This story is about a lot of things.

It’s about college romance. It’s about Royce Gracie and the Rev. Horton Heat. It’s about pumping gas, the collapse of the housing market and brain surgery. It’s about dogs, a laboratory, and a couple of entrepreneurs whose business won’t stop growing.

But mostly, it’s about life and the human experience, and what we do when we’re presented with challenges that feel impossible to survive.

It begins with wyeonmia smithii.

Wyeonmia smithii — the pitcher plant mosquito — is an insect only a scientist could love. 

They breed in one very precise location, in water pooled within a carnivorous plant (the pitcher plant) that typically uses its cup-shaped top to trap and kill its insect prey. Almost 20 years ago, Travis Davison was an undergraduate student doing research in physiological ecology and working in a laboratory at the University of Oregon studying the circadian rhythms of the pitcher plant. 

And it’s the pitcher plant mosquito’s fault, if inadvertently so, that Travis and Kisa Davison began a lifelong love affair that marks its 18th year of marriage this year.

That love affair included a beloved dog named Sweetie, seemingly innocuous long-distance phone conversations, a Rev. Horton Heat concert, a boyfriend (not Travis) visiting Ecuador and a bit of a surprise twist for Kisa.

“I never imagined myself to be married to a redhead,” she says now of her husband.

“Nobody does,” he quips back.

“He’s handsome, but that personality overcomes a lot of red hair,” she responds with a smirk.

By the time Kisa moved in with Travis, science was behind him and he was doing what one may not expect a well-educated man to do after studying pitcher plant mosquitoes: working the graveyard shift pumping gas at a Chevron.

Living in the Portland area, Travis and Kisa were in love but also a little bit lost. Neither was working toward anything related to their college major — Travis at one point was a tattoo apprentice and Kisa was studying for the Foreign Service Exam. Nevertheless, they very quickly built a family. 

Four children were born in rapid succession, and not without complications. The pair had twins, Stella and Ricky, born two months premature, and their oldest, Ted, was faced with a dire future from birth.

“When [Ted] was diagnosed with infantile spasms, the prognosis was death or severe mental retardation,” Travis said.

Ted has undergone numerous medical treatments and a 2014 brain surgery at University of California-Los Angeles. He is now 16, and despite still battling occasional seizures is a sophomore at Flathead High School.

The 20-something Davisons eventually settled into the construction world, Travis working his way up to become a general contractor and Kisa helping run the back end of the business from home while earning her real estate license.

Life’s journey had its fair share of turbulence, though.

Travis, who is colorfully adorned with a number of tattoos, including the words “HOLD” and “FAST” across the fingers on his right and left hands, spent his early post-college years inching close to a dangerous cliff.

“I certainly did [get into fights] more than I would like to admit,” he said. “And I’m not proud of that at all.

“I think, eventually, that pattern would have resulted in something not good. Pick a fight with the wrong guy or something just happens; doesn’t go well. There’s no real good end game when you think about that.”

Kisa, with her children growing, was having her own struggles. Her husband was becoming immersed in a sport that would change his life, but the time commitment kept him away from the house on a regular basis. The stress of raising a young family and a gnawing, unfulfilled and unknown angst was taking its toll. 

“Shortly after our youngest, our fourth [Joe], was born, I actually was having a nervous breakdown,” she said. “Four kids in three years, a struggling construction business, we were struggling in our marriage, it was just really hard times. Our oldest had severe health issues. I couldn’t see straight. I hadn’t slept in four years.”

Kisa and Travis love dogs. It was Kisa’s dog, Sweetie that Travis was watching when the two began regularly conversing on the phone. Travis initially was interested in biology because he thought he wanted to be a veterinarian. And the pair is currently training a service dog for their eldest son. 

So when Kisa thinks back on their younger days, her metaphor is understandable.

“If you have a dog and that dog isn’t walked twice a day or doesn’t have an outlet, then you come home and your couch is shredded,” she said. “That’s kind of how I view our 20s. We didn’t really know what we were supposed to be doing with all of this energy that we had. I don’t even think we had ideas, necessarily, we just had a lot of energy.

“When you don’t have an outlet for that it tends to come out as what might seem to others as reckless, but really that’s just the chewing of the couch because you didn’t get a walk.” 

The first-ever Ultimate Fighting Championship was held Nov. 12, 1993, and it was then that Travis would be taken on his first walk. 

The fledgling sport had only a handful of rules at that time and was fought without gloves and without weight classes. The concept was simple: win all of your fights — three in one day — to claim the title of Ultimate Fighter.

Travis tuned in to the broadcast.

“I remember watching it and, at the time, thinking, ‘Who’s this little Mexican guy in pajamas?’

“Our image of what a fighter looks like is what TV told us a fighter should look like,” he said. “It should be a karate guy, or a kung fu guy … or even the big, tough biker, and they had all of those guys.

“But this little 180-pound Royce Gracie, who was Brazilian we found out later, and what he was wearing was a gi, not pajamas, he proceeded to choke all of them out. Choked them all,” Travis recalled. “It was all like magic.”

Gracie, now a legendary figure in the mixed martial arts world, was fighting using Brazilian jiu-jitsu. When one of Travis’ friends and his brother found a gym teaching the art, the three of them signed up immediately.

What they walked into was the original Straight Blast Gym in Portland. Almost immediately they were hooked.

“Within the first year my brother and I actually committed to a lifetime membership, that’s how convinced we were,” Travis said. “As powerful as it was to see it on TV, to get in there and think you’re a tough guy and then get into a room with these people … these guys destroy your ego right in front of you.”

For Travis, the experience was more than just humbling. It was a pivotal moment in his life. He describes it with the kind spiritual reverence seldom found outside the pulpit.

“Jiu-jitsu changed my life. Saved my life,” he said. 

Kisa’s life was saved, too. But she wouldn’t be taken on her first metaphoric walk until several years later.

It happened just outside Portland in Camas, Washington. She had first discovered yoga in college and practiced intermittently after that. At the behest of her mother, she sought out a studio in her new hometown when she felt that breakdown just around the corner, after the birth of her youngest son in 2003.

“I walked in to Running Water Yoga in downtown Camas,” she said. “The teacher, Paul, I still consider the main player in my life being saved.”

She’d had positive experiences with yoga in the past but experienced an awakening almost immediately this time.

“I walked into that first class and 90 minutes later I walked out and I just felt right again. I felt myself. I felt like I could do things, I felt quiet in my head,” she remembered.

“Then I got into my minivan and there was a Post-it note on the steering wheel with the grocery list on it. And my whole world came crashing down again.”

Grocery lists will always, always be there.

And that realization is the point of all of this. Life is going to throw all kinds of grocery lists at you. It’s going to test you over and over again.

“At some point you just have to realize, at the extreme of both ends, you can curl up in a ball in the corner, crying, complaining about how unfair things are,” she said.” Or you say, ‘You know what, I’m going to put my head down and just get through it.’

“When our son (Ted) was diagnosed … I started to curl up in a ball and cry. That’s not going to fix the problem. So that’s where we learned it. That’s when we had to realize, look, life’s not perfect. Do we deserve that? Who cares? Did he deserve that? It doesn’t matter. Deal with it. Yoga and jiu-jitsu give you the tools to deal with it.”

The Davisons made their way to Kalispell in 2007 with a terrific opportunity to build houses and take advantage of the nationwide boom. Then the bottom fell out of the housing market.  

“I remember standing in the kitchen of our condo and thinking I’m probably going to have a really big panic attack,” Kisa said about the days leading up to the inevitable termination of their project.

“But when it happened, I actually didn’t feel panicked at all. I looked at Travis and said ‘well …’ and Travis said ‘I only know how to do two things: I know how to build houses and teach jiu-jitsu. And I said ‘all right, let’s open a gym.’”

So they did, and a move across the street and several expansions later, Straight Blast Gym and The Yoga Room have locations in Kalispell, Whitefish and soon will open another in Missoula.

Travis and Kisa were no longer shredding couches, so to speak. They had found a way to direct their passion. And the challenges in front of them were, in their words, now “speed bumps and not brick walls.”

The first gym opened in 2008, and while growth was slow in the early years, the company has blossomed recently. Travis is now the vice president and a 49 percent owner of Straight Blast International, a collection of Brazilian jiu-jitsu gyms around the world that has trained, among others, current UFC champion Conor McGregor.

While the connection between the brutality of ultimate fighting and the serenity of yoga seems tenuous on the surface, a deeper look reveals two arts are, at their core, teaching near-identical lessons.

“We often refer to jiu-jitsu as extreme yoga,” Travis said.

“Yoga with chokes,” Kisa chimed in.

Both are rooted in mindfulness, or the practice of remaining mentally in the present. And both incorporate a level of physicality that keeps the practitioner’s focus on the often very challenging physical task at hand, be it holding a yoga pose or grappling an opponent on the mat.

Travis and Kisa have found happiness and, as much as anyone can, peace. And they contend that their greatest joys now come not from seeing their company expand but from the number of people they help turn their own unmovable brick walls into obstacles that can be conquered.

At this point in their life story, life is good for the Davisons. Saved by the sports they love, they’re raising a family, hurdling brick walls confidently as they come across them.

And there is another dog to train.

“One of the books I’m reading right now in regard to this [dog] training … he says you have to stop looking at mistakes as being bad things,” Kisa said.

“When you look at mistakes as being bad things, and I’m paraphrasing here, you turn away from them and those mistakes become weaknesses. When you look at mistakes as just being mistakes you go back to the drawing board, you figure out how to do better, you don’t make that mistake again because you’re aware of it, you’re conscious of it.”

Or, perhaps, when your couch keeps getting shredded, maybe it’s just time to go for a walk.

Reporter Andy Viano may be reached at 758-4446 or by email at aviano@dailyinterlake.com.