The Dam Needs to Break
A vulnerable account of the last 3 years
“How’s it going out there, acting like you ain’t scared? How’s that heart of stone, ain’t so hard when you’re alone. Crying tears you hope nobody sees. Guess the good news he’ll never leave you be and amazing grace is a pesky, pesky thing.” - Ben Fuller
Every fiber of my being does not want to write this. I know that comes across as a shameless and cheap ploy to hook you and keep you reading. But the truth is that this one isn’t for you. It’s for me. You can read it if you want to, but I have my reasons for writing it that go far beyond readership.
Here’s Hoping the Dam Breaks
Writing has always been an important outlet for me. As a child I stuttered mightily with a stutter so saying things verbally was very difficult for me. While I have largely gotten over that, there is still something deep in my brain that is unlocked when I sit down and write. I am able to process, to think, to express, and to purge, everything going on inside my brain. This is why I first starting talking about launching this blog almost a year ago.
But I haven’t been able to write. I have been stuck. It has been deeper than writer’s block - I've dealt with that before and know how to power through - I haven’t wanted to write this.
I wanted to start and publish Distilled Wanderer, but I didn’t want to be real. I would do that except at the cost of letting myself be vulnerable and to actually have to process through the last few years. So deep down I was afraid to write because I knew if I did, eventually I would be doing exactly what I am doing now. So I just always gave up.
My hope is that I get this all out on the screen, then the dam breaks and I’m able to write consistently again. So here goes…
The Idea That Changed Everything
Google photos has an annoying habit of reminding you of everything. This is not an issue with 95% of the memories stored in the ether that is the Googlesphere, but for certain memories it has an effect similar to removing a scab and pouring rubbing alcohol on the open sore.
In the Spring of 2021 I was wrapping up another school year as headmaster at a local private school. Things had been going very well. I had navigated our school through COVID without having to close a single classroom (thank you, Idaho). On top of that I had it all - beautiful wife, two beautiful children, an amazing home, the obligatory Idaho truck. Everything I ever needed, I had!
But I was bored out of my mind. Unchallenged. Static. Restless.
My wife had even noticed it - she noticed me becoming a hollowed out version of the man she married. So we started to talk and think about what the next chapter might look like. We would go around and around and always came to the same conclusion: “God has us in this place at this time for a reason, and we need to stay the course until that changes”.
MCO’s Story:
Later that year an opportunity of a lifetime comes along to jump into business with a very successful group. Located in Texas, they run a successful business that blends retail shopping with a taproom environment. The idea was to re-create that model up in Idaho. After mulling it over and praying through it, my wife and I decide to spend the fall of 2021 running down the possibility of opening that business here.
For anyone that knows my story, I am of course talking about Mesquite Creek Outfitters.
Oh what a tremendous opportunity it was, and what a cool idea. We found a building in such an incredible little downtown area and we were off and running. Filled with the hope of what could be. I submitted my resignation for the end of the school year in June of 2022 and Lauren and I were off on a brand new adventure.
Oh by the way….Lauren was pregnant and due with our third child while all of this was going on. So if any of you are wondering at this point if I’m crazy…
That answer is yes…absolutely.
An Amazing Beginning
I learned a lot of lessons in the buildout phase of opening MCO. Unfortunately, as they tend to be, these lessons were learned the hard way in the form of permitting delays and thousands of dollars lost in having to add unexpected equipment. But we struggled through and made it to opening day. On September 24, 2022 we soft opened for a privately invited group of people to preview our business. It went gangbusters. We had such and overwhelming groundswell of support that it was humbling.
And that was the story of the first 12 months of business. We got off to such an amazing start that I couldn’t believe what was happening. We had a blast - we had a great base of support from Caldwell; we had made a name for ourselves in the local live music scene as being a venue that both artists and patrons wanted for live music, we had some of the best selection of men’s and women’s clothing in the area, and we had built a business centered around family and relationship. It seemed like all of our hopes and dreams for what Lauren and I wanted this business to be were coming true, already. It felt easy.
And then it wasn’t.
The Decline and End
I’m not going to give you a detailed listing of what happened, but suffice it to say that slowly and painfully over the next 12 months business kept getting worse and worse. We would have small bursts here and there, but nothing that was sustainable. We had a good group of very enthusiastic and wonderful supporters who patronized our place regularly, but as beautiful as those people and our relationships with them were, it was not enough to sustain a business.
In the fall of 2024, my brother (who was my principal business partner) and I decided that we were going to look where we were at after the big holiday season and decide if we were still going to pursue this. After barely making any profit during what was supposed to be our biggest time of the year, we came to the conclusion that it was time to start putting together an exit plan. Which we were able to execute by the end of May 2025. We closed our doors for the last time to customers on May 24th, 2025. It was gutting. It was heart wrenching. But standing here almost a year later - it was the right thing to do.
My MCO Story
Nothing quite prepares you for being the lone man in the arena of business ownership. I have said this to anyone who asks - starting and running MCO Idaho was the single hardest thing I have ever had to do. And that is coming from a guy who is used to managing a staff of 50 teachers and 400 families in a private school. Now, I did have partners, but they all live down in Texas. What that meant is the operational burden of MCO Idaho lay solely on my shoulders. Which is fine - it’s what I signed up for. What they don’t tell you is how lonely that world is. We played red dirt country music, mostly from Texas, in our shop and there’s a song that would come around a lot where the singer bemoans that he’s “Never alone, always lonely”. Every time that would come on I would have to smirk to myself.
When you own a popular business you’re everyone’s best “friend” - especially when you own a bar. Regulars want to stay in your good graces, other businesses want you to send people their way, local politicians want you to have a good opinion of them. With the clientele that we were targeting in particular - above the average of the Caldwell socio-economic ladder - influential people wanted to be in really good with us, and me in particular.
I allowed myself to fill my tank with that hype. I grasped onto that and placed my sense of worth and accomplishment in those relationships and my reputation in town. And again, that worked until after the first year was done and business cratered. That exposed so many things about my heart and where I was placing my hope and worth.
When the money stopped flowing my mind and heart became trapped in an endless cycle of fear. I had regulars - members who had seen what Lauren and I were trying to build and bought in - that I couldn’t look in the eye because I wasn’t able to consistently provide all of the perks that I promised when they signed up. Every month I had to ask the question “Do I drop $1000 on the member t-shirt this month, or do I pay my mortgage?” Objectively that was an easy answer, but I either didn’t trust the membership to handle being told that, or I was just too much of a coward to admit it - either way I just kept avoiding and deflecting until such a time came where I could actually live up to what I had promised. This messed with my mind and I started seeing ghosts around every corner.
The Worst Question In The World
I became afraid to talk to people at the bar because I dreaded the one question everyone wants to ask a business owner:
“How’s business?”
I hate that question with a burning passion. I mean, it’s GREAT when business is booming. You get to talk about all the crazy days you have had how you’re meeting goals. When business is awful, it’s just a mirror into how things are not going the way you envisioned. Multiply that 20x and that’s about how many times I would have to answer that questions over the span of a couple days. Multiply that 7 days….and you can tell how I spent my weeks.
It wasn’t isolated to while I was at MCO, I couldn’t escape it at church, at life group, in friend groups…there was no safe quarter from having to give an account of how MCO was doing. It was all I did - it was the only thing about me that people knew anymore. I had fallen out of community at church, became a stranger to people I had built relationship with, and even became a stranger in my own home. MCO consumed me.
God’s Miraculous Provision
God provided in many ways during this time. Many people stood in the gap for us when we didn’t have anything - my in-laws Steve and Lois DuBridge bought groceries for us, paid our mortgage, and supported in untold other ways; my own parents helped out as well. Jonathan and Shelly Higgins stood in the gap for our family when creditors came calling and helped to get me out of trouble there. A mystery giver sent us a check for almost the exact amount we needed to cover our kids’ homeschool curriculum for that year. We were blessed in crazy ways by so many people.
But one stands above all.
I would be in a far different place right now if not for my incredible older brother Greg. Words will never do justice to the gratitude I feel for that man. He was the singular reason we were able to give MCO as long of a chance as we did, and he is the singular reason why Lauren and I still have the house that we do. I quipped to him at the end of 2024 that he needed to let me know what he needed from me to claim me as a dependent. But it really wasn’t a joke. He single handedly provided for both his family and mine. My wife and kids were fed, had a home, had reliable transportation, and stability because of Greg’s generosity and his unwillingness to give up on his little brother when most others would have. I will never be able to repay him. In every way - the debt I owe that man is immeasurable.
But our enemy has a way of convincing you that the greatest blessings God gives you are curses.
The Lowest Point
All the generosity, all the help, all the need for me to be dependent on others created the narrative in my head that I was worthless. It became a burden - constantly knowing that I had been brought low. It followed me like a shadow
It’s late February 2025. I’m exhausted - I've been running MCO while teaching full time since June of 2024. Earlier in the week my brother and I met with our landlord and decided that we were going to place our space on the market to find a tenant to take over the building. We would close MCO as soon as contracts were signed. In reality, MCO was over - only I needed to act like it wasn’t until we were able to close. I needed to fake it for just a little while longer.
Up until MCO I had never failed at anything. That sounds arrogant, and I’m not trying to be that, but God has blessed me at every step of the way. I was always just the guy who “figures it out” but I couldn’t figure out MCO. It was one of the reasons I was arrogant enough to think that I could pull something like MCO off.
(This next section may come across as me being negative about my brother, or something like that. Nothing could be farther from the truth)
Another layer that I was dealing with - even as a 38 year old man - is the little brother/older brother dynamic. My brother has never done anything to contribute to this - he has been a wonderful example to me. But the reality is, that his is the shadow I always lived in growing up. My brother was incredible at what he did because he was a tireless worker. So it didn’t matter what it was, I was compared to him. Also, due to the fact that we are so far apart in age (9 years) Greg and I haven’t really had a great chance to build a relationship until we both became adults. And now we both have kids and are crazy busy - which is to say we STILL don’t have time.
I’m a very secure person. I really am. Until it comes to letting down two people - my wife and my brother. It’s my achilles heel.
So as you can imagine - the demise of MCO was a perfect cocktail of awfulness that the enemy used to sow lie after lie in my brain and heart.
Lies like:
“Your wife will never respect you again”
“You wasted all of your brother’s faith and money. You’ll never recover from this. He’ll never forgive you”.
I went to a dark place. I wanted to run and hide. I wanted to be away from people all the time.
I was constantly feeling like the last three years of sweat and tears weren’t worth it. That the time lost with my kids was all for nought. I was supposed to be building something that would provide in big ways for our family, but how quickly our greatest dream turned into our worst nightmare.
I felt like a failure.
…as a husband
…as a father
…as a brother
…as a friend.
And I haven’t even gotten to business owner yet.
All of it weighed on me constantly. Berating me. Eating away at me from the very core of my being. I felt like an imposter. Every time I was at MCO and making small talk with people who had supported us through it all, I had this feeling in the back of my head that they had no clue how incapable and awful I really was.
One night in late February, I had to come and close the bar because we were short staffed. It was a brutally slow night - the kind that proved why we were closing. We closed at 9pm, and I don’t think I saw a soul after 7:30.
I mopped up, sanitized, and closed up everything in the bar. Then I poured myself a drink and sat down in my empty building, at my empty bar, with the lights off.
Everything hit me at once. All the feelings of failure. All the feelings of guilt for putting my family through this. All the feelings of guilt for wasting my brother’s investment. Everything hit me.
Then the darkest lie of all grabbed hold of my brain:
“They would all be better off without you”.
It’s amazing how quickly that lie takes root. I convinced myself that was true. It was late, Lauren and the kids would have long been asleep. I was going to go home, grab the pistol, and rid them the burden that was me. So I grabbed a piece of paper and started writing. I wrote the only sentence that my brain could muster: “I’m sorry I wasn’t who you thought I was”.
That singular sentence encapsulated what I believed to be true in that moment. In that moment, in my mind, I was a failure at every level of my life - as a husband, father, provider, friend, partner, brother, and member of the community - I failed.
Who did I think I was anyway? I convinced everyone that I would “figure it out” because that’s what I always had done. But not this time. It all proved to be a house of cards because I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t smart enough. I sold people a bill of goods that I did not deliver on. I convinced my wife that she should trust me when I said this is a risk we should take. I convinced my brother that I would make a return on his investment. All of it was done with the best of intentions, but none of it worked out.
It was me. I was the problem - so I was going to solve the problem. I folded the paper up, left it on the bar, locked the building, and walked to my car.
This is the part of the story where God reaches down and grabs me.
I get in the car and plug my phone in. Amazon Music pops up….and I know that I wasn’t listening to it when I got out of the car…but it pops up anyway and fires up a song without me choosing. I’m driving, lost in my head, wallowing in my depression, and suddenly “Fight of My Life” by Rend Collective begins playing. For those of you who don’t know that song, the chorus goes like this:
“I need You to be my joy.
This is the fight of my life.
I’ve gotta keep looking for the light.
This is a war for my mind…”
Just that idea of looking for the light - never stop looking for the light - took root in my heart at that moment. As you can imagine, I had to pull over because I was full on ugly crying while trying to drive. As I’m sitting there, on the side of the road on Highway 44, God starts running a slide show through my brain of everything in my life that is good and from Him. Like an old home video watching my kids take their first steps, or say their first words, begins running through my mind. Seeing Lauren’s beautiful face when I walk through the door flies across my mind.
With light there is hope. When the light in my life was shown to me again, hope for the future began to take root again. I began to see again what a life reclaimed could look like. I found a reason to hope again. Even if in that moment I was still depressed, the seeds of renewed hope had been planted.
I actually turned the car around and drove back to MCO. I went back to the bar and found that piece of paper with the single line on it that I had left on the bar, grabbed a lighter and burned it in the bathroom sink. (Side note: THAT is a very cathartic thing to do when you just need to get stuff out of your head.) I went home from there, crawled in bed and acted like nothing happened.
Healing is Wild
In the time since our closure of MCO there has still be a ton of healing that needs to be done. Like I said, on the day we closed for business for the last time, I crumpled into Lauren’s arms, not ten minutes after this picture was taken, sobbing like a baby. It was gut wrenching.
The people were always the best part of MCO.
The aftermath hasn’t been easy either. In adjusting back to a normal work schedule I have had to relearn how to be present at home (and Lauren has had to relearn how to deal with me at home…). I have had to relearn how to leave work in its rightful place. And when work gets hectic (like for instance in these past couple weeks) and it begins to feel like the dam could break at any minute, I have to constantly guard against my nervous system breaking down into panic mode because that’s what it learned from MCO - “This is how it all goes wrong…so let’s freak out!”.
I returned back to my old job a broken man - and a different man - but a man with more clarity and perspective than I had ever held before in that role.
Only recently have I been able to open up this part of my brain. I have spent much of the last year trying to pretend that MCO never happened, hoping that by doing so I would naturally heal with time. But that’s not how healing works. Wounds have to be cleansed before they are healed. So this is me opening up the proverbial bottle of rubbing alcohol.
Healing hits me at the most random times. I can be sitting in my driveway watching my boys play on a Saturday afternoon, and I will be run over with gratitude realizing that I’m watching something that I missed for the last three years. I can be sitting at dinner on a Thursday night, or watching a movie with the family on Friday night and will be overflowed with love for the moment because I missed so many.
This picture was taken the day after we went “full-circle”. I found out while driving to this cabin that I would return to the old office I held before opening MCO. The final step in God’s immediate provision for our family. I will always love the photo because it represents the first time I felt peace in years.
A Note to My MCO Friends/Family
Thank you. Seriously.
I don’t want you to read any of what I just wrote as including you as the problem. The people were always what made MCO Idaho a special place. That was not and will never be lost on both Lauren and me.
Final Thoughts
Friends, healing is wild. I keep saying that because it’s true. I started this whole thing with a quote from Ben Fuller’s song “Black Sheep” (my new favorite song). I’ll end with another quote from that same song:
The Good Shepherd’s love smells like smoke
There ain’t no hell so low
Where He won’t let the Hound of Heaven go
More than anything, I am thankful for that truth.
-BB