Dreams

Dreams

There was only one thing I wanted to do when I started college. I wanted to do more of what I was already doing. I was going to school and getting good grades, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. As it turned out, I started down the wrong road to the right place.

College was a way to get the work I thought I wanted. I paid for my own schooling, so I had to work a lot. I have friends, and we played a lot. During a couple of summer vacations, I got the chance to work, as a part timer, in the career that I had in mind.

That career was in Forestry. I loved being outdoors. I worked some summers as a staff member at a camp for young people, but what I really enjoyed was working outdoors. Getting ready for the campers, cutting trees that had fallen down over the winter, breaking beaver dams that would flood roads, and hiking around the area were my favorite activities.

My summer job working in a forest was the best. My job was to walk through random parts of the forest and make a record of the kinds of trees and plants that were there, how fast the trees were growing, and the direction of the slope. It was in some very steep mountains.

I did not walk on roads. I found my way through the mountains by looking at photos that were taken from an airplane. Since I was so far into the forest, away from other people and cars, I saw lots of animals. I saw deer, a couple of bears. I also found some stone tools made by Native Americans a very long time ago.

That job was terrific, and it gave me an opportunity to see what real, college-educated Foresters did at work. They spent a lot of time in offices, working at desks. Working at desks was not what I wanted to do.

I decided to change my major to English Literature, and my dreams changed. I wanted to travel, just travel around the world. I didn’t know how yet, but that was my dream.

After college, I decided to study foreign languages. I thought it would be good to find out more about them, because language is something everyone has in common. If we could learn more about languages, we could learn more about people. 

I still wanted to travel, but one of my teachers, my Japanese teacher, was very good. She suggested that I should go to Japan. Japanese is an interesting language, so that is where I went.

Flash forward nearly four decades, and I’m still in Japan. Now my dreams are different, but only slightly. I spend my free time in the woods and in the garden. I started down one path with one set of dreams, and the path has changed ever-so-many times. Had I told my 18-year-old self where I would be in 2020, he would never have believed it. But had he thought a while, he would have to admit that the dreams have not changed that much.