Small, Fleeting Dreams & Big Mountains

Our dreams are funny things. Not the kinds we have when we’re asleep. Although, those can be strange all on their own. But the dreams we have for our lives at any given point in time. The trips we want to go on, and the adventures we say we’d love to take one day. Or the perfect patch of earth where we want to build our perfect house when we have the perfect job.

Our dreams shift, growing and shrinking as we grow and shrink. Some dreams stay in our heads for years and then decades. Others stick around for just a day or two before we set them down in a corner to get dusty. Sometimes we contentedly part with a dream because it doesn’t fit us anymore. And sometimes it breaks our heart to part with a dream, but it would break us even more to keep holding onto it.

My first dream was to be a ballerina princess when I grew up. I wanted a superhero alligator wearing a red cape for a best friend that would keep my castle safe. Then I started playing soccer, and being a graceful dancer went out the window. I still wanted to hang out with Fred, the superhero alligator, but he didn’t have to protect a castle. I wanted to be a professional soccer player and an Olympic gymnast. And then, I was ten years old with all different dreams.

There was one dream though, one of those fleeting ones from when I was seven or eight that stuck around. It happened the way most elementary school dreams do; suddenly and with five minutes of an intense conviction that it will come true. It was a dream from a spring break adventure with my mom and my sister. Something invented while sitting on a living room floor of a house on a ranch, in a rural mountain town.

Good family friends had decided to follow one of their big dreams and bought a guest dude ranch, nestled just below a tiny town on the banks of the Colorado River. My mom, sister, and I helped move some of their things from Michigan. We slept in one of the winterized guest cabins, ran around amazed by the ranch animals, and spent our time in the ranch house living room. After a few days, my sister and I both declared that we’d come work on the ranch when we were in college.

Years passed, other dreams came and went, and the ranch dream stayed lodged in a dusty corner. By the time I got to college, it was a dream I still wanted to come true. But my college schedule didn’t line up with the ranch season, and I set it back down. My sister set it down too, although I’m not sure if it was really still one of her dreams. Being a vegan in the city wasn’t easy in the early 2000s. I don’t know that ranch life would’ve been for her, or what she would have eaten all summer in rural Colorado.

As we grew up, I was land and my sister was the sea. We were at home in complementary, but different worlds. The runner and the swimmer. The one adventure dream job my sister applied for when she was in college was on the ocean. She thought it’d be fun to be a summer camp counselor in Southern California, and she would have been great at it. But it was the same summer she found City Year. And the dream of helping kids close to home was bigger for her.

Five months after my sister’s eyes sparkled as she told me about both jobs she was applying for, everything changed. One day she was 20 with big dreams and a huge heart. The next day, the only way her dreams would live on was if others carried them for her. And carry her dreams we did. Fifteen years later, a recycling program she started still exists. She made kombucha cool and all of us that choked it down in her honor years ago, now regularly drink it – by choice.

My dreams got messy when my sister died. They got tangled up with all her dreams and all the things she’d ever told me she was proud of me for doing. For a long time, I cared more about her dreams still coming true than about anything else that’d been important to me. Chasing her dreams was the only way I felt okay that I was breathing when she couldn’t. It took a couple years for the constant crushing weight I felt to ease enough to follow even a shared dream.

During my senior year of college, I decided it was time to go to the ranch. We’d never be able to work there together. But I could still go for both of us. And a few months before graduation, I got the job. Lots of people thought I was crazy when I abandoned all job prospects I had lined up for after graduation. But it was a career path I hadn’t wanted for a long time. And going to the ranch was the first thing I did for myself after my sister died that I didn’t feel guilty about.

Maybe I was still running from having to follow any of my own dreams. But this one fleeting, childhood dream felt safe to chase. Because it was something we dreamed about together. So, four days after graduation I drove a thousand miles to a tiny mountain town in the next time zone with only a Ford Escort’s worth of my things. It look me less than 20 minutes to unpack.

The first few weeks into my adventure, I cried a lot. The guilt I hadn’t felt before came rushing over me in tsunami-sized waves each day. I pretended as best I could that everything was fine. It wasn’t fine and I wasn’t fine. But slowly, the mountains took me in. They challenged me and changed me. In the mountains, I found a world that was still breathtakingly beautiful inside the broken, petrified shell of a person I’d gotten used to being.

It was in the mountains that I began to pull myself back together. It took walking away from everything for four months, two and a half years later, to remember who I was before and find out who I’d become after. And somewhere in the tangle of dreams I’d been chasing and hiding from, I discovered all new dreams. Dreams that felt right to follow, for both of us.

As the summer went on, I found myself breathing easier in the thin mountain air than I had for years at sea level. It took moving to the mountains for me to meet the person, forged in grief, that I had become. That person was more my sister and more myself than I knew was possible. And slowly that summer, I learned that all my breaths could be for both of us. Although I moved back to the midwest that fall, the guilt I’d carried for simply being alive didn’t return with me.

Last week, I went back to the ranch for the first time in more than a decade. So much was the same and so much was different about the tiny mountain town that gave me the courage to take my first steps forward in life after losing my sister. Gratitude is not a big enough word to express how I feel about that small, fleeting dream of young sisters and that ranch on the Colorado River. And to those mountains that welcomed me home like I had never left.