OUR STORY

Growing up, many of my weekends and vacations were spent splashing in the streams and lakes of the Adirondacks. As a small child, my parents bought an old hunting cabin in the Park; the building itself was small, only partially insulated, and had a few more rodent residents than many would have preferred.

Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t an admirer of the Great Outdoors at an early age. While many of my friends were vacationing on beaches and sleeping in state-of-the-art hotels, I was swatting mosquitos by the fire, eating Freihofer’s doughnuts on a ramshackle picnic table, & playing basketball with my older brother, using a kickball and a bucket nailed to a tree (Looking back, I wish I could tell 8-year-old me that those were going to be some of the best memories of my life).

One weekend, however, things changed. We were at a local Kmart grabbing a few last-minute supplies for our next trip to Camp. I didn’t want to go. In what I assume was an effort to quell my pouting, my Mom played a brilliant mind game with me; you might even call it a bribe.

She pulled me down the camping aisle and we looked at all of the sweet gear we wouldn’t be buying. At the end of the aisle though, were two aluminum fishing nets with lime green netting. She picked them up and said simply “These are really cool, right?”, and put them both in our cart – one for me and one for my brother. “You guys can catch fish in the creek with them!”. I wasn’t exactly sure why, but I was sold. I couldn’t wait to get up to Camp the next morning. It didn’t matter that the holes were too big to catch any of the minnows that might be swimming near the rock that we played on. It didn’t matter that I didn’t even like fishing. Those shiny nets with the lime green netting spurred my imagination. I was inspired to become the best fisherman the creek (or ‘crick’ as my Dad will forever call it) had ever seen!

I never ended up catching any fish with that net - not that weekend or any other. Not a single of one of the enormous bass that were leaping around in my head jumped into that net. But that excitement stayed with me. Instead of focusing on the bugs & mice, I began to see the Great Outdoors for the magic that it held. From then on, I always looked forward to our next weekend at Camp and the adventure we would find.

To this day, there isn’t a weekend where I don’t hope to get out and seek adventure in the wilderness, especially in the Adirondacks. You might say those nets had a direct hand in me finding my passion for exploring & conserving. And from that passion comes The Squatch Brand – a place where we aim to provide unconventional goods that foster that same type of excitement for Mother Nature that a pair of Kmart fishing nets once did for me.

So, go on, “Squatch Out” and find your adventure!

P.S. Those Kmart fishing nets are still hanging in the shed at Camp.