How NetHarbor started.
A working harbor metaphor — and the reason a veteran left agency life to build it.
What it was to serve.
At twenty-two, I read Wild at Heart by John Eldredge — a book about the longing of the heart, and the adventure men are made for. It named something I'd been carrying without knowing what it was. So I joined the United States Army.
The work was hard and clear, and for a while it was exactly what I'd been looking for. The longing had a place to go. Then I witnessed a friend killed in a training accident — the kind of loss that doesn't have a clean place to go inside you. It just sits.
Eldredge had meant the longing as an invitation. But the catch was risk. Are we willing to live with the level of risk God invites us to? The question doesn't ask itself once. It keeps asking.
In 2023, I was medically discharged. The answer I'd built my life around, over in an afternoon. The risk I'd said yes to had already taken my friend. Now it took the rest of what I'd built.
Then I found Tribe by Sebastian Junger — about what soldiers miss most when the unit dissolves. The belonging. The small group with a clear purpose.
I needed to go somewhere I could feel that again.
So I went north.
What the harbor was doing.
I enrolled in the AmeriCorps Sitka program and flew north. On my first day in Sitka, Alaska, I sat on the rocks at the edge of the harbor and watched the fishing fleet work.
Boats came in battered from the season. Crews refueled, restocked ice, patched nets, welded what needed welding. Then they left again for the salmon grounds.
What struck me was that the harbor didn't do the fishing. It didn't catch the salmon. It made the fishing possible.
We refill. We repair.
We get them ready to sail.
The work of restoration.
After everything, I ventured to Colorado to attend a men's program called Restoring the Soul. I didn't go looking for answers — I went because I'd run out of places to put the weight.
There I read Sacred Attachment by Michael John Cusick — a book about trauma, the lies that calcify around our losses, and the long work of coming back to something deeper than survival.
Restoration isn't going back to what you were.
It's becoming what the loss made room for.
That's the work. And it's why NetHarbor exists — because every organization I build for is also a part of this story.
We refill.
We repair.
We get them ready to sail.
A special thanks to Bill, Josh, Todd, Craig, Trip, Duddley, Justin, Raul, Ben, Michael, and all those along the way for helping make sense of my story.
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