Ryan Heck started college as an environmental sciences major, but an elective class shifted his focus toward social work and human services. As someone who turns to the natural world to find balance and calm, Ryan has combined his passion for outdoor pursuits – especially fly-fishing – with his work with veterans and first responders struggling with PTSD, addiction, and substance abuse. He is an operations manager for Vermont State Parks and also works with the nonprofit Strengthen Your Mind Initiative.
I grew up in Hamilton, New York, in the central part of the state, just over an hour away from both the Adirondacks and the Finger Lakes. As kids, my friends and I were outside all the time. We were always on our bikes, exploring anything we could. The Colgate University property in town had hiking trails and mountain biking trails, an old quarry, and a little ski hill when I was growing up. Once we got to middle school, we were camping every weekend. We built forts, treehouses, a mountain bike course behind one of our houses. In high school, I spent a lot time camping with friends in Moose River Plains in the Adirondacks, and I also got into skiing.
When I started looking at colleges, I was looking for somewhere that had an environmental major and where I could ski. I really liked Vermont. It was a good midpoint between Hamilton, where my mom lived, and Dartmouth College, where my dad was teaching. I went to Southern Vermont College. My first year and a half I focused on environmental studies, and I was also was pursuing a minor in art. At one point, I needed an elective course, and I took group counseling. After that course, I ended up switching my major to social work. I graduated with a degree in human services.
I come from a family of teachers, and my sisters is a social worker, so the idea of working with people has always kind of been there. I just needed to find the right class and the right professor. I enjoyed learning the dynamics of the group and also doing some self-exploration, kind of getting some ideas of why I may do some of the things I do or how I interpret something or maybe why I react a certain way. That first class gave me a lot of understanding about my own self and also my interactions with people.
During college, I worked at Woodford State Park, which was a great job. I started in May and worked through October. Woodford was such a good place to spend my summers. The first time I ever saw a moose was there. I appreciated the fishing on the ponds. But I also had a great supervisor, Nick Caputo, and a lot of my work ethic has come from working for Nick.
After college, I went to work in developmental services for United Counseling Services of Bennington County. I was a community support provider. I took developmentally disabled adults out into the community, modeled how to access the community for them, but also worked on individual goals that they had. It was also educating the community a little bit, which was a really nice relationship. I was able to step back and watch some independence grow. And I had the opportunity to bring my outdoor passions to the job. We spent a lot of time hiking if we weren’t doing something directly with the community. We went fishing. I did respite work and took somebody every summer on a weeklong camping trip in the state parks of Vermont and New York and really created an experience for them.
After about 5 years, I went to work for a residential center in more of a supervisory role. I managed a dorm in the evening, and was an administrator on duty in the evenings and on the weekends. It was a tough job – physical restraints, some assaults. I was able to work with some very challenging younger children that the school normally didn’t have, but we were able to take them in. And that was a success – watching them adjust and have a safe place, when they hadn’t had a safe place in the past.
When I was working with some of the older kids who had a really hard time being in a group, I’d bring my flyrod in and we’d go cast out on the lawn. That was my first aha moment. When I cast, it relieves a lot of my anxiety, helps ground me in that present moment. And being able to share that with some of these kids was incredible. But with that type of work, there’s burnout, and that was my first experience of the work really taking a toll and sometimes coming up when you’re not expecting it to. So I left and worked for myself for about a year – outside, doing carpentry and painting.
Then I connected with a former colleague, Donny Richard, who is a veteran, and he recruited me to join this new program, the Uniformed Services Program, at the Brattleboro Retreat. The program served veterans and first responders who struggled with post-traumatic stress, substance abuse, dependency, depression. It was a day program with a residential component that wasn’t considered therapy, but the peer support and the right activities promoted a really safe and therapeutic environment. That’s where I got linked into recreation therapy. We did a lot of hiking to start in the Brattleboro area. Then I started going up to some of the parks, going up to the fire tower at Molly Stark and going to Hogback Mountain and the natural history museum there.
At that time I was also studying mindfulness, and the program used mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). It’s an evidence-based approach, and I was able to see some tangible evidence that this worked and what it looked like, and how your body and brain can change over the course of years. It was kind of something I naturally did; one of my tools to help ground myself and allow myself to be present is spending time in the outdoors.
We developed a therapeutic flyfishing program that was grounded in mindfulness, as well as the therapeutic model ACT – Acceptance Commitment Therapy. Twice a week I started taking people out flyfishing. It was not an easy sell at first, but I did my research and presented evidence from some other programs that had been doing similar things. The director at the time said he needed some time to think about the idea. He went home and was watching the news, and there was a story about a therapeutic flyfishing program for veterans, and he decided to go ahead with the idea.
We had a sheriff come through the program, and the day he started, we were going flyfishing. We got all geared up, and we were walking down to the river, and he says, “Can you believe insurance is paying for this? This is a joke. This is a gimmick.” Very quickly, you could kind of see the group spread out from him. I was walking up and down the river giving some instruction. About five minutes into it, he said he’d much rather go walk on a hiking trail he’d seen. I asked him to give about 20 to 25 minutes on the water, take the instruction, try to engage. He agreed, but said he’d go hike the trail after that. Some time went by, and I yelled down that it was time to go. He was the last one down there. He had lost track of time and stayed on the water for almost 2 hours. This guy who was resisting so hard, not really wanting to be open to it – the river and the experience changed his life and created an opportunity. It came down to his willingness. I didn’t sell him on a bad experience. I just gave him the tools, and he chose to use them.
I loved the work, but the politics of working for a hospital like that makes it hard. We had a variety of different directors come through. The program was not necessarily what I wanted it to be, so I felt it was time to move on. I left and worked for myself again doing carpentry and painting, which is work that I love. Then the pandemic hit, so people didn’t want you in the house anymore. My former supervisor from Woodford State Park reached out and said he was looking for help opening the parks during the pandemic. I was hired into a manager position, and now I’m an operations manager for six different state parks in Region Two, which is the southwest region of Vermont, from Bennington up to Charlotte.
During the pandemic, Donny was starting the nonprofit Strengthen Your Mind Initiative, and we started brainstorming about adding flyfishing and outdoor mindfulness experiences to that. We do retreats for veterans and first responders, at no charge. They’re 2 ½ days long. Everything is included – room, board, gear. We also do trainings with various groups and organizations. We have provided in-service training on ACT, MBSR, peer support, and ways to develop resiliency and critical incident debriefing for Vermont fire departments. We can approach the trauma and the aftermath, but how do we develop resiliency? How do we better prepare ourselves when these situations do come up?
I didn’t grow up flyfishing, but I grew up fishing, and it was a love-hate experience. I sometimes have a hard time staying present while sitting still, so the idea of being in a boat is cool for about half an hour, and then I’m ready to do something different. My whole family fished – my older brother, older sister, my father. On the rivers it was great because I could spin cast, and when I was done, I’d wander up and down the bank and find trees to climb. As I got a little older, I moved away from fishing. But my senior year of high school, I found a flyrod in the back of the garage, and I remember going out and playing with it in the backyard – unsuccessfully. But the rhythm and the flex – it was captivating.
A little later, I went to a family reunion at our family’s camp in the Allegheny National Forest, and I kind of got back into stream fishing. I remember pulling the flyrod out of the back of my Volkswagen Jetta, and my brother looked at me, because it had been his rod in high school. He had a new flyrod and had just taken a flyfishing course at college, and we started flyfishing together. My brother and I started doing more trips, traveling to fish. He used to come up and help out at the Brattleboro Retreat on the flyfishing weekends. We got into steelhead and salmon fishing. My brother and I were inseparable when it came to fishing. There were days we’d fish together, and there were days he’d go up the river and I would go down. My brother passed away in 2016, and his wife and daughters still like to ask about the fishing trips.
The funny thing is, when we fished, we really didn’t talk about fishing. We talked about family, and that was when I remember my brother having his guard down and really getting into some of the stuff that wasn’t just on the surface. That was a powerful experience that he and I shared. Fishing’s been in the family, and we’ve come to it and left it and come back. It always has a new meaning. Some of the best days that my brother and I had were not days when we caught a bunch of fish, but days when we saw something cool or we had one of those conversations. And that’s what the outdoors does.
I like to be outside, and if I can find a job that allows me to be outside, that’s great. I love people, and I love seeing people having an amazing experience. I love it when people get to walk away from an experience with some value. With the parks, there are generations of families that come back. Being part of the team that helps keep the parks be the best that they can be and in a way that they can continue to help create these amazing memories for these people – watching children catch their first fish or see some of their first wildlife – is amazing. That’s just so rewarding and important to me.