April 2005 through August 2010
When I moved back to Montana from Hawaii, I started swimming rivers to get a freediving fix. I brought the hobby to Oregon when I went to law school. After a couple of trips down the Willamette River through downtown Eugene, I tried to swim the Rogue River. The Rogue was a good teacher. It taught me that swimming face-first down serious rapids with nothing more than a bike helmet for protection is really not a good idea.
Somewhere on the Rogue, I became addicted to whitewater. I’d learned my lesson about swimming rapids, but could never afford the cost of a kayak or the time to learn to ride one. Someone overheard my wailing about the predicament and said that they saw a video filmed in New Zealand where they ran brutal rapids while riding flat on some type of plastic board.
It took some crafty Googling and some serious begging of the local river equipment retailer, but eventually I was floating down the MacKenzie River on a rented riverboard. All it took was one Class III and I was obsessed. I bought my own board and took it back to Montana to play for the summer.
The obsession evolved to the point where I decided that I needed an inflatable riverboard. There weren’t any on the market. I contracted with a company in Colorado to build me a prototype. It was awesome. I took it off a fifteen foot waterfall and tested it in rivers from Oregon to Africa.
I placed an initial order of twelve boards and shipped them to river rats around the country to build the buzz for a spring shipment. I was stoked. It was a pretty awesome side gig and a lot more fun than lawyering. What I didn’t know was the market for riverboards was about to collapse and adventure sports companies were about to bring out a fleet of inflatable riverboards that retailed for as much as it cost to make our board.
I toyed with another design, but couldn’t get it dialed in to the point where I felt comfortable bringing it to market. Eventually, my wife made it very clear that the money I was sinking into this goat rope probably needed to go towards raising kids, paying for the house, etc. As much as I hated to admit it, she was right.
I looked at all of the work I put into the project and all of the money. What a waste. According to my view, nothing had come out of it but a few cool river toys, some youtube videos and a funny bullet on my resume.
I was wrong. Four boards off my initial order of twelve ended up in the hands of J Dubb an owner-guide for Bearpaw River Expeditions. After taking them through the Grand Canyon, J Dubb decided to stash one of the boards on the floor of his raft during trips down the Lochsa the following summer.
Jesse, one of J Dubb’s yearly regulars, had just returned from an intense tour in Iraq as the combat medic. He was battered by injuries, PTSD, and addiction. All you had to do was look in his eyes to see that the war had followed him home.
Sometime during the trip, Jesse conned J Dubb into blowing up the inflatable riverboard so Jesse could try it out on the massing swells and raging hydraulics of the Lochsa. (For anyone reading at home, please do not try riverboarding for the first time on this potentially deadly river). Jesse got battered, whipped, and tossed. He found enough breath to survive the ride and he found something else – peace.
Jesse came back the following day, and the next; reclaiming his life amidst the whitewater and pines.
I met up with Jesse and J Dubb after the season when Jesse was in Helena to go to the VA. Jesse had heard about my step-brother’s PTSD-induced suicide and some of the work that I did after his death. Jesse talked about his own struggles and then said, “If it was for riverboarding, I’d be dead right now.”
I made him explain. Jesse told me about the mix of the adrenaline, the healing power of the river, and feeling like a badass again.
It was an amazing story. I told Jesse that he had free boards for as long as I could get them. We said our goodbyes, but Jesse’s story lingered in my mind. Was it just him or could other returning veterans find the same kind of peace in the churning water.
A few months later, my sister Janna was trying to come up with a project for her doctorate work in Occupational Therapy. We talked about a couple of potential ideas and then I remembered Jesse’s story. I gave Janna his number.
Over the course of the next five or six months, Janna and Jesse laid the groundwork for a therapeutic program that would involve taking veterans riverboarding. They partnered up with the Missoula Vet Center and Montana River Guides.
The program succeeded beyond anything I’d ever imagined. I’d been involved with PTSD and reintegration issues on a national level and I’d never heard of anything remotely that successful at plugging vets back into life and traditional forms or therapy. Before long, they’d started up a second session.
Rave reviews came in from as far away as Washington, D.C. for this unconventional treatment that was so popular that they had to turn interested veterans away due to a lack of spots. It's hard to imagine a program with a higher potential to help our men and women returning home from combat.
Jesse stopped by my house last August to pick up another board for a trip up to Alaska’s rivers. We sat on the porch and talked about riverboard design.
I looked across the table at Jesse and realized that he had found a deeper peace. The trauma-induced tension had left his face and he was excited about the future.
At that moment, I realized that the purpose of my whole riverboard building fiasco was so that there would be an inflatable riverboard sitting at the bottom of the raft on the day that Jesse needed it. My obsession with the sport left me as nothing more than a domino in the chain reaction that put the board there for Jesse to use to find his own peace and develop a model that would bring his comrades peace.
Some would call it a coincidence, but I’ve seen enough of these coincidences to know that it was more – much more.
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