HOW STEELHEAD SPRINGS BEGAN

Sometimes a Farm Begins With a Dream. Ours Began With a Mother Fighting for Her Life.

Steelhead Springs did not begin with a business plan, a piece of property, or a lifelong ambition to become a fish farmer. It began with my mom, Gordana “Gordie” Bates, with a medical emergency that changed our family forever, and with questions I could not stop asking afterward. What eventually became Steelhead Springs began as one son's attempt to understand what had happened to his mother and whether something better could be built from everything our family had experienced.

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Long before this farm existed, my mom had already spent much of her life fighting for our family. During the war in Bosnia and the years our family lived through captivity, she protected us when she herself was vulnerable. She endured fear, violence, uncertainty, and personal sacrifice while doing everything she could to keep her children safe. There were times when she placed herself between me and people who meant us harm, and those are memories that never leave you.

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To me, she was not simply my mother. She was my protector, the person who fought for me when I was too young to fight for myself, and the woman who helped carry our family through circumstances that could easily have broken us. Years later, after we had built a new life in America, I found myself standing beside her again. This time, I was the one desperately trying to protect her.

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THE DAY OUR LIVES CHANGED

My mom had rheumatoid arthritis, and over the years the disease increasingly affected her joints and quality of life. Nutrition became part of the effort to help her, and fish became a regular part of her diet because of its protein and omega 3 fatty acids. We believed we were making a healthy choice for someone we loved.

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Then one day my mom collapsed. She was conscious, but she was not responding normally, and when I called 911 the paramedics immediately recognized that something was seriously wrong. She was rushed to the hospital, where doctors quickly determined that she had suffered a brain bleed.

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What followed was an emergency surgery that lasted approximately eleven hours. Doctors discovered a meningioma involving the tissue surrounding her brain and skull, and the operation became so extensive that a portion of her skull had to be removed because of the tumor's involvement. Our family went from managing rheumatoid arthritis to wondering whether my mom would survive.

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There are moments in life that divide everything into what came before and what came after. For our family, this was one of those moments.

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THEN CAME ANOTHER DISCOVERY

As her doctors continued evaluating her condition, medical testing revealed another serious concern. My mom had experienced significant mercury exposure. Her blood testing showed an elevated mercury burden, while additional testing raised concerns that the exposure may have occurred over an extended period of time.

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Her physicians explained that prolonged mercury exposure can affect the nervous system and other parts of the body. Symptoms we had previously connected almost entirely to rheumatoid arthritis, including memory problems, numbness, confusion, joint discomfort, and occasional problems with her vision, suddenly had to be considered from another perspective.

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I want to be precise about this because my mother's story deserves accuracy. Her mercury exposure was real, medically documented, and taken seriously by her doctors. What I cannot responsibly say is that medical science has proven methylmercury caused her meningioma, because that relationship has not been scientifically established. That distinction does not diminish what happened to her. It simply means I will never claim certainty where certainty does not exist.

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I NEEDED TO KNOW WHERE IT CAME FROM

Once mercury exposure became part of my mom's medical story, I became determined to understand where it might have come from. Over roughly five or six weeks, I tested everything in our home that I could think of, including products, surfaces, cookware, and areas she regularly used. Every negative result sent me somewhere else because I could not accept knowing that she had been exposed without at least trying to understand how.

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Eventually, the investigation turned toward the fish that had become such a regular part of her diet. We had the fish itself tested, the results concerned us, and those findings were shared with her medical team. We stopped serving her the fish we had previously been purchasing while her mercury levels continued to be monitored.

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Over the months that followed, her measured mercury burden declined dramatically. That did not provide a perfect scientific reconstruction of every exposure she had experienced throughout her life, but it changed the way I looked at food permanently.

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Before my mom became critically ill, I looked at fish the way most consumers probably do. I looked at the species, appearance, price, and perhaps whether the label said fresh, frozen, farm raised, or wild caught. Afterward, I wanted to know much more about where that fish came from, what environment it lived in, what it had eaten, how it was raised, and how much of that information a family could actually verify.

The more I learned, the more I realized that I no longer wanted to accept a label as the entire story behind something my family was expected to eat. Those questions became the beginning of Steelhead Springs.

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I WANTED SOMEONE TO PAY

I do not want to rewrite this part of our history simply because it is uncomfortable. I was angry, and that anger was intense. I believed our family had trusted a system we did not fully understand, and after watching my mom fight for her life, I wanted answers, accountability, and consequences for the people and businesses I believed had failed us.

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I spoke with an attorney and seriously considered legal action. I was prepared to spend years fighting because anger had become part of how I was dealing with what had happened. What I could not see then was how much that anger was beginning to change me.

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My mom could see it. She had survived major brain surgery, endured rehabilitation, lived through testing and uncertainty, and was still fighting to rebuild her own life, yet somehow she became worried about what all of this was doing to me. The woman who had spent so much of her life protecting us was trying to protect me again.

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She asked me to let the fight go. She was not telling me that what happened did not matter, and she was not asking me to forget everything our family had learned. She was asking me not to spend the rest of our time together consumed by attorneys, courtrooms, accusations, and anger over something that could no longer be changed.

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Then she asked me to think about other families. If our experience had taught us questions we never knew to ask before, perhaps other families deserved better answers. If I truly believed fish could be raised differently, she wanted me to put my energy into proving it rather than spending years fighting over what had already happened.

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That conversation changed the direction of my life.

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FROM ANGER TO BUILDING

I have spent much of my life building things, working with construction and mechanical systems, figuring out why something fails, and finding ways to make it work better. That was a world I understood, and slowly I began directing the energy I had put into anger toward something constructive.

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I started studying aquaculture from the perspective of the consumer I wished I had been when I was buying fish for my mom. I wanted to understand the water the fish lived in, what they were fed, and how their environment affected their health. More importantly, I wanted to know whether a farmer could build a system where those important conditions were controlled, monitored, and openly explained to the people buying the food.

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Designing the original system alone took approximately a year because I did not simply draw something on paper and assume it would work. I built components, tested their functionality, changed designs, learned from failures, and continued refining the concept as I learned more about aquaculture, filtration, water quality, and the biological needs of Rainbow Trout. From my mom's surgery and recovery through the testing, research, experimentation, and development of the original Steelhead Springs concept, nearly three years passed.

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What began as questions slowly became drawings. The drawings became experiments, the experiments became designs, and the designs eventually became the foundation of a real farm.

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A few months before my mom passed away, Steelhead Springs had become real enough that she knew what I was building and understood why I was building it. She knew that the energy I had once wanted to use fighting the people I believed had hurt our family had instead become the energy behind creating something new. That will always be one of the most important parts of this story.

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HER ILLNESS STARTED THE FARM. HER LEGACY KEEPS IT MOVING.

My mom did not live long enough to walk through the completed Steelhead Springs farm or stand beside tanks filled with Rainbow Trout. She did not get to see our first commercial harvest or watch families take home fish raised in the system she challenged me to build. But she lived long enough to know it had begun, to understand what it represented, and to know that something constructive was growing from one of the most painful chapters of our lives.

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That matters deeply to me because this was the same woman who had protected our family through war, protected me as a child, fought through extraordinary illness, and then protected me once more by refusing to let anger consume the rest of my life. Even while she was fighting for herself, she was still thinking about what would become of the people she loved and what we might be able to do for others.

Her illness was the catalyst that made me start asking questions I had never thought to ask. Her recovery gave us time to turn those questions into research and design. Her words changed my direction from fighting backward to building forward, and after her passing, continuing that work became part of how I chose to honor her life.

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Steelhead Springs is being built around the lesson those years taught me. If you are going to produce food for another person's family, you should be willing and able to explain how you raised it, understand the environment it came from, and put your own name behind what you produce. That principle is not a slogan to me because it grew from an experience I would give almost anything to have never lived through.

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My mom spent much of her life protecting our family. Now I carry the responsibility of protecting what she taught me and making sure something meaningful continues to grow from her story. My hope is that years from now, when my children and grandchildren walk through Steelhead Springs, they will understand that this farm is more than tanks, buildings, fish, and equipment. It began because Gordie believed pain should become purpose and that building something better was more powerful than spending a lifetime consumed by anger.

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Her name was Gordana “Gordie” Bates. She was my mom, my protector, and the person who changed the direction of my life when I needed it most. Her illness started the questions, her courage changed my direction, and Steelhead Springs is the farm she lived long enough to see begin.

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