PUEBLO – Bob McCook starts each morning with his dogs and bees on his 120-acre ranch in Pueblo.

“I get up before 4 a.m. and then go to bed around 10, 10:30 or 11 p.m.,” McCook says. “If someone disrupts that time in the morning, I get in trouble.”

McCook loves the cool mornings on his ranch when he watches the sunrise.

“The sunrise is nothing like the sunrise over the ocean,” McCook said.

He says “the sea” because the retired Navy chief warrant officer spent much of his time as a flight deck coordinator on aircraft carriers for more than two decades, a career he began shortly after his 17th birthday.

Photo credit: Bob McCook

Photo credit: Bob McCook

“I dropped out of school in ninth grade,” McCook said. “Everyone told me I wouldn’t make it. My dad wrote me a letter at boot camp saying, ‘This is not your home, don’t come back.’ My second week at boot camp, I realized I had found my home.”

Robert McCook

After his career in the Navy, McCook worked as a nuclear engineer for twenty years. When he retired, he struggled with a number of health problems and began to isolate himself. His wife of 50 years, Belinda, began to worry.

Robert McCook

“He couldn’t focus on anything, and when he tried to find something that would give him that spark, that energy, those energetic things, it wasn’t there,” Ms. McCook said.

He decided to get his family’s finances in order and made a plan to commit suicide within the next two years.

“I actually developed a spreadsheet,” he said.

He told his wife about this plan.

“I’ve fought for 50 years to have him and to keep this going, and I see him giving up more and more every day – not to us, but to himself,” Ms. McCook said.

Then his road to healing began with a chance encounter with a veteran during a doctor’s appointment.

“He said, ‘Hey, have you ever heard of this Healing Waters project?’ He showed me pictures when he was there. So I came home and told her about it.”

The national nonprofit helps veterans and active military members with disabilities like PTSD heal through fly fishing. But it took McCook two more years to agree to a trip with Project Healing Waters.

Robert McCook

“When he told me about it, I said, ‘You’ll be with your boys as soon as you get to (Project) Healing Waters, as soon as you go fishing, you’ll be with your boys.'”

Robert McCook

McCook said he agreed to go on a four-day fishing trip in Montana, which he describes as a trip that saved his life.

“It wasn’t just about fishing,” McCook said. “It was about being surrounded by veterans, being surrounded by guys who understood what I was saying, other guys who were struggling.”

He owes this possible in particular to a veteran, Dave Ross.

Robert McCook

“I come here and I’m all composed. And then I walk in and he’s there. I’m fine,” McCook said. “I’m here with people who care.”

Such moments also change the lives of the people who teach them to fish. Volunteer Dave Brown has spent 10 years teaching participants in the program how to fish.

“I call it the therapy of focusing on things outside your own world,” Brown said. “When you see something beautiful out there, you just open up and then when you finally hook that weird little fish, it shouldn’t be that important, but sometimes it puts a smile on your face that you may not have seen in months or years. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Back at the ranch, the McCooks are filled with renewed hope and gratitude toward the men and women of Project Healing Waters who are determined to make a difference.

“I got back the man I married years ago,” Ms. McCook said. “He sounded the same, his voice, the words he used, I had him back. I had him back. So when he says to me, ‘There’s another one coming,’ I say, ‘You’re going to go, by all means you’re going to go, go see your friends, be with them, draw from them and do this.'”

Robert McCook

The Healing Waters Project began in 2005 to help wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan recovering at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The nonprofit now has locations across the country. To find a location near you, click here.

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