Cheever Farley: Outdoor Redemption

Farley has always known the value of time: “I just learned really quickly that time was the biggest asset. The dollar was not the asset to chase. The dollar allowed me to do the things I wanted to do. It was how could I find the time to do it?”

Unfortunately, what he wanted to do as a young man was ruining his life. “I got deep into the drugs and the booze and everything starting in high school.” After Farley’s freshman year at LSU, his father, himself a recovered alcoholic, said, “Here's your last chance. I'm going to put you into rehab...and if you complete the program, we love you and you're in our lives. And if you don't and you want to keep going down this road, we can't be a part of it anymore.” In recovery, Farley found clarity. His ability to identify the best possible outcome in challenging situations, to help someone or someplace or something become more than it was before he found it, fully emerged. He now says, “My sobriety is my biggest asset, and the lessons I learned in that are the best tools I've got in my toolbox.” In his words, “That's an old man realization at a relatively young age,” but it left him a lot of life runway with which to have an impact. 

Farley has always pushed hard at whatever occupied him. “I don't know where I picked that up, but one of the things I've always loved about waterfowl more than any other hunting is it's a grind. We're the kind of people who want all the odds stacked up in our faces. That's why I love chasing ducks on that public ground. I'm going into the wide unknown, and I'm going to figure it out. I can remember driving up to the North Platte River, putting my boat in by myself, struggling for a couple of days, and then coming across ten thousand mallards on a sandbar, and it was just the sweetest feeling. I kind of seek that misery.” Farley began to pursue his life the same way he hunted waterfowl: putting his head down and grinding, working through challenges and taking the pain when required. That ethos became invaluable when he focused his efforts on waterfowl habitat restoration, specifically on a critical piece of Oklahoma’s public wetlands called the Hackberry Flat Wildlife Management Area.

Farley was looking for a piece of private Oklahoma wetland to maximize so he and some buddies could hunt ducks for a few years before selling it for a profit. He says, “We're losing habitat pretty damn fast out there. The wild things have fewer and fewer places to go these days.” But when Farley and friends “started putting together the ranch in Oklahoma, I found this 7,000-acre Hackberry Flat WMA up the road that had all the makings in the world of something super special. But it had a crumbling infrastructure, the most important part of which was a pipeline that delivered water that had been down for ten years. It just didn't have a champion trying to throw their weight behind it to get that thing moved forward.” Deciding to be that champion, Farley reached out to Ducks Unlimited for help with the restoration of Hackberry Flats.  As a result, he says, “The amount of momentum this thing has right now is far superior [to what] it's ever been. And now I meet with the commissioners of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife and Conservation...to get this done.”

What is the price of redemption? For Cheever Farley, it’s immaterial relative to the incalculable value of a place where “16-year-old, 18-year-old Cheever can go out there and try to figure it out for himself and get his fire lit. And then one day, maybe that kid becomes successful and can buy some land himself and put some money into it and create more habitat...The benefit to the resource becomes exponential when you get people who really, really care. I mean, it's just a win-win. I'm grateful to be able to have that opportunity.”

We’re all grateful for Cheever Farley.