Note: The person described in the following story as Curt is not named Curt. Everything else is accurate.
September 2002
To say that my path from the military world to the civian world was bumpy puts in mildly. The medical discharge was followed by a flurry of resume send-outs then an empty mailbox. I limped around a construction site for a few months before Shane's accident, then I worked at a residential treatment center for seriously emotionally disturbed children.
A well-placed donkey kick from a ninety pound, thirteen year old female patient while I was helping stop a mini-riot on our wing led me to the emergency room and another career path. Unfortunately this one was with an environmental subcontractor with huge ambitions and no capitol. The work was steady though the paychecks were not.
By September I was happy to head down to Utah to help a subcontractor get their equipment ready for a water treatment pilot project. Curt was the president of the company and we hit it off well. The company only had one other employee and a few contractors. They were a small rag-tag outfit that more than made up in gumption what they lacked in polish. In short, my kind of crew. They'd developed a pretty wild electric water treatment technology and we had to get their trailer finished up to drag up to Montana to pull of the pilot before the cold hit.
It was random work and we weren't well equipped. I spent one hot afternoon fourteen feet above the ground unloading a 6oo lb. bag of zeolite into massive canisters with a cooking pot. Something about that display of both stupidity and fortitude moved Curt to offer me a job. A man with better options and more foresight would have said no. I shook his hand.
After the project finished up in Montana, I moved back down to Utah to a little trailer in the desert. Each day I helped work on a technology that I thought would change the world. I'd developed a major concern about upcoming water shortages while I was at West Point and this seemed like developing Curt's water treatment technology was tangible way to help minimize the impact of that future scarcity. It's cheesy, but I thought I'd found my life's mission.
Curt's mind amazed me and I felt honored to be involved with trying to bring his ideas to life. He was a wild-haired Mormon visionary and I was the Copenhagen chewing second man trying to figure out how to bring the vision into reality. Every week brought a new challenge and we were short of just about everything but creativity and ambition.
Somewhere over the course of the next year, our progress on the technology slowed. We were close never quite ready for prime-time. We'd prep and then test, rework and then test again. It was exactly what we needed to do, but I was worried that it wasn't happening fast enough for our investors and my love affair with the Utah desert was over.
One June afternoon in 2003, I found myself hotwashing out used septic tanks in 114 degree heat for our next test. I blasted the scalding water against the grimy plastic for five or six hours before coming to the conclusion that it was time to go back to school.
August 2008
Five years later, I'd completed with law school and spent two years as an associate in a law firm before taking a part-time job as the Executive Director of NAMI Montana. Once again thinking I was going to change the world, but it couldn't have been much different than trying to develop new technology under the desert sun.
It had taken a while, but Curt and his company had finally flourished. They used the water treatment technology as a path to transition into plastics recycling. The company was opening a plant in Burbank and the cash flow projections were jaw-dropping.
Curt and I had stayed in touch over the years and he'd even offered me a position with the company the previous fall. We talked every couple of months and he'd update me on the company that we'd brought out of infancy together.
I hadn't thought about Curt in a while, but images of him kept coming into my head one August day as I worked in the NAMI office. I tried to focus on prepping for our upcoming Walk fundraiser, but I just couldn't get him out of my head. Eventually it was just too much, I wrapped up my half-day and walked home intent to work on some other projects.
But still I couldn't get Curt out of my head. Finally I broke down and called him.
"Hello?" I heard his startled voice answer on the other end of the line. "Matt? That's weird we never get reception up here."
I said hi and tried to strike up a conversation. I had no intention of telling Curt that I'd been dwelling on him all day and finally called just to get him out of my head.
Something was wrong. "Curt, what's going on I asked."
He sighed. "I'm sitting by the side of the pond up at our ranch with a .357 Magnum in my hand. It's all falling apart. I'm going to lose everything: my business, my family, everything. I'm trying to think of a reason not to kill myself."
I spent the next hour talking him down. I was in way over my head and knew that I was doing everything wrong, but somehow a combination of mindfulness exercises to shortcircuit the anxiety/depression and telling him for the first time about my near brush with suicide a decade before was enough to get him to put down away the gun.
March 2011
Over the course of the next two and a half years, Curt really did lose everything. His business, his property, and eventually his family. They all fell like horrible dominoes. I know that he could have done some things differently, but the complete collapse was more than one man could ever bring on himself. It's just a brutal mystery why some struggle so hard through so much.
Curt's been tested in a way that I hope I never have to be. The fact that he continues struggling forward is an incredible accomplishment. Curt had a job interview last week with a water treatment company in Colorado. It's too early to know whether he got it, but I pray that it's his time to keep moving forward again.
End Note: I had a family member commit suicide about a year and a half before I called Curt on that fateful day. I've also had a family member try to commit suicide twice in the years following that call. I can't begin to fathom why I was summoned to contact Curt and not the others. It's too sad to even try, but that doesn't change the facts around the phonecall to Curt.
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