I grew up on a fish hatchery in South Carolina. It was simply called “Styx.” For most of my childhood, that name didn’t mean anything to me. It was simply where I lived — warm-water ponds stitched together by dirt roads, bass and bream moving just below the surface.

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My father worked there for 35 years as Hatchery Manager. The hatchery raised fish for the state of South Carolina.

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Water came in, water went out. Life moved through it. Only later did I learn that the “River Styx” is also the most famous river in Greek mythology — the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

In myth, you don’t “drift” across the Styx.

 

You cross it deliberately. You pay a fare. You leave something behind. And once you cross, you are changed.

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The river is not evil, but it is absolute. It marks a “threshold” that cannot be undone. That coincidence — the Styx of my childhood and the Styx of mythology — has come to feel less “accidental” to me over time.

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Let me tell you about the journey I have traveled and, more importantly, where I want to walk with you next.

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— ZACH MANIS | FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL