Green & Rowdy Outdoors

Green & Rowdy Outdoors was born from a handful of memories that, like an old river, have only grown deeper with time.

Some of my earliest and fondest memories were made in Northwest Montana, where my father, Chad Green, and I spent long summer days with Keith Haverfield—though to some who really knew him, he was simply Rowdy. We fished for Pike and Bass, traveled the woods for Grouse, and passed those slow Montana afternoons in the company of good water, good stories, and good people.

My father and Rowdy's story began long before mine did.

Rowdy was nearly thirty years older than my father and lived only a few houses down the street from him when my dad was a boy. He was a man's man in the old sense of the word. He loved sports, loved the outdoors, and seemed most at home when there was a lake to fish, a field to cross, or some stretch of country waiting to be explored.

Rowdy had two daughters of his own, but no son. My father always believed that, in some way, he became the son Rowdy never had.

When they were young, they spent afternoons in the street tossing a football back and forth. Later, they found themselves working side by side at the Aluminum Plant just outside Columbia Falls. Years passed, as they always do, and their friendship grew quietly into something more than friendship—a bond built through the ordinary days of life, which are often the days that matter most.

By the time I came along, Rowdy was already a part of my father's story. Before long, he became part of mine.

I loved those days when Rowdy would let me tag along. To me, they were simply adventures. We often began fishing before anyone else arrived at the lake. We traveled Forest Service roads in search for Grouse. We talked about whatever happened to cross our minds, and sometimes about nothing at all. At that age, I didn't think much about the patience it took for an older man to bring a boy along, to slow his own pace, and to let the boy see the world in his own way.

I understand that patience now.

Rowdy, Me, and My Father after a High School Football Game during my Senior Year of High School.

Having a daughter of my own, and several younger cousins who remind me of myself at that age, I have come to appreciate what Rowdy was really giving me on those days. It wasn't only a place in the boat or a seat beside him in the truck. It was time. It was attention. It was the quiet gift of being welcomed into someone else's world.

Those are the things we rarely recognize while we are living them.

It is only later, when the years have passed and the people who shared them with us have grown older, that we begin to understand how much those ordinary days meant.

I started Green & Rowdy Outdoors in 2019 because I wanted to keep some of those days from disappearing. I wanted a place to record the lakes we fished, the woods we wandered, and the memories made along the way. More than anything, I wanted a record of the time we've been fortunate enough to share together.

Rowdy with one of his signature "Hawgs".

Because while I'm still young, the older I get, the more I believe that our lives are measured less by the years themselves than by the moments that fill them.

A summer afternoon on a Montana lake. A fish breaking the surface. A football spiraling across a backyard. A boy sitting beside a man who had known his father since childhood. A story told for the hundredth time and still worth hearing.

The water moves on. The seasons change. Children grow up, and the old men who taught them where to fish grow older still.

But some things stay with us. The places. The stories. The lessons. And the people.

Green & Rowdy Outdoors is my way of remembering them.