In a recent emotional Alaskan Bush People interview, Billy Brown’s first-born son Matt opened up and revealed that he feels like he had lost his way, but now he is back. While Matt’s interview with People focused on his troubles with alcohol and the reason for his absence on the Alaskan Bush People Reality TV show, the 33-year-old’s words were not just about himself.
The Brown family reality before the TV show.
Once upon a time, Billy Brown and Ami fell in love, got married, started their new life together, and planned to have children. Billy’s own childhood was crushed to pieces at the age of 16 when his parents and sister died in a private plane crash on March 2, 1969, leaving him alone, scared, and abandoned.
Before that tragic day, Billy was living in an affluent Fort Worth suburb in Texas.
Ami, also a Texas resident, married Billy in 1979, but during the next four years, the young couple realized that they were searching for something other than a life in the suburbs. The young Brown family’s quest for a place to call home appeared to end in 1983 when they discovered the Alaskan wilderness.
With their two first sons, Matt, 3, and Joshua, 1, the life of Billy and Ami focused on learning how to survive in an environment that was nothing like Texas. After 18 months, the Brown family had made it and grew to what Alaskan Bush People viewers know as the Wolfpack. Together with their parents, the family's seven children --Matt, 33, Joshua, 31, Bear, 28, Gabe, 25, and Noah, 23, Snowbird, 21, and 12-year-old Rain -- share with viewers what life is like in the wilderness.
Gold in Alaska.
For Billy Brown, the need to share the experiences of his amazing home in the wilderness came long before the reality TV show. In 2007, Billy Bryan Brown published his first book “One Wave at a Time.” In his book, Billy revealed what it was like to be orphaned after his parents’ plane crash, what it was like to become a husband and a first-time dad, and what it was like trying to survive in the wilderness.
Within two months after publishing the book, readers commented that this is a beautiful and inspiring story that would make a great movie because it describes a man’s courageous quest to follow his dream in the Alaskan wilderness and that despite of the dangers and hardships, the family always supported each other.
The huge financial success of Billy’s first published book resulted in another book.
However, unlike“One Wave at a Time,” the 2009 book “The Lost Years” made less money. When Billy was approached by the Disney Channel to turn his life into a reality TV series, there was no question for the Brown family patriarch. There was still gold to be found in Alaska.
An addiction to alcohol or money.
Despite the nice monetary compensation for appearing on the Discovery Channel’s reality TV show since 2014, Billy apparently felt the need for some more of that gold that Alaska can provide. When Alaskan residents received funds for its oil pipeline, the Brown family claimed part of their share even though they actually were not living in Alaska between 2009 and 2012.Quite obviously, Billy’s quest for a place to call home since leaving Texas in 1983 had turned into something quite different in 33 years.
Or as Matt Brown expressed it in his heartbreaking interview, “in life, we all get lost every now and then and have to find our way back.”
At the age of 33 and after having completed 35 days of rehab, Matt says that he feels like he found his way back to where he belongs. However, the question remains whether the same applies to his dad. In Billy’s 2007 book description, it mentions that his life in Alaska was a way of running away “from the emptiness left by his childhood loss.” As viewers watch reruns of the Alaskan Bush People until the new season begins, has 65-year-old Billy’s quest been successful and really ended?
