Healing Waters

Healing Waters

By Kale Williams, The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reprinted with permission.

Chad 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.

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.

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 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 through.” Signs of mental health issues began to creep into his life toward the end of his time at Pratt. He sometimes got lost on his way home, a route he knew well. A couple times a month, he would find himself sobbing in the middle of the street for no particular reason.

Each time, he shook it off and worked even harder.

After finishing his graduate degree, he won a few awards and found success quickly, taking on lucrative contract design work and feeling his way around the advertising industry in New York. Eventually, he found himself pitching ideas to Russell Simmons, the hiphop mogul, and doing work for Phat Farm, Simmons’ fashion line.

The pace of his life, again, increased. But despite his success, he knew something was off.

“For a lot of vets, we find ways to cope with things. Whether it’s alcohol or drugs or cigarettes, but I think for me, the more I could step into that arena of a fast lifestyle, that was kind of my way of coping,” he said.

Rapids to stillwater

In 2007, Brown knew he needed a change. He took a job in Portland as a senior art director at an ad agency. When it came to pace, though, Portland is no New York.

The slower speed of the city gave him more time to think and the demons that haunted him from afar on the east coast drew closer.

Depression set in, for real this time, and within six months of arriving in Oregon, Brown lost his job and began a period of onagain, off-again homelessness that would last for years.

He knew he needed help and turned to Veterans Affairs, but the paperwork and numerous doctor visits proved difficult to navigate. He was put on heavy medications and enrolled in therapy, but Brown’s symptoms weren’t getting any better.

“I was one of the many vets standing in line to give blood for $20 so I could keep gas in my tank,” he said. “I was in a place that I never in my life thought I would find myself.”

In 2009, it became too much to bear.

“I was found on the river about to take my own life,” Brown said. “I was angry, mad at the world, frustrated, strung out on so many different meds. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t smile. I felt like I was a walking zombie.”

He spent a few days in a psych ward at the VA, and spent more time learning about his condition. Brown had post-traumatic stress disorder. He would struggle over the next few years until a friend introduced him to fly fishing.

Soon after, he would discover that the river itself would be his savior.

He still can’t say exactly what it was about fishing on the Clackamas River that soothed him. Perhaps it was the consistent sounds of running water or maybe the repetitive action of casting a line.

Whatever it was, fly fishing was the only thing that made him feel any better. He bartered with the doctors at the VA: if he spent more time fishing and continued to improve, they would decrease his meds.

He was still looking for a larger sense of purpose, though.

Breakthrough

It was 2012 when Brown got the idea for Soul River Inc. He knew the river had saved his life, but he wanted to help other people find their own version of fly fishing, that which could soothe the wounds left by trauma.

“Your soul river is different than my soul river,” he said. “Your soul river may be hiking or skateboarding, but it’s the idea of being able to connect on a personal level that you can use as a coping mechanism to help you go through your process.”

The next year, he finally got his paperwork from the VA diagnosing him as 50 percent mentally disabled. With that diagnosis came roughly six years of backpay and a chance for Brown to start over again. He paid off some debt he’d accumulated, and sunk the rest into Soul River Inc.

Even though he’s been out of the military for more than 20 years, the imprint left on Brown by his service, and on Soul River Inc., is indelible. He organizes seven expeditions a year, which he calls “deployments,” to places in environmental peril, which he calls “hot zones.”

The trips vary widely — some as close as Eastern Oregon, others as far away as the Arctic Circle — but the mission stays the same. Brown throws together small groups of underserved youth with veterans from all branches of the military for an immersion class in environmental stewardship, leadership and advocacy.

Citlalli Briseño was 16 when she was volunteering for the city in her hometown of Vancouver. Someone mentioned that there was an opportunity to go camping with some kind of outdoor nonprofit and she jumped at the chance.

That year, 2014, Briseño went with Brown and a group of youngsters to stay on the land of the Quinault tribe in Washington. She was so taken with the experience, the next year she went with the group to the Arctic Circle.

“I loved it,” she said. “Being out there in the middle of nowhere with the vets. It’s hard to explain, but they are natural leaders and it rubbed off on us.”

Now, at the age of 19, Briseño is the youngest member of the Board of Directors for Soul River Inc., and has taken a keen interest in the environment. When she starts summer school this year, she plans to major in marine biology with a focus on the Arctic.

By any measure, Soul River Inc. has been a success. Brown and other members of the organization see themselves as a family, many of them staying in contact whether they are planning a deployment or not.

Still, Brown felt like he could do more.

Different kind of justice

Taking kids who have traumatic backgrounds out into the wilderness presents its own special challenges, Brown said.

“If John Doe, at 16 years old, had his brother get shot in the streets by the cops and two months later John Doe is wanting to come on a deployment, he’s bringing that into the wild. How do we deal with that?”

It’s a vexing question with no easy answers. The issues of environmental justice and social justice are intertwined to the point that they can’t be addressed separately, Brown said, but to do so, people need to be able to talk to each other about things that are, in the best of times, contentious.

On April 22, Brown will attempt to start that conversation. He’s partnered with Oregon Wild, a local conservation group, and the Portland EcoFilm Festival to present two films at the Hollywood Theater. The first, a short documentary about Brown’s most recent deployment to Alaska. The second, the premier of an environmentally-focused music video from Michael Crenshaw.

For Brown, though, the most-important part of the evening will come after the films. He’s put together a diverse panel of speakers to talk to the audience about their own experiences in the environmental movement as members of minority communities.

“You have a lot of people out there from diverse backgrounds that love the outdoors just as much as anyone else, that are highly skillful,” Brown said. “But you never hear their voice, you never see them.”

On April 22, Earth Day, Brown hopes to change that.