ROSEVILLE — For Jason Maxwell, founder and CEO of Warriors to Wilderness, a southern Ohio non-profit that offers free therapeutic hunting and outdoor experiences to veterans, the first inspiration for the project came from a personal experience.
When he retired from the U.S. Navy after 22 years, Maxwell had reached the rank of senior chief in the Seabees (combat engineers), and had seen action in Iraq three times and Afghanistan twice. Returning to civilian life and a job with the Department of Defense, he brought back with him a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“If I went to sleep at night, and I heard a noise, I would wake up and have to patrol the house, figure out what it is, make sure the house is safe,” he explained. “The times that I actually did sleep, I would wake up just drenched in sweat and go get a shower. And they were saying it was because I was stuck in a heightened state.”
Living in California at the time, Maxwell , who as a child attended St. Rose Elementary School in New Lexington, accepted an invitation from his son who lives in southern Ohio to go on a bowhunting excursion. This required his sitting alone in a tree stand for hours, during which a small miracle occurred.
“They took me out there, I sat in the stand, and it was the first time that I really slowed down to really look at this place,” he recalled. “When I left here 22 years ago, and joined the military, you couldn’t have told me that I would ever come back to the country. But coming back and seeing the leaves change and all that stuff, I was just like, this place is really beautiful! And the amazing part of this was, over the course of a week, I fell asleep every single time I went out to the woods waiting. And so I started thinking — How is it that I can sleep out here in somebody’s woods, but I can’t sleep in my own house?”
Maxwell talked to a few colleagues from the military who reported having had similar experiences. Even more encouragement came from a podcast he listened to, on the topic of alternative treatments for veterans.
“One of the topics that they were on was wilderness immersion,” he said. “Basically that’s like connecting through nature. There have been studies done on it, and they’ve found that being in nature has a healing effect, not just on veterans but on everybody. So then I said, ‘Okay, I want to share this with as many people as I can.’”
He started small, just bringing individual fellow vets he knew out to Ohio for hunting trips when he would visit. The tipping point came when he brought out a female veteran, who had served as a Navy medic attached to the Marines.
“Post-service, her PTSD was completely different than mine,” Maxwell said. “Mine, if I’m surrounded by large crowds, I get anxiety. But hers, she was just outwardly angry. You couldn’t approach her and say, ‘Hey, it’s a nice day’ without her making just a smart aleck retort.”
Another symptom emerged when she began talking about her traumatic military experiences in therapy. “Whatever she spoke on in therapy caused her to develop a permanent stutter,” Maxwell said. “And so now when you talk to her, she realizes that she hasn’t always been that way. It frustrates her, and then it causes her to stutter more, and it just overwhelms her and then she becomes very angry.”
After setting the woman up in her first vigil in a tree stand, the others in the party returned in a few hours to find her fast asleep. ‘What caught my attention was, during a little over a quarter of a mile walk back to the lodge, she did not stutter — not one time. And so I thought, ‘Well, here’s somebody who has an outwardly visible ailment, and I can see for myself it has an effect on her.’ And so because of that I was just like, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
And so Warriors to Wilderness was born; after discussing it with his wife, Maxwell began the process of making this type of nature immersion therapy his life’s work. “I did all my paperwork, registered with the state of Ohio, so I have a certification from the state of Ohio saying that we are a an official, nonprofit, veteran- owned organization,” he said. “Our mission is to help veterans, and veterans that suffer from PTSD get reacquainted or reintegrated with life as a civilian, and try to just help manage the stressors.”
Maxwell’s commitment is reflected in the investment his family has made of their own resources in the project, including buying property and putting some $50,000 from their savings into renovations.
“We have about 30 acres, and then we have access to family land; that’s an additional 105,” Maxwell said. That land is on the border of Perry and Muskingum counties; the organization also has about eight acres in the Philo-Duncan Falls area.
Warriors to Wilderness also caters to vets who may want immersion in nature but without hunting “The 30 acres had a house on it, and we renovated the house into an Airbnb type of stay,” Maxwell said. “And so the veterans when they come, they can choose either to stay in the main lodge, or we added two Amish-built wooden cabins out back. So they can either say, ‘Hey, I want to be a little bit out there’ and they can do to do a cabin stay, or they can say ‘Hey, I want to come connect to nature, but I don’t want to feel like I’m camping.’ And in that case they can stay in the main lodge. We have nature trails for them to hike. We are developing little educational programs, not necessarily a full sit down class, but just something to keep your mind busy and at work. We have a pond that we just recently excavated and stocked and so spring and summer, the veterans can come out and do a holistic four day retreat, in which they stay in either the cabins or the main lodge. They can fish, they can hike, and just immerse themselves in nature. Then in the fall when the whitetail bow hunting seasons come in, we transition from the holistic retreat to therapeutic hunting sessions with compound and crossbow.”
Warriors to Wilderness provides its services free to any veteran, whether they saw combat or not.
“We encompass all veterans because, whether you were in combat or not, it’s still a transition to integrate back into civilian the civilian sector,” Maxwell explained. “So It’s really about just, how can we help you deal with that integration back into a society that you maybe don’t understand, or maybe doesn’t understand you.”
The organization, which has been operating officially for less than a year, is funded by donations. Anyone with interest in what it has to offer should reach out to it through its website, https://warriors2wilderness.com/.
Email at jphillips@logandaily.com
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