Chapter Twenty-seven
Three months ago, Beeswax sent me on an unusual assignment: spend ten days in the Canadian wilderness with a man whose couples therapy start-up I’d covered rather harshly for this magazine.
Harshly enough, perhaps, that celebrity client and potential corporate partner Renee Garner had pulled out mere days before the company’s inaugural session.
There are times in a journalist’s life when they find themselves in the right place, at the right time, searching for the wrong story.
The morning my wife (Ed: well-known outdoor photographer Willow Connors Torquay) and I arrived in Pendleton, British Columbia was a brilliant early-summer day.
We’d tacked some extra time onto the beginning of our trip to drive the famous Oceans to Peaks Highway and enjoy world-famous Grey Tusk Mountain.
I thought I’d spend the following week on the water and come home a little stronger, a lot dirtier, and in possession of a story about the increasingly bizarre lengths to which self-help hawkers will go to walk a gold-paved path to fame.
Instead, I came away with a marriage transformed in ways I never saw coming, a flourishing group chat of fellow whitewater enthusiasts, and a brand-new respect for the people who show us life’s most important lessons in some of the world’s most unexpected places.
And I dove down a rabbit hole straight to the dark underbelly of academia, which takes pains to paint itself as a meritocracy but has a bad habit of eating its young even after they leave the nest.
There I found a physician and a psychologist, both of whom were driven out of institutions of higher learning that like to position themselves as above the fray, but which remain rife with the same abuses of power you’ll find in all the worst workplaces.
(Note: At the time this article went to press, Dr. Alan Fisher had not responded to our requests for comment.
Both New England University (NEU), where Dr. Fisher is a professor in the Department of Psychology, and Grey Tusk General Hospital declined to comment due to active misconduct investigations.)
This is a story of good people trying to make the best of bad circumstances and creating the most astonishing “vacation,” if you can call it that, I’ve ever experienced.
Oh, and there’s a good whack of skulduggery.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At first glance, you wouldn’t think Lyle “McHuge” McHugh and Stellar J Byrd have much in common.
McHugh, one of the few men I’ve met who understates his height (he claims six feet four inches under duress), most often comes across as a soothing Mother Earth type who would give you the literal shirt off his back.
Byrd is the yang to his yin, a sharp-eyed pragmatist whose small stature belies her big presence.
Along with their ninety-five-pound rescue dog, Babe, they live in a ten-by-ten-foot orange tent at the Love Boat headquarters north of Pendleton.
For now, that is: the overnight fame that followed their company’s dramatic first season means they’ll be spending the winter in a yet-to-be-disclosed southerly whitewater destination to continue their lessons in canoeing, life, and love on a year-round basis.
They’re not the most demonstrative couple when they’re working, preferring to keep the focus on their guests’ love stories rather than their own.
But every so often, if you’re paying attention, you’ll catch him lifting her onto rocks, logs, chairs, or whatever will bring her face on a level with his.
Or you may notice her passing her thumb across the scar in his left eyebrow—one of those ordinary, G-rated gestures that somehow make you feel you should look away.
One does wonder whether they’ve decided to strictly limit public displays of affection so their guests don’t try to measure up to unrealistic #CoupleGoals.
Despite their humble digs, McHugh and Byrd are no ordinary entrepreneurs.
For example, they’re considering a quickie wedding before the winter season, provided they’re able to accommodate the schedules of their nearest and dearest: Byrd’s half sister, Sloane Summers (yes, that Sloane Summers); Tobin Renner-Lewis, a Love Boat cofounder; Liz Renner-Lewis, recipient of the Innovator of the Year prize from the Canadian Outdoor Adventure Society; Sharon Keller-Yakub, heir apparent of the quietly dynastic Keller family of companies; and oh yes, close personal friend Renee Garner, rumored to be in negotiations to bring McHugh into her expanding stable of telegenic pop psychology personalities.
The story starts with Dr. Byrd, who thought she knew a grifter when she saw one, considering her father did time in Canadian federal prison for wire fraud.
She went to medical school and earned a double qualification in family medicine and emergency medicine, thinking she’d finally acquired enough clout to put herself out of the reach of people who’d take advantage of her.
Shortly after completing her training, she joined the emergency department of Grey Tusk General Hospital as one of two female physicians hired after the department suffered national embarrassment for not having hired a female staff physician or accepted a female resident in almost two decades…
Meanwhile, after completing his master’s degree in counseling psychology, McHugh was accepted as a doctoral candidate in the prestigious lab of Dr. Alan Fisher, who has come under significant fire since unveiling his own, suspiciously Love Boat–like research expedition just as McHugh and Byrd launched theirs.
Notably, Fisher had never published any wilderness-related work or paddled whitewater beforehand, according to my research.
Since June, a number of Fisher’s former graduate students have alleged their work was improperly credited to him during and after their time under his supervision—a big deal in academic circles.
If the story of this canoeing trip sounds more like a true-crime documentary than an idyllic vacation, that may be why the dispute between Fisher and the Love Boat was the subject of by far the most popular episode of Season 7 of Renee Garner’s podcast, Garnered Wisdom .
Then again, its popularity may be due to the #marrymeMcHuge hashtag that began trending shortly after the episode dropped, along with a meme of McHugh dropping a chaste (but somehow not chaste) peck at the corner of Byrd’s mouth, saying, “I waited a year for her. I would have waited the rest of my life for her.”
And you thought Canada was boring.…
So did the good guys win? Yes, and no.
McHugh and Byrd’s story has so far followed an all-too-familiar pattern: while underlings may fall, powerful men—especially powerful white men—often get “forgiven.”
Pending his trial on charges of assault, William Trevor Butterworth is prohibited from entering Canada except for legal purposes. He has appealed his expulsion from NEU. A second, unnamed student withdrew from NEU’s PhD program voluntarily.
Meanwhile, no charges have yet been laid against Fisher. Although he is under investigation by NEU, as well as several prominent scientific journals, he remains an active faculty member at the venerable university.
Notably, Fisher has signed a legal settlement attesting that he will not undertake wilderness-based research in exchange for the Love Boat owners’ agreement to drop a seven-figure civil lawsuit.
Fisher’s whitewater therapy research project also disappeared from a list of current funding recipients on the National Science Foundation website.
So far, however, just two of his hundreds of scientific papers have been retracted by the journals that published them.
And where does that leave McHuge—sorry, McHugh—and Byrd?
I caught up with them in a rare moment indoors, at his Grey Tusk condo.
Pressed and clean, without zinc-covered faces or emergency knives strapped to their chests, they give off something like Clark Kent vibes while still radiating the competence and closeness they leveraged to launch their company to stardom.
Byrd gives McHugh a secret smile when I ask what her plans are between now and the winter session of the Love Boat.
She’s gradually reentering medicine as a family physician in a group practice (a part-time pursuit for now, but she’ll reconsider her plans once Tobin Renner-Lewis returns from paternity leave) while working with McHugh to compile material for their upcoming self-help book—his second, her first.
“Writing a book is a risk,” she tells me.
“It’s a lot of work for uncertain returns.
You have to love it and be prepared to give a lot to it, whether or not it gives back in the form of money or recognition.
” But to Byrd, the work feels more satisfying than anything except successfully executing her favorite medical procedures, which I won’t describe here.
For his part, McHugh uses his downtime to occasionally dip into the thriving online community of Love Boat graduates.
Their private server is cheekily named “Divorce Boat,” an insider term for tandem whitewater canoeing that pokes gentle fun at the difficulty of the sport.
McHugh won’t confirm whether he and Byrd are considering licensing the rights to their proprietary methodology, but rumor has it they’ve already turned down some offers they felt were too low.
Says McHugh, “If the universe sent licensing opportunities our way, we’d ideally use the revenue to offer special sessions at low or no cost, to make the wilderness a more equitable place.
Maybe a parent and teen Love Boat is in our future.
But we’ll see. Above all, we want to find the right partnership. ”
But don’t they want to strike while the licensing iron is hot?
Byrd shakes her head. “For now, no matter what, we have ourselves, and we have each other.”
They shift slightly, then settle back into the love seat, hands clasped as if each has reached for the other and found them waiting.
Couple goals, indeed.