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Welcome to the Behind the Shield Podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show former firefighter, paramedic, police officer and winner of the Naked and Afraid
show Gwen Grimes.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from the outdoor living that forged
her resilience as a child, her journey into EMS, the transition into law enforcement,
the unique challenges for first responders in the wilderness setting, her career ending
injury, the formation of her own wilderness retreat and so much more.
Before we get to this incredibly powerful and important conversation, as I always say,
please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the
show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of almost a thousand episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Gwen Grimes.
Enjoy.
Well Gwen, I want to start by saying thank you so, so much for taking the time and coming
on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Not a problem.
Happy to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
So where on planet earth are we finding you today?
We are 120 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Alaska in a remote location, which is our
homestead on the Yukon River.
Beautiful.
I think you have to be my most remote interview.
I've had a wildland firefighter that did it from his van.
I know that was pretty remote as well, but I think you'd be even him.
That's awesome.
Well I would love to start the very beginning of your timeline.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little about your family dynamic, what your
parents did, how many siblings.
So I was born in Oregon and my dad was a military then transferred over to deputy sheriff.
And when I was a teenager, he got a job working up in Alaska and brought our family up.
And so we've been in Alaska since the late 80s and kind of just started off our Alaska
career up here.
And that was early beginnings.
I mean, pretty standard.
Dad was a cop, mom was a homemaker.
When you said he was military, was he Vietnam era?
He was, but he didn't go to Vietnam.
He ended up going to Germany.
And yeah, he got out in 73, 72 or 73, something like that.
And what about his career?
When you asked him when you were wearing uniform, what were some of the, you know, what we would
call career calls that he ran?
Oh, geez.
I mean, so where we lived out in Oregon, also remote, he was a deputy sheriff down there.
And so I actually got to do a lot of ride alongs with him when I was a child because
of the remoteness.
So he'd come pick me up and I'd be out rolling with him and, you know, driving around on
patrol, going on calls, sitting tight up in the passenger seat, watching what was going
on.
And I got a taste of law enforcement very early on.
Yeah, I was just a tight knit little department and kind of a big family.
Everybody just kind of hung out together.
And probably one of the scariest incidents with him being a cop in Oregon when I was
very young, I had two of my siblings were born at that time.
My brother was like two.
My sister was four and I was five.
And he actually had a guy that got pissed off at him, decided he wanted to take him
out.
And he was at work and my mom was home with us kids.
And the guy came to the door pounding on the door and was screaming at my mom about her
turning them in for CPS and he demanded to come in and take her kids and swear in a Bible
that she didn't turn them in, that kind of thing.
And my mom looked at me and said, take your siblings into the closet, keep them quiet,
do not come out.
So I did.
And during that time, while we were in the closet, I guess he ran up into our barn overlooking
our animals and the house and was up there in a sniper position to take my dad out when
he came home.
And so my memory of that being so young was once everything was clear, we came out and
all these cops were in the house, like everywhere, all over the property.
They'd actually got the SWAT team out there, surrounded them, took them out.
And then that was kind of my introduction into what law enforcement was capable of doing,
how they could protect people.
I thought that was pretty cool.
I really loved that aspect of it.
Didn't really scare me.
It was intriguing and interesting to me.
So that was neat, but scary at the same time being so young.
What about the idiosyncrasies of law enforcement in such a vast rural area?
What are some of the elements that inner city people, for example, probably don't even think
about?
Oh, there's no backup.
So when I was a cop, I worked up on the North Slope Borough for the first decade of my career.
And out there, you work villages of between 200 and 1,000 people, depending on which village
you're in.
And you're out there by yourself.
You do a two-week-on, two-week-off rotation, and you're it.
There's no backup.
Nobody's coming to your aid.
You don't even have radios.
You get your phone call at the station from dispatch, which is hundreds of miles away
up in Barrow.
And they dispatch you to the call.
And then you roll out on it by yourself.
And you figure it out.
And you better know what you're doing.
Because if you got to make an arrest, you got to break up a fight, any of that kind
of stuff, nobody's coming to bail you out.
That's it.
You're it.
So do what you got to do.
So that was a very interesting decade of my career, being a solo officer out in those
villages.
When we go back to York and the school age, what were you playing as far as sports?
I played as much as I could.
I love sports.
I love playing football.
So that was our grade school, roused about stuff on the playground.
But for like organized sports, I played softball, basketball, baseball.
I was actually when I got into middle school, they didn't have a softball team for girls
yet.
And so me and three other girls, we really wanted to play ball.
And we petitioned the school.
We were the first female baseball players allowed on a boys team.
And so we ended up being able to go travel with the boys team and go play play baseball
for the first two years.
And then they got a softball team for us together.
And we started doing school softball from that point out.
Were you playing in some moral teams or were you the only coed?
We were the only coed in in our area because we had to petition the school board to be
able to be allowed to play.
So we were kind of groundbreaking females at the time into an all boys sport and no
other teams that we played had girls on them.
And how were you received?
I mean, some people would assume that immediately there was all this hazing and bullying.
But I mean, you know, was it that way or was it actually the opposite?
We're all Tomboys.
All of our friends were guys.
So we all we all just played out together.
There was no no problems.
Excellent.
What about career aspirations?
You're doing these ride alongs with your dad, you know, then you have this horrendous, you
know, up close and personal experience with crime on your own property.
Were you thinking about law enforcement when you were in the school age?
Was there another career that came in first?
I was I really wanted to be a cop.
That was like my big thing.
I wanted to be a police officer so badly.
And then my dad kept saying, no, no, no, no, you do not want to do this as a career.
This is no, I don't want my daughter being a cop that do something else type thing.
I was very bullheaded and I wanted to do my own thing.
And so my ever all of my choices and things that I was doing was gearing me up to be a
cop.
And then my house 14, I think, and we were driving over to Boise, Idaho for Christmas.
My mom was driving and she fell asleep at the wheels Christmas at wintertime.
And there was a lot of snow on the ground.
And all I remember was this station wagon that we're all in.
None of us were buckled in.
Obviously it was it was the early 80s.
And she flipped the car.
It went into a burrow ditch and the car flipped over, hit the culvert, flipped the car.
All of us went airborne.
We landed on the top of the roof, skid to a stop, super quiet.
And I could hear my twin sisters in the back.
They were babies.
Basically they were very little.
And then my my two other siblings back there.
I remember crawling out of the car and my mom was unconscious in the front seat.
And my dad was like, when climb behind here, hold your mom's neck, do not let it move.
And then so I did.
I climbed in there and held her neck.
Took an hour for EMS to show up on scene.
When they did, they put on a kid extricated her.
And I was fascinated with what they were doing, like all the jaws of life, all the all the
equipment, everything.
And I asked, can I ride in the back on the way to the hospital?
And they're like, yeah, that'd be great.
Here, keep holding your mom's head.
So it was weird because I was concerned about my mom.
She was definitely hurt.
I mean, there was there's a lot of damage there, but I wasn't scared.
I was really fascinated with the medics and how they were saving my mom basically and
all the stuff that they were doing.
And it just fascinated me to the point that it changed my career path.
And I actually ended up going to school for paramedicine and minored in search and rescue,
became a national registered paramedic firefighter.
One did that for.
Oh, geez, for almost 15 years before I decided to switch over to my initial love of law enforcement,
which I did in I think I was 30, 32 when I switched over to law enforcement.
So from 18 to 31, 32, I was a firefighter paramedic and then switched over to law enforcement
to finish out my career.
So I've had almost 29 years of emergency services service under my belt.
So what about the firefighter paramedic role?
Again, what was the kind of population that you were serving and what were some of the
career calls when you were in that uniform?
Well, I did my internship down in Atlanta, Georgia with Grady Memorial Hospital.
So I saw some inner city stuff there as for two summers while we did those internships.
Also got my certification, my husband at the time, and I moved to where we go.
We went to back to back up to Alaska.
I got hired on at the department, the police department working corrections at the jail
there.
I wasn't using my paramedic certification at the time.
And I really wanted to use my paramedic certification, but I was working in corrections.
My husband hated the Arctic, hated it.
We had two young sons at the time.
And he was like, I'm taking the boys down to my mom's and I'm going to go see if I
can find us jobs.
I was like, all right.
I said, here's the deal.
I said, I got a good job up here working for the police department.
So if you can find jobs anywhere in the world, like both of us for both of us as medics,
I'll leave Alaska for you and the boys to go do that.
So he was out for like three months scouring the country and he found two paramedic jobs
for us in truth or consequences, New Mexico.
It's the polar opposite, right?
He's like, pack your bags.
We're going to New Mexico.
I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.
So I went from, it was like 20 degrees in Alaska to 120 degrees in New Mexico in a matter
of like a week and started off my paramedic career there in the county ambulance.
And I got stories that could last for days with all the medic stuff that I've done and
the fire calls, law enforcement, just so many.
I mean, lifetime of memories, good and bad.
When I asked the military people about combat, it's usually, not as we all can't stand being
asked, not that what's the worst thing you've seen, but what would be some of the most critical
calls that you ran?
And then also those field goal calls that maybe weren't even emergent, but you just
did, you made someone's life better in a different way.
Well, I've got a bunch of those too.
I guess the one, the career changer for me was one of the calls that I went on was a
child abuse case where the father had dipped his one-year-old in scalding water up to its
chest and the baby died.
But it made me very angry that he was able to do that with almost no consequence.
The system seemed broken.
There was a lot of people getting away with some really bad stuff.
And I was like, you know what?
I've always wanted to be a cop.
I want to go make a difference, see if I can go on the blue side and see if I can make
a difference.
I felt like my paramedic and fire career were coming to an end.
I was getting kind of burnt out.
I was salty.
I was a salty old paramedic.
I'd been there, done that.
I need something to change.
So I went ahead and applied and got hired on with the police department and rolled out
from there.
That was my changer though.
That was my, let's see if I can make a difference elsewhere.
I felt like I'd done everything I needed to do or could do as a medic and a firefighter.
Probably one of the worst calls, I mean, obviously the worst calls as a firefighter is going
into buildings and finding them burning, burn up bodies.
Those are always not fun to stumble upon.
I was in a back draft one time that almost took me and my front partner out.
Actually separated our masks on our faces to within a quarter inch of complete failure
where we would have, when we walked out of the building, well, walk, we were like scrambling
out of the building because the fire drafted over the top of us.
We were both on fire.
Our turnouts were on fire and they had to put us out.
So that was eyeopening as well.
That was a close call.
Probably one of my favorite stories that I tell often to people is how law enforcement
can make positive impacts in people's lives.
When I was working up on the slope, before you go out into the villages, you have to
do two years in Barrow, which is now Utpiaugvik.
It's furthest north city in North America that you can live in.
It had a population of 5,000 gravel roads.
There was usually two officers on duty.
You just kind of had to prove yourself out there and then they'd spark you out to one
of the villages.
While I was doing my proving grounds out there, we had a young man that was just turned 18
or 19, very young, decided to get drunk, run around town.
He was firing a shotgun off, shooting shotgun around town.
Me and my partner that night, Greg, we got the call.
We scrambled in our patrol trucks over to go intercept him.
While we were coming around a corner, I see him go up onto a family's porch up in that
far north.
The houses are up on stilts.
They're about three feet off the ground for permafrost reasons.
They have these porches that go up.
On top of that porch is basically a picture window that's looking into the entire house.
I slid my patrol car to a stop, hopped out of my truck to approach this young man holding
a shotgun, getting ready to enter this house.
I could see the family sitting at the table behind him in the picture window.
Absolutely terrible.
You don't want to shoot, right?
Because you've got all these innocents right behind you.
You're going to catch 22.
I'm coming up, I have my handgun out, and I'm walking up to approach him.
I'm trying to talk him down.
Drop the gun, drop the gun.
He starts swinging the shotgun around at me.
As all cops know, once they start swinging that around, it's a lethal threat.
He can kill you at that point.
It's a shotgun, and I'm fairly close.
I'm maybe 20 feet away from him.
Well, everything slowed down.
Time slowed down.
I watched his hands come off the firing mechanism, slowly start peeling away as he was turning
to throw the gun.
I watched his hands slowly open, and the shotgun scattered across.
I went and I got him.
Arrested him for disorderly conduct, misconduct involving weapons, blah, blah, blah.
I didn't think anything of it.
Status quo, regular call, get in there.
Could I have shot him?
Yes.
Was it a good shoot situation?
No.
I didn't think twice about it.
Years later, many years later, I was in Prudhoe Bay.
I was sitting down at a... They have places because that's the oil field over there.
They have places that you can go in and sit down to eat.
Cops always sit alone at the tables, so you're there by yourself, sitting at the table eating.
This young kid, he's like 25, 26, comes over and he sits down at my table.
I'm like, okay, this is weird.
He says, can I sit here with you?
I'm like, sure.
That'd be great.
He sits down and my spidey senses are like, what is going on?
Something's not right because nobody ever comes to sit down at a cop's table.
I'm looking at him, kind of looking him up and down.
He goes, you don't remember me, do you?
I'm like, I'm sorry.
Can you jog my memory?
He goes, I'm the kid with the shotgun on the porch that you could have killed that night.
I was like, and then all of a sudden I'm like, uh-oh, here we go.
I put you in jail.
He's going to fight, right?
I'm thinking, here we go.
But no, he goes, I needed to sit down and have a meal with you and I wanted to thank
you.
I'm like, for what?
He goes, that was one of the eye-opening nights of my life.
I realized you could have taken me out that night and by all rights, you should have because
I was hell-bent on killing somebody that night.
You stopped me and I was able to get put into jail, realized my choices in life were not
the best and now, he goes, I have a wife, I have two kids, I have a really good job
on the slope, I'm making money.
I just bought a house.
He goes, you changed my life and I'm like, this turned out way better than I thought.
So totally unexpected, feel-good story.
Like, hey, I didn't have to kill that kid.
He learned his lesson, turned his life around, productive member of society, blah, blah,
blah.
So yeah, there's good and bad in all aspects of civil service.
You do, you see the good and the bad and you can make differences in people's lives.
It's interesting when you said you got burnt out by the fire on EMS side because if you
think about it, what I did for my whole career was reactive.
People are already having their worst day when they call police and fire, excuse me,
and fire an EMS.
Something has gone terribly wrong, but the law enforcement side, of course, you've got
that reactive element, which is sometimes, but you've also got almost like a lifeguard,
the proactive element, the trying to stop things before they go bad, whether it's a
site call, whether it's simply a traffic stop before someone slides off a bridge because
they're going too fast.
So it's interesting the contrast.
I never thought of it that way before, but there is a lot more of a proactive element
in the law enforcement side than there is an EMS and fire.
Absolutely.
I agree with that 100%.
It's vastly different fields.
We are talking about being a law enforcement officer on your own.
Obviously, we'll get into some of the other stuff you've done later as well.
When you reflect to where you grew up and the type of upbringing that you had, what
were the elements you think that contributed to this physical and mental toughness that
you developed?
You know how people say they're born to do things?
I was born to be a cop.
I was born for it.
It's been in my blood.
It's been in my bloodlines.
My family, I was like third generation law enforcement.
It was, I don't know, it just felt right.
It felt like something I had to do, like a calling almost.
I think some people are just built that way.
You think different, you react in stressful situations differently than most humans do.
Because of that, you can function in chaos.
What about the actual environment?
I don't know if you've seen on any of your interactions with the internet and social
media or anything, but recently there has been this pursuit of discomfort because a
lot of us in urban and suburban arenas, it's so comfortable.
Now I'm sitting in a house, I've got air conditioning.
I'm in Florida, so it's brutal outside, but inside it's nice.
When I think about the farm that I grew up in England, I was out in the cold and the
rain and the wet and there was an element of fostering resilience through just simply
not having the creature comforts that we have today.
What was your Oregon and Alaskan upbringing like?
If you contrast it to a city, what elements of that do you think helped foster the strength?
I didn't know anything about city life growing up at all.
I was raised in the mountains, transported to Alaska, which we went to Point Hope, which
is a village of a thousand people on the Chupchi Sea and extreme environment.
Going from the mountains of Oregon to the extreme Arctic, very hard living, hard life.
You're not how to battle the elements, how to keep your houses warm.
When we were in Oregon, cops didn't make much money.
We were fairly poor growing up.
We hunted for our food.
We had a garden.
We had animals.
We went and milked our cows.
We did all that kind of stuff.
We chopped firewood.
I was eight years old when I was out splitting wood in the woodshed and I put an axe through
my knee.
My mom went up to the back door to tell her because it felt like there was ants running
down my leg.
I looked down and there was blood spurting out.
I went up and I knocked on the back door.
My mom opened it and she's like, oh my gosh, what did you do?
I think I cut myself.
She grabbed a tourniquet and put it on my leg, threw me and the kids in the station
wagon and it took us 45 minutes to drive down that mountain to the nearest veterinary clinic
and put me up on the vet table and the animal doc stitched my knee up and said, she's good
enough now, get her to the hospital.
We had another 45 minute drive to the hospital from there.
We were remote.
It took us a long, you learn how to survive out there and now I live remote now.
My whole life has been remote.
When I moved up to Alaska, I had to come out to get my wisdom teeth extracted and I'd never
been to a big city before.
I was 18 and they put me on a bush plane, flew me out to Anchorage.
I remember I stand at one of my dad's friend's places and he was like, do you need to go
to the grocery store to get anything?
I'm like, I don't know.
I've never really been to a big grocery store before.
He goes, all right, well, let's take you in.
So I'd seen Star Wars and stuff as a kid.
I walked up to this big supermarket, these airlock doors did the open.
I felt like I was in the future because I'd never seen anything like that before.
Then I walked into the store and there's this mist that's coming down on the vegetables
and I felt like I was in a totally different world and all the traffic and all the noise
and it was very unsettling.
I didn't quite know what to think of it.
Over the years, I'm definitely not a city person by any means, but I've been to some
very, very big cities over my life and it's such a vast difference.
That's one of the reasons that we, after my husband and I retired, opened up our homestead
up in Alaska to people from the big cities to come do outdoor activities, to get them
out of the cities into the peacefulness and the remoteness of Alaska, to give them a
different outlook than what all of that hustle and bustle looks like.
What is the sense of community like in the small towns and villages that you've spent
most of your time in?
Super tight.
Super, super tight.
So, in point hope, my sister and I, we were the... Let's see, it was my sister, my brother,
me were all in teenage years.
My brother was, I think he was 10 or 11 and then my younger sisters were in grade school.
We had gotten invited to go out, my sister and I had gotten invited to go out on a whale
hunt with the whaling crew for their village whale.
Point hope could get two or three that year.
They hunt these whales out of umiacs, which are walrus skin boats made the native way.
We got to participate in building these umiacs.
We got to go in and see how the elders stitched together the hides with sinew and chew it
on them to make them soft at different places.
It was a really cool experience learning how to build these boats.
And then went out onto the ice to go hunt this whale and whale gets killed.
Everybody helps pull the whale up with block and tackle up onto the ice.
Takes hours and hours and my sister and I, the whaling captain lived behind us and he
told his son, take the girls home so they can get some sleep.
So he rides us home and we just go crawling to bed.
My dad comes in, he start pounding on the door.
He's like, get up.
I'm like, what's going on?
So we get up and he directs us out to the front porch and opens the door and there's
these piles of whale meat and muck tuck, which is whale skin and baleen, which is the whale's
teeth in piles on the porch.
He's like, what is all this shit?
And we're like, we have no idea.
What are you talking like?
We don't even know what this is.
And so he called the whaling captain behind us and he's like, what's going on with all
this stuff on my porch?
And he goes, well, your girls helped pull the whale in and helped on the hunt.
So this is your family's share of that whale.
And so with that community, they accepted us as a family in that community so much so
that when I actually went back to that community as a police officer, decades later to police
there, as the only officer, I was told multiple times, welcome home.
They remembered me from that and brought our family in as part of that community, which
was a really cool experience to be part of that just unique community out there.
When I see the kind of dynamic that you're talking about, when I grew up, I wouldn't
say that the town that I grew up in, it wasn't immense by any means, but it was large enough
to not be like a super tight knit community.
But then I contrast when I've lived in London or some of these other big cities, there are
so many people that it seems like that sense of community is lost.
Now some downtowns or little suburbs actually do it well and they have a lot of downtown
events and the schools are very tight and the school games and those kinds of things.
But it feels like we've lost the very essence that it is to be a human being in some of
these places.
And if we go back to native humans, I think that's the answer.
It really is.
Community is the key and we have gotten away from that so badly and often, as you stated
earlier, people are in their comfort zones.
And I think part of the problem that people have with the internet bullying and the trolls
and all the negativity basically that's out there is at the base root of all that, people
are just freaking bored.
They have nothing better to do with their time.
And if we lived a more sustainable life where you had to go garden, you had to get your
food, you had to go hunt fish, garden, gather, whatever, to go do those things, being able
to go cut your firewood to provide your heat, taking away those creature comforts that people
have in order to live life and keep you busy and occupied would take away the need for
all of this just sheer idiocracy going on right now.
I couldn't agree more.
I really couldn't.
I think the other sad thing, and I've heard this from many people and usually it's law
enforcement because that's the kind of uniform profession that is often in some of the tribal
areas.
But I've had people talking obviously about the beauty of tribal culture and sadly some
of the things that were robbed even when the Europeans moved in.
But I also hear about the poverty and some of the addiction issues and crimes and some
of these reservations as well.
What was your experience with the native people in the Alaskan area?
They're an amazing, beautiful culture that is being lost to the internet basically.
And being lost to the doldrums of literally sitting in your house and playing on your
phones or on your video games or whatever.
The culture is so rich and so unique and it's truly just unbelievable that it's being pittered
away and nobody seems to care.
I think there will come a day that that knowledge is going to need to be there.
The people that I dealt with, obviously when you're out in those communities, as the only
law enforcement officer, you don't want to go in there as a jackbooted thug.
That's the last thing you want to do.
You don't want to go out there and start creating waves and being the big badass because then
you're going to be taking on the whole town.
They're not going to accept you.
So you integrate yourself into those cultures and into those communities and you go sit
with the elders in their house if they don't have any other kids there.
You go have coffee with them or you listen to their stories or you go to the schools
and you go interact with the kids and you teach them things.
You do D.A.R.E. and all that kind of stuff.
You're just very community oriented.
You do community activities.
And then when bad things happen, which they do, there are definitely there's alcohol and
drug and a lot of domestic violence.
That was one of the huge ones out there.
Alcohol induced D.V. and it's horrific when it happens.
They're extremely violent.
You deal with those individuals at that time.
What if you have established a relationship with them prior to them popping off on whatever
issue it is that they're having, nine times out of ten, they're going to be fairly compliant
or at least not as combative as they would be if you were the town jackbooted thug to
come in and just be the cop there.
You know what I mean?
So that was a unique experience to be able to integrate with the communities, get to
know them, get to know their families, get to know the people and deal with law enforcement
from a community oriented policing perspective.
Why do you think, because I hear this a lot, why do you think that the domestic violence
specifically is so bad in some of these cultures?
Is it part of the cultural element as well that's amplified by mental health and alcohol?
I think alcohol fuels it.
I don't know that it has anything to do specifically with any kind of race that you are, whether
you're Alaska Native, American Indian, white, black, Chinese, it doesn't matter.
You start adding alcohol into anger, it's going to result in domestic violence.
One of the things with that they need to break the stigma, and this is what we've worked
with a lot out in the villages to break the stigma, break that cycle of violence, is that
all these young kids have seen their parents, you're in a very isolated community, fly in,
fly out only.
You're very isolated.
You don't have any place that you can go.
You're basically in a fishbowl driving around and everybody knows everybody.
And so what they see and what they hear is in a very microscopic arena and they don't
know anything from the outside.
The kids don't understand that if they leave the village and go out into the big world
that their lives could be completely different than what it could be if they stayed in the
village.
So teaching them that it's not okay to have that abuse, it's not okay to react violently,
it's not okay to go beat somebody up because you had an argument with them, it just comes
down to understanding and learning a new way that wasn't taught to them.
And they've seen it generationally.
And so I think that does add to the amount of domestic violence in the villages.
I think it's isolation, learned behavior and alcohol for sure adding to it.
But I saw a lot, a lot, a lot of DV, violent DV as well when I transferred down to Wasilla,
which was a city department in Alaska and worked there in Wasilla.
And it was equally bad.
I just had backup there.
So it's across the board.
It's just, it's a learned behavior.
What is the dynamic in Alaska specifically?
In America and in Canada, a lot of times you hear about, I mean, the Trail of Tears and
all these other stories of native people being geographically moved, putting on reservations,
sometimes even being, I forget the term, almost like Aryanized, it's breeding the Indian out
of them doing air quotes here.
And so now you have this people who literally, we talk about tribes, their entire identity
is being deconstructed by these people who have invaded their country.
Were the Alaskan natives subjected to the same thing or was the remote nature able to
help them to actually retain their land?
They've predominantly retained their land.
We don't have reservations up here.
Alaska has no reservations at all.
They have villages which are predominantly their tribe of people wherever they're at.
And then there's actually the Chickaloon, which if you, after we get done with this,
you could look it up online.
Chickaloon, Alaska is actually one of, it's an independent nation that lives in the state
of Alaska, but they function as an independent nation, as a tribal people, which is really
unique.
They're type of working with those people there, but they've maintained their identity.
Most Alaskan villages and natives pretty much stay in their tribal lands up here.
They weren't pushed out really.
I mean, maybe in some of the bigger cities where they're clearing land or whatever, but
it wasn't anything like lower 48 where they did that kind of stuff down there.
It was a lot and still is more rugged, more wild west.
We don't have a huge population base up here.
I think our state population last I checked was 736,000 people total statewide.
Amazing.
Yeah, it's funny.
I remember going to Australia and New Zealand and in Australia, obviously the Aboriginal
people are in the outback usually, and it was very sad.
I went to visit Ayers Rock and I didn't get to meet a single Aboriginal person to tell
me about their culture and this holy place that we were visiting.
They were kind of kept away.
Conversely, in New Zealand, the Maori people were everywhere.
The difference is when the Europeans went to Australia, there was a lot of genocide
for lack of a better word, but when I think they went to New Zealand and they were met
with these monstrous warriors covered in tattoos, they were like, well, do you want to share
this island?
I'm sure it was the same in Alaska.
They probably looked at the vast tundra and be like, we're good.
You guys can stay there.
It's a shame because if there'd be more resistance, maybe more of these cultures would still be
intact.
Yeah, possibly.
I don't know.
I wish things could be different and that we could go back to some older ways.
Absolutely.
I think that's it.
There are so many conversations I have with people when it's mental health, whether it's
obesity, whatever the topic is, most of the answers are, let's go back to doing things
100, 150 years ago, especially if you're not, again, I'm not talking about New York City,
but most of the rest of the country, growing your own food and having real food in schools
and exercise is just part of your everyday and you're out in nature and you get sunlight
and you've got this community of a local town or village.
These are all the things that we know work.
They've worked for humans for millennia and then we've deconstructed that literally in
less than 100 years.
Yeah.
Look where it's got us now.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, going back to your career, talk to me about your injury and then your transition
out of uniform.
I was heading out to a call in my patrol cars down in Wasilla and I was stopped at a red
light downtown and it was a non-emergent call so I was just stopped.
I was actually reading the call on my MDT and just sitting there reading the MDT and
all of a sudden the inside of my patrol car exploded, exploded.
I thought I'd gotten shot because all I see is glass flying all over and my shoulder was
on fire.
It felt like I'd been shot.
I don't remember anything after that.
I know what people have told me happened after that but I don't have the collective memory
of that.
But I had been hit from behind by a one ton pickup truck that was doing, they estimate,
probably 55 to 65 miles per hour, didn't see the stoplight is what he said, didn't see
the patrol car sitting at the stoplight and rear ended me and crunched my patrol car and
me in the process up.
Totaled my car, totaled me and he walked away with a citation.
It was a devastating injury for me.
I tried to, as all cops do, I tried to shake it off.
I had actually torn some nerves and ligaments and crap up in my shoulder.
I did some damage.
I was trying to play it off and be like, I'm alright, I'm alright.
Well, I could only do that for so long.
My arm was getting worse and worse.
I'd been in to have it looked at several times.
My arm, at one point my sergeant was like, you need to go into the hospital now.
I was like, why?
He goes, your arm is blue.
I looked down, my arm was blue.
I'm like, well, that's not good.
So we got in there and they were able to give me a shot up in my arm and relax my shoulder.
Well, I did this for close to a year.
I was fighting Workman's Comp during that time and that's why I continued working because
I was fighting Workman's Comp.
They didn't want to cover the surgery that was required for my arm to get better.
They were dragging their feet on it.
So long story short, after I had to hire an attorney, we met with the state and the guy
looked at my arm and he's like, is this what we're fighting about?
I said, yes.
He said, your arm is blue.
I said, yeah, it needs surgery.
It's needed surgery for like a year.
And he said, go get to the hospital, get it done.
They got me into surgery within three days after that.
They did a full reconstructs, took out one of my ribs up here to open up the channel,
reconstructed everything up there, tried to put everything back together, but the nerve
damage by that point, because it had taken so long for the state to jump on it, did irreversible
damage.
When I went through rehab, it took me almost a year of rehab where I was trying to get
my shoulder back to functional where I could actually pick up my gun, move my arm up, that
kind of thing.
It wasn't working.
Every time I'd lift my arm up, it would go dead from the nerve damage and I couldn't
feel things.
I couldn't manipulate things and I'm left handed.
It was my left hand, of course, that got injured, my left arm.
I worked for a year trying to get it back to functional.
They brought me into work rehab, that kind of thing.
At the end of all that, they sat me down and they're like, you're never going to be a
cop again.
You can't.
Your arm's too fried.
You can't manipulate a gun.
Your career is over.
I was like, it was devastating because I was five years away from retirement and I'm like,
this cannot be happening right now.
Can't be happening.
But it was.
Then I was like, okay.
I'm like, well, I was a paramedic and a firefighter.
I could go do that.
They're like, no, no, you can't.
You can't go do that either.
Your arm is shot.
You're going to have to adjust to this new way of life.
You have a permanent disability now that you will not ever be able to do law enforcement,
paramedic, fire, any of that.
You can't.
That took a lot.
That was devastating to me.
Absolutely devastating.
Every time I would, I'm in the bottom of the bucket.
I was like, this is not a good place to be.
I still had three teenage daughters at home and they're all in high school and I'm getting
ready to be at the end of my career and everything was going good.
Then the rug got ripped out from underneath me and I was like, my world went into a tailspin
hard.
I was like, I don't know what to do.
I couldn't work.
They wouldn't let me go back to work.
They put me on medical retirement and wasn't enough to cover my mortgage, all this stuff
and I couldn't work.
It was just a whole nightmare of things that were piling up.
Then years, years, years, years before, one of my buddies had actually moved out to Eagle
and he had asked me, hey, will you help me move out there?
It was a 12 hour drive from where we were at.
Yeah, sure, I'll help you out.
We drove him up, moved him up here, saw Eagle.
I was like, this is a pretty cool little place.
Someday when I retire, I'd like to move out here.
It's very peaceful, very remote.
There was no, I mean, there's like 70 people out here.
There's nothing in the way of realtors or anything like that.
It's word of mouth.
We're driving around and my buddy shows me this old cabin that's up on a hill and he's
like, I know the guy that has this place.
He may be interested in selling it.
I said, we'll give him my name if you see him and maybe someday.
I'm a bit away from retirement.
Well, as the cards unfolded, I just gotten medically retired.
I was working through it, trying my best.
Things were not going good.
I was looking at the end of a shotgun barrel because I was done.
I was like, this is not happening.
I cannot keep doing this.
I get this phone call out of the blue and it's the guy that owns the cabin up here and
said, Hey, I just decided that I want to sell my cabin and my kids don't want it.
Are you interested?
I was like, window of opportunity.
Absolutely.
I will take it.
So sight unseen.
My husband and I bought this place and then first, the, so the roads closed up here eight,
eight months of the year.
You cannot drive up here.
It's closed due to snow.
So as soon as the snow broke in April, we decided to drive up here knowing we had just
bought this place.
My place is in foreclosure where I'm at.
I need to find a place for my kids ASAP.
So I get up here and it was, uh, it was still snowing.
It was 20 below zero and, um, front door wouldn't open.
I told my husband, I said, uh, put shoulder into it, puts a shoulder into it.
Porch collapses.
We get inside and it is a rat dive of a cabin.
I mean, it's bad.
It's like a seventies furniture and stuff in it and it is covered in cat and dog hair,
cobwebs.
Nobody lived in it for like 15 years.
And there was an old wood barrel stove in the middle of the living room and it had holes
in the stove pipe and everything.
And I was like, Oh my gosh, what have we done?
Cause I literally socked the very last of my savings into this nickel and dime little
cabin that I bought out in the middle of Alaska and I didn't know what else to do.
So it was like, well, here we go.
So we lit a fire up in that wood stove cause it was, we spent, I don't know what four or
five days in, in a 20 below weather, that front door wouldn't shut cause the porch caved
in.
So we, it was literally 20 below zero in the house.
Super cold.
Couldn't stay warm.
Finally said, fuck it, light up the wood stove.
So if it burns down, it burns down.
It's insured, whatever.
So we threw the, threw the wood stove on house, heated up, looked at it in a new light and
were able to kind of start looking at it and being like, ah, we could fix that.
We could rebuild that.
We could flip this thing.
We could do this at, so we took the next, basically the next five months and worked
12 to 16 hour days and we flipped this place.
We rehabbed it.
We got it.
We got it rebuilt.
We got it.
We got a good stove put in and we got all this stuff done.
And then I went and picked up my kids.
They were staying with my sister while they finished up their school down there.
And then I went and picked up my kids, brought them up here and we started our life homesteading
in Alaska.
And it was the best thing that I could have done because it was what gave me a new focus
to be able to get out of my head, to get out of my pity, woe is me, lost everything mindset
to, hey, let's work on getting this cabin up and built.
There's no police, no fire.
There's nothing up here.
There's no sirens going anywhere.
So I didn't feel that call to go respond every time I heard sirens going by.
It was mentally, it was a good spot for me to be in.
So that first year that we were out here doing that, we focused on that, just getting everything
up and running.
And then one of my buddies got involved in a shooting and he was like, hey, can I come
up and hang out with you?
And I got a Marine buddy too that has some issues.
He just needs some peace of mind.
Sure, come on up, bring them up.
So the two of them came up and that was our kind of our aha moment that we had this little
piece of paradise out here.
Where both of them were able to relax, open up.
My buddy was able to talk to me.
The other guy, my husband's a military veteran.
So they were able to peel off and go talk together.
And it just became like a sanctuary kind of for wounded, whether emotionally, physically,
mentally, whatever issues that person is having.
It became that place for people to come up here, hang out with us, see what Alaska life
is like, eat some good food, joke around the campfires, go walk in the woods, go explore,
you know, whatever place for people to come and just be away from all of the chaos, unplugged
from the rat race, all of that kind of stuff.
So that was my new direction in life.
I decided that that chapter was closed on being able to participate in emergency services,
but I could still help other people, which is my deepest drive for life is to be able
to help others.
The number of horror stories I've heard from workman's comp, also EAP, the mental health
side and people looking for help in that way, but workman's comp especially, and there's
such a clear cut incident in your case, you're in a patrol vehicle, you're on duty, you get
rear-ended by a vehicle, which again, I don't think people realize how little penalties
there are for causing death or injury on the road.
I'm writing a second book and I was researching a certain chapter and I was talking to some
of my police friends and they're like, oh no, if you kill someone, it becomes a civil
suit, but really, unless they can prove that you were doing it maliciously or they were
drunk, then yeah, they get away with it.
I was just like, oh my God, this is insane, absolutely insane.
Now you've got this injury, it's threatening your career, it's threatening your ability
to even feed your children, and now you're having to fight this workman's comp claim
for the longest time and then you have this forced medical disability, which one would
argue may or may not be the right choice.
However, the way it went about obviously was probably not as well as it should have been
handled.
Talk to me about how that impacted your mental health because you have this tribe, you have
this purpose, you have this identity, and when one of your members of your family or
tribe, your community is injured, one would think that we all surround them, make sure
they're okay, and then lift them up again.
More often than not, I have firefighters and police officers and paramedics and every other
kind of professional here that did everything they were supposed to do and then had their
legs cut from under them when they were wounded or if something else happened in their uniform.
That's exactly what happens predominantly, I would say 90% of the time.
That was a hard one to wrap your head around was the lack of support from your guys that
you're out battling with.
You're out there defending each other's lives, you're on the streets together, you're the
invincible warriors out on the street doing your thing, and then you get taken out and
now all of a sudden you're like a leper.
Nobody wants to address the fact that Grimes got taken out, she was supposed to be invincible.
If you bring that to the front and they try to wrap their head around it by addressing
it and saying, hey, we're here to help you, whatever, they don't want to see that vulnerability.
They don't, they don't reach out, they don't come in to help you.
They basically push you away and it is awful.
That was one of my like, you know what?
I spent almost 30 years of my life providing services to other people.
I get taken out and literally nobody.
While I was in the hospital recovering from my surgery, not one officer came by, but one
of my old closest friends, she was with the blood bank of Alaska and she'd known me since
I was like early 20s or whatever, always followed my career.
She was just this really close family friend and she was a nurse and she drove up from
Homer, which is about a three hour drive to get to Anchorage where I had my surgery done
and came in and was like commanding the nurses in my room, like you take care of this officer,
da da da da, all this stuff.
She was like my biggest cheerleader type thing and that was cool, but she was not a part
of my emergency services family.
She knew of it, she was kind of in it because she was a nurse and she knew the other people
that I did, but it was an eye opener to me and it was very frustrating.
That was one of the reasons that I had joined the Wounded Blue.
They had approached me and offered me a volunteer position there with them, which I did for
a few years.
It was because of that, because when you get hurt in the line of duty, your department
doesn't go to bat for you.
They don't fight for you.
Your fellow officers do not contact you.
It was very frustrating and yeah, it is what it is.
I don't know how you change that culture.
It's a mindset and the way I felt like I could help change it was to provide knowing what
I went through.
I go out to other departments and I'll give speeches at squad meetings or whatever and
say, hey, if you ever do get hurt, here's an opportunity, an option for you because
don't count on your department backing you up because it's not going to happen.
Don't count on your friends being there for you.
That's not going to happen either and unfortunately, that's just the way that it goes.
What I've seen, if there is a response and I've had a lot of people on the show that
are widows from first responders and they're like, day one, two, three, everyone's there,
but then it all filters away and now you've got this grieving husband or wife and their
children and three months later, no one's calling anymore.
The thing is, to look on the other side, what's so sad is that I can think about when I was
in and getting mandatory overtime all the time and these people are so tired and so
overworked that sometimes they just don't have the capacity or don't forcibly take
a step back and go, I need to check on whoever.
I think it's both sides.
It's that culture definitely and we do as we talked about before, come from a time where
they're deliberately cleaving community, deliberately driving people apart and then making them fight
against each other versus the community and that real family that you do find in some
police and fire departments, the well-led ones, but then also that workload, that immense
stress, their own mental health, blurring their minds to the fact that I need to check
on these people.
I think that's so important, having an organization that is bridging that gap because I'm sure
your closest law enforcement friends did care, but they didn't actually make a mental pause
to go, I need to check on Gwen.
I need to go to the hospital and visit her.
Okay, I missed the hospital.
I'm going to go to a house and visit her, but if you just don't show up, that is brutal
to the person who felt like they were part of a tribe and now their tribe has turned
their back on them.
It's true actually.
I still keep in contact with all my buddies from both departments that I work for.
One of them had posted on Facebook a couple of weeks ago.
It posted on there one of those copy paste things about, hey, my brothers and sisters
in blue, should you ever need a hand or a ear to cry on?
I'm here for you.
I've always got your back, blah, blah, blah.
I read through it.
I was like, you were there when that happened to me.
You did not do that.
So I actually wrote it out nicely on social media on a response to him.
I said, I understand the sentiment behind this and I understand that that is what most
cops do feel like they say.
I will be there for you.
I will have your back.
I will do these things, but let's talk about reality.
You remember when I got taken out, when I got hurt, you didn't show up.
You didn't call.
You weren't there.
I needed you then, but you weren't.
So I'm not placing blame and I'm not trying to make you feel bad.
I'm just calling the facts the facts.
So please, if this happens to another officer, remember what I'm telling you, that you didn't
do this for me, but do it for the next guy.
When he gets hurt, go out and do that for them.
So I posted that.
He actually responded back and he said, oh my gosh, I am so sorry.
I did not realize that I had actually done that in my head.
It was just, you know, just what you just said.
I'll get there.
I'll call her.
I'll go visit her house, whatever.
And it just kind of keeps getting pushed on the back burner.
Never happens.
And then just kind of gets forgotten.
So bringing that to light, I think is important so that, yes, your intention is good.
Obviously you want to help people.
That's why you're a cop.
That's why you're a paramedic.
That's why you're a firefighter.
You want to help people.
You want to be there for them.
But when one of your brothers and sisters gets hurt or gets, you know, some mental going
on or they get suicidal or whatever the case may be, be there for them.
Don't think that somebody else is going to fill that role because they're not.
Like you need to be the catalyst in that and you need to lead the charge and bring others
to them to be able to not have that happen so that they have that sense of abandonment.
Yeah.
When you talk about the suicide, you know, I've seen a lot of people like, oh, you know,
if you're hurting, if you're struggling, just call me.
Here's my number.
And it's like you've got that backwards.
They're hurting.
They're struggling.
They don't want to pick up a phone because they're hurting and they're struggling.
You have to physically put yourself in front of them.
Yeah.
Show up at their house or call them or whatever it is.
So switch that around and you got the answer.
Exactly.
That's what I was trying to get across to him.
Like I understand.
I understand.
I do.
I get the sentiment.
I understand where it's coming from.
But in reality, this needs to be a full reversal.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to get to kind of one more area and then we'll close out.
Obviously, you know, one of the reasons that people know you is the naked and afraid show.
So how did you go from, you know, a storied first responder career to finding yourself
on television?
Well, that's a funny story too.
So we're up here in Eagle and the only way that you could get on the computer online
was to go down to the local library and hop on their really slow dial up Wi-Fi.
And so we would go down every week or so, maybe every few days if we needed to do something.
We'd hop on there for a couple hours.
Well, I had been posting some stuff through I didn't because I was a cop retired, though.
I still hadn't switched over into creating a profile or anything.
So I had a basically I ghosted my I used my I used my husband's account for everything
and I used his stuff to go on these other pages.
So I post on like medical survivalists and that kind of stuff.
And it was underneath his name.
So he gets this messenger message and it's from this casting director saying, hey, we're
super interested in putting you on on the show.
Could you contact us?
And he shows it to me.
He's like, what is this?
And I was like, I have no idea.
And so we're reading through it.
I'm like, that's just a scam.
There's no there's whatever nobody's going to call us out of the blue in the remote Alaska
to be on some reality TV show.
So he goes, well, you you text her back then.
So I texted her and I'm like, all right, here's the deal.
I said, this is legit.
We have to we have to drive 10 minutes to get back to our house.
And we have a landline.
So you call us on the landline.
And I want to talk to you in person if this is a legit message gave her the landline phone
number and we leave from the library and go back up to the cabin, wait around for this
phone call.
And sure enough, phone rings and it says gal.
And we'd actually just rented they get afraid.
Season one CD that we had or DVD that we had been watching on on this show on our TV because
we didn't have cable or anything like that.
DVDs are it.
So we were watching it.
We're like, that's that's pretty that's pretty extreme, right?
Not thinking too much of it.
So then this gal calls, right?
And she says, she says, hey, I'm so and so with with the metal flowers media.
And we want to talk to you guys about getting on with the show.
And so I start going into cop mode, right?
I'm interrogating this poor girl because I want to know if she's like a scammer.
Right.
So I'm like running her up and down.
I'm on a phone.
And so finally, she goes, I understand your hesitation.
I'll tell you what she goes.
I'm going to have E.J. Snyder call you here in a few days.
He'll give you the survival test.
And if you guys pass that test, then we'll we'll wrap you up and take you down to L.A.
for casting call.
My Gaya.
OK, whatever.
But nice talking to you.
Right.
Click.
Well, E.J. Snyder was on season one of the DVD that we had just watched.
He has a very distinctive voice.
Sure shit.
Like three days later, E.J. calls and he starts talking to us.
And I'm like, I looked at Nate and I was like, dude, like this is legit.
This is that guy that was on TV.
And so he gives us this survival questionnaire on the phone.
Right.
And and everything worked out good.
They sent both Nate and I down to L.A. for casting call.
So it was basically a cold call.
Out of the blue, they contacted us.
Sent us to free trip to L.A.
Got the casting call done.
And from there, I three months later, I flew out to Mexico on my first challenge.
So it was interesting.
So all the things that you talked about up to this point, from your childhood in Oregon
to the Alaskan experience, the first responder professions, what elements of those helped
you do so well on the show?
Mental fortitude.
That is the key to that show.
You can have all the survival skills in the world.
You can know how to tie a bowling upside down in the Batcave and it's not going to do a
lick of good if you don't have mental fortitude to be out there because it is by far the most
extreme environment that they put you in under the most extreme conditions.
And it is mentally so challenging to push through the extreme temperature, the bugs,
the being naked and doing everything without any tools.
Like it is it is a shock to your system and it is an extreme, extreme challenge.
And if you do not have that mental fortitude, you will tap.
When you look at Bear Grylls, for example, there's that kind of tongue in cheek element
where yes, he is out doing these things, but obviously he's got a camera crew and sometimes
they stay in a motel for the night.
What are some of the behind the scenes elements that you kind of made you chuckle when you
were doing that whole experience?
We didn't have behind the scenes elements.
They literally have you strip and then you go like that's it.
Strip down and then they follow you around like you're a caveman on display in the Smithsonian.
They don't talk to you.
They don't interact with you.
You just kind of doing your thing, living your life.
And then every night they pull you aside for like up to a half hour interview and then
they send you back to your little camp that you're in and that's what you do.
Like the whole time, whatever challenge you're on, the camera crew and producers and all
that, they don't talk to you.
They don't interact with you on a very limited basis.
You can't ask them questions.
You can't be like, what kind of wood is this?
Is this a poison wood?
You have to know what you're doing.
Berries.
You can't be like, can I or can't I eat this berry?
They won't tell you, they'll just shrug their shoulders.
You have to know what you're doing out there obviously to be successful but not having
that so it takes a few days once you're out there.
You get everything, your basics set up, food, fire, shelter, all that.
Get all that set up and then that's it.
So during the day, the camera crew's out there with you milling around like sharks, filming
everything that you do and then in the evening at five, six o'clock at night, they go home.
Nobody's out there.
It's just you and your partner or you and your partners depending on what challenge
you're on and there's no crew there.
Nobody there at night.
Like that's it.
You have a radio in your bag for emergencies.
If something were to happen, you can call them up and say, I need help now and you've
got depending on how close their camp is from yours, can be anywhere from a two minute response
to a 20 minute response.
So it's all dependent on your location and like our 40 day challenge in Africa.
We had a huge crew, like huge production crew because there was 12 of us out there.
So they had to have crews for all of these survivalists that were out there doing all
the stuff that we did every day.
Well to get help from them, it was a 10 minute response time because all of their crew was
a 10 minute drive away.
In Mexico, we had medics that were camped out down the beach from us in a tent up on
a hill that was about a six minute walk from our base camp where we were at.
And so if we called them on the radio, it would take them six minutes to walk to where
we were at to get there.
So I mean, it's all dependent on your location, but people don't realize how hands off production
is out there.
You're literally just out there kind of doing your thing, trying to survive.
And it's a very unique experience and an interesting challenge.
What about when you got back?
Now you're not going back to California or somewhere where you're going to be surrounded
by lots of people that are stopping you in shopping malls and wherever.
Obviously you're going back to your remote location again, but what was the kind of ripple
effect of you being on screen in front of millions of people?
So one of the good ripple effects that happened with that was that's how the Wounded Blue
found me.
Basically one of their higher ups at the time had his wife and him were laying in bed watching
the show.
He went in to go to the bathroom or something.
And I came on the screen and told them, was starting to talk about my injury that had
medically disabled me.
Same thing had happened to her husband.
He was a cop that was with Wounded Blue.
She said, you need to come out here and see this.
So he came out and he started watching it and he was like, I need to contact this girl.
And so he sent me a message and said, hey, I'm with the Wounded Blue.
I saw your episode.
I really want to talk to you.
So went ahead and opened up that line of communication.
And he was like, this is what we do.
This is what we offer.
We would like you to come down and be a volunteer.
So that kind of launched my stint with the Wounded Blue and being able to go do that.
So that was a good aspect of going out on the show was my involvement with the Wounded
Blue, which helped basically network with a bunch of people to be able to help get others
aware that there is help for wounded officers out there, that you don't have to be alone.
Their motto, never forgotten, never alone resonates with wounded officers for sure,
because we all have felt that way.
But with officers that have never been injured or in that situation, they don't understand
the concept behind that.
And so it kind of banded together a bunch of broken misfits, if you will, that you can
now have somebody in common with like, oh, you went through this too.
Oh, I've been through that.
Yeah, you were fighting your state medical.
Yeah, been there, done that.
Let's talk.
Like you help people through that.
You help them realize they are not alone, whether the department's there for them or
not, that group of the Wounded Blue is there for them to help them through those things.
So it was a real cool organization on that aspect of it.
And then on a personal note, like I'm the only Alaskan that has ever completed a naked
and afraid challenge.
So I give myself props for that.
But when I go through the stores, when I go through the stores here in Alaska, and Alaska
is huge, it's a massive state.
I can be down in Anchorage.
I could be in Fairbanks.
I could be in remote Eagle, Alaska.
And if I get recognized, people are all like doing the fangirl fanboy stuff.
It's funny.
It's fun.
It's interactive.
It's embarrassing at times.
It's the worst when somebody like screams and runs at you across the store because you're
like, oh crap, you know, did I arrest you and you're coming after me?
Did I?
I don't know why you know me, but now all of a sudden I have this, you've seen me naked
on national TV to add to that little script, you know, so.
It's quite a unique place to be.
Yeah, it is.
All right, brilliant.
Well, I want to throw some closing questions at you before I let you go.
That's okay.
Sure.
All right.
The first one I'd love to ask, is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
So my buddy, Jeremy Charlo, he wrote a book called My Brother's Keeper.
Jeremy met Nate and I at a law enforcement convention down in Las Vegas.
We were down there promoting wounded officers to come out and help us build a cabin out
in remote Alaska.
We had some acreages that we wanted to put a cabin on.
He was the only one out of that whole group.
He walked over and he's like, what you got going on?
Told him and he's like, I'm going to Alaska.
We're like, okay.
So sure enough, he showed up and the three of us went out and built a cabin two years
ago from literally just dropping trees out in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness using
hand tools and chainsaws.
We dropped dead standing trees and we built a 16 by 20 cabin out in the middle of the
woods with a sod roof, old school trapper style type cabin.
And Jeremy was out there with us for the 103 days that we did it.
It was an epically life changing experience for him to come out there and do that with
us.
And he wrote that book before he'd gone out with us called My Brother's Keeper based on
his experience going through all the stuff that we just talked about, getting shot in
the line of duty, that kind of thing.
Really good book.
He sells it on Amazon.
So yeah, any officers that are going through struggles, good reference book on the survival
aspect besides a book by Kai Froenow called, she's one of the Naked and Afraid survivalists.
She's a phenomenal survivalist herself.
Wrote a book called Thrive, I got it somewhere, I can't remember.
Anyway it's a super good survival book.
Kai is currently right now battling on Last One Standing 2.
So that book there, top survival book that I've ever read in my entire life.
She covers all topics, survival related, mental survival, physical, all that kind of stuff.
Very good.
Cop Shock also is a good, can't remember who the author is but the book's called Cop Shock.
It's a good mental helping you through book.
Those would be my top three for the topics that we're on.
Excellent.
I want to say Jeremy was the one that connected us.
It's been so long since we first spoke but I want to say thank you to him as well.
I had him on the show probably only about six months ago now and it was a great, great
conversation.
He works with Operation Enduring Warrior and I helped them out once in a while as well
so that's where we met.
Yeah, Jeremy's a cool cat.
He's a good friend of ours now.
Brilliant.
All right, well same question.
That was books.
What about films and documentaries?
Well, don't really watch a lot of that kind of stuff just because we haven't had internet
for so long.
We finally got Starlink out here so this will be our first winter with actually being able
to watch things on TV.
I personally, documentaries, I love realistic history, historical reenactments, defiance.
That show is one of my top favorite survival shows with the Bielski brothers from World
War II where they saved I think it was like 180 Jews from being annihilated and then how
they did it, how they counterattacked the Nazis that were trying to take out their families
and their friends and how they created basically a survival camp out in the middle of the wilderness
and then did some guerrilla tactic turnabouts on the Nazis and then at the end they have
these actual, where they're talking to the actual Bielski brothers and the survivors
of some of the families that they helped pull through and they give all the stats and it's
like they saved 180 families or something like that and now there's like 10,000 people
that are alive because of the actions of these two brothers, those kind of things.
Super cool movie, love it, defiance.
Guaranteed one of my top favorite movies ever.
I'm going to have to watch that.
I do, I love watching true survival shows.
So the show Alive, they just came out with a new one where they, that's from the 1972
Andes plane crash.
The reason that I love that story so much, it's a true survival story.
I mean they get dumped out on the middle of the Andes mountains, they are in the snow
zone.
They're not even in trees, they're in the snow zone.
These are all young men on a soccer team, they get dumped into the middle of nowhere.
Now what are you going to do?
You got a bunch of you that are still alive.
How are you getting out of this one?
Nobody can find you, you're not being rescued.
The story inspired me so much that when Nate and I, we took a back when I 2018, part of
my recovery of mentally getting mentally back into being myself was to take a backpacking
trip across Uruguay and Argentina.
So we sparked out for three months and did that.
And in part of that was to go meet one of the survivalists at the museum, the 1972 museum
in Uruguay, Montevideo, Uruguay.
They have a museum there.
And so when I got there, I was like, I have come all the way from Alaska to meet a survivalist
or survivor from this 1972 crash because I read in some little booklet somewhere that
you can have tea with these survivors.
And they're like, Oh, sorry, we don't do that anymore.
And I'm like, I just came all the way from Alaska to meet to do this event.
Right.
So the guy, the owner, he said, come back in three hours.
Okay.
So we went, we trolled around Montevideo for a few hours and then came back.
And sure enough, he had brought Eduardo Strauch, who was 19, one of the, he was 19 years old
when he crashed.
He was one of the survivors in the plane.
Eduardo came up to me, gave me a hug.
He kissed me on both cheeks and we started talking about survival.
And I was like, I had so many questions for him.
I was like, how did you do this?
How did you do that?
And he'd give me this brush off answer like, Oh, we just pulled the seat covers off.
We put them on the plane and then we trickled water off snow melt from the sun.
And that's how we got our water.
Now tell me about Alaska.
I want to know everything about Alaska.
And he's like grilling me on Alaska, flipping it around.
Right.
And he's just, just a character.
And we had such a great time sitting there talking with him about Alaska and about his
experience out there.
And the fact that, I don't know, I felt like meeting this real life hero, right?
Like he's, he acts, he, he survived.
He had the most horrific event in his life happen where he had to resort to cannibalism
to live.
And he lived and he had a successful life and he had a family and a career and did all
of that.
And it was just an incredible story.
And to meet him in person was just life changing.
And that was such a cool experience.
And so that movie alive and the book that they wrote alive, both good books, good movies
to talk about the true human spirit, the, the ability to survive the worst successfully.
That's amazing though, to actually meet one of them.
Yeah, all it was, it was such a cool experience.
Brilliant.
Well, speaking of great people, is there a person that you'd recommend to come on this
podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the
world?
Have you talked with Eddie, with the one of blue?
I don't think so.
Richardson.
That's right.
Eddie Richard.
Wasn't ringing a bell.
So he would be, he's not with the wounded blue anymore, but he still is very active
in doing things with wounded law enforcement.
He would be a really good person to talk to.
He was badly wounded in the line of duty and, and has some long-term effects that are not
going away with that.
He's, he's super down to earth, really good dude.
He would be at the top of my list that I can think of right now.
But if I think of anybody else, I can text your message.
Yeah, absolutely.
Please do.
Thank you.
All right.
Well, then the very last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you
online, what do you do to decompress?
I carve to me carving.
So I use a basically a pocket knife and I carve figurines and statues and that kind
of stuff.
And I, to me it's therapeutic.
It helps my mind focus on something that is, it takes me out of my, my bad head space when
I can get into carving and I can focus on creating unique things.
So it keeps me busy in the long dark winters and I, I enjoy it and it's therapeutic on
my hand because it forces me to watch what my hand's doing because I still can't feel
my arm.
It's, I have 60% loss of the sensation in my arm.
So it forces me to watch what my hand is doing and she teaches me to relearn to do fine detail
with carving things.
So that's, that's kind of my, my decompression is to sit down and carve.
Have you seen any sort of improvement in your arm?
Has it got better than, you know, when you first had the injury?
No it's, it's gotten worse.
So when I first had it done, the surgery, it was that year of rehab was, was a lot trying
to get it back.
And then that's when they diagnosed me with the 60% loss of, of a sensation and use.
I have mobility issues as well.
I can't like lift my hand straight up over my, I can't lift my hand, my arm up.
Like if you're holding your hands up, can't do that.
Just extremely limited range of motion with my left arm.
But it had, even with them doing all those surgeries, I've had multiple surgeries on
it over the years.
This the nerve damage is so severe that it's not going to get better.
It's it's where it was at or sometimes it's worse.
Like if I lay on it the wrong way or if I lay down flat, just the sheer compression of
my chest muscles on it will spark it off to make it completely dead or it's like waking
up with your arm falling asleep.
It just functions that way.
I think it was one of my police guests, Billy Cushing, who he was a canine handler.
And if I've got this right, it's been a while now he was shot.
And I remember him saying when they report when we get shot, they say, you know, either
they were killed or it was a turn that downplayed the injury.
And he said, they never say they had life, life changing injuries.
So whatever the phrase people normally use, you know, they were injured or whatever it
is.
It's not just an injury.
It's something that for a lot of these people, Kevin Holtry is another one.
He's in a wheelchair now from from the shooting that he was in.
You know, this they they might have survived, but there is this long term impact that's
going to last the rest of their lives.
And it kind of downplays the sacrifice that our men and women that didn't die in a shooting
or a car accident or whatever it was are going to have to carry on throughout.
So I think it's it does a disservice to our people when it's when it's labeled that way.
It does.
And, you know, they just say, oh, they were wounded, you know, and it it does it downplays
it so much because you get to a point, especially with the speaking from my experience with
the long term effects.
This is my my dominant arm.
I'm left handed.
My left arm was permanently injured, permanently disabled in the line of duty from a simple
car accident that just took everything from me.
And there was a point in early on when that injury first happened because it was being
downplayed by my department, by the state, by everybody saying, oh, you just jacked up
your shoulder.
No, I injured it.
It's not going away.
This is not ever getting better.
This is something I have to live with the rest of my life.
It impacts me daily.
You know, even just picking up a coffee cup is you have to pay attention or you're dropping
it.
I didn't have to do that before I got hit by that car.
So with all of the things that you go through with the surgeries, with the mental stress,
with the feeling like you can't do your job anymore, all those kind of things you wish
you would have gotten killed.
It would have been better.
Like those thoughts go through your head.
I wish that accident would have killed me.
I wouldn't have to deal with any of this today.
Those are thoughts that legitimately go through wounded officers' heads.
And that's why that mental shift goes into being able to help those that do get wounded
critically, gravely, all of those kinds of things where they need that help to be able
to reach out and have others say, been there, I'm here.
I know you're feeling that way.
Let's work through this.
It does.
It will get better.
You just got to work through it.
You know, punch through it.
But yeah, it's not addressed.
And it is very frustrating and very disheartening that even military guys that get permanently
injured in the military.
Yeah, they have their disability checks and that kind of stuff, but their sacrifice does
not go noticed much.
You know, it's the ones that die in battle that get the recognition, get the heroes,
you know, send-offs, all that kind of stuff.
The others, they're the forgotten ones that just get pushed aside like cannon fodder.
Absolutely.
There's one of the Delta guys I had on, Pat McNamara, used the term disposable heroes.
And I think police, fire, EMS, and the military, we can all relate to that.
You know, everyone's waving the flags and the politicians are all shaking their hands
during election season.
But you know, when the door closes behind you for the last time, especially in the first
responder profession, there is no VA even.
You're not even counted anymore.
You're just, you know, you're gone.
Well, then I'm sure people listening would love to kind of follow you or be able to reach
out where are the best places online to do that?
Well, I've got a Facebook page under just my name, Gwen Grimes, and then my Instagram
grizzlyguenn907.
Those are the only two platforms that I have.
Were there 906 grizzlyguenns already and that's why you had to choose that one?
What does the 907 mean?
907 is the area code for Alaska.
Okay, I was wondering.
All right.
Well, Gwen, I want to say thank you so much.
I mean, for people listening, you know, you're there, like you said, on your phone with the
new internet that you've got, but you are miles away from, you know, I was going to
use the word civilization.
I think that's the wrong word, miles away from densely populated areas.
But we made this conversation work.
So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
I appreciate the opportunity.
Thank you so much.