navy veteran, sits with his dog Axe on a “deployment” with Soul River Inc., Brown’s nonprofit that brings together underserved youth with veterans from around the military.
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had Brown wears a lot of different hats. The 46-year-old Navy veteran is part entrepreneur, part environmental advocate, part designer, part nonprofit president and that same organization’s only paid employee. If it were up to him, though, he’d be happy to be known as just one thing: a fly fisherman. His shop in North Portland, a small affair called Soul River Inc. just off Interstate Avenue in the Kenton Neighborhood, is dotted with gear of his own design. An army green inflatable raft sits in one corner and meticulously crafted flies long to be casted from inside a glass case. The work Brown values most happens behind the retail space, however, in a cramped room taken up mostly by a conference table. The walls are covered with blown-up pictures of kids and teenagers, usually up to their waists in river water with a rod in hand, smiling as they cast their lines in the hopes of landing a sizable fish. This is where Brown runs the 501(c)(3) portion of Soul River Inc. This is where he introduces at-risk youth and other vets to the idea of conservation. This is where he’ll tell you about how a river saved his life.
Headwaters of trauma Brown had a knack for art and design from the time he was a youngster growing up near Austin, Texas, and his plan was to pursue 22
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it as a career. In 1990, he was enrolled at The Art Institute of Dallas, studying to become a commercial artist. When his money started to run short, he dropped out and joined the Navy. Brown would travel to 14 different countries as a member of a Joint Taskforce Expeditionary Unit, which often shadowed special operations teams around the world. He served in Operation Desert Storm, at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, at a NASA research station in Antarctica and in Mogadishu, Somalia, during a period of extreme violence. The movie “Black Hawk Down” takes place around the same time Brown was in the war-torn country’s capital city. The violence he saw wasn’t dissimilar to that portrayed in the film. “Desert Storm was a lot of hurry up and wait, but Somalia was a whole different ball game,” Brown said. “It was like the wild, wild west, fast and rapid. It was ugly. I was in the mix for a lot of the mess throughout the city.” He came out unscathed, physically at least, in 1994 and immediately threw himself back into school, finishing his undergraduate degree at an art school in Atlanta. Brown moved to New York to get his masters degree in photography, communications and design at the prestigious Pratt Institute. “The way I staged everything coming out of the military was just like boom, boom, boom, one after the other,” he said. “It was back to back for me and I didn’t really have time to think about what I went
