Life Is But A Dream

By Elizabeth Well

Companies reinvent themselves. Celebrities remake themselves habitually. So why not you? We sought out people who switched courses late in life to pursue a dream that had been on hold for too long. And we found a country full of inspiring stories: the commercial fisherman who now surfs three months a year, the business exec who becomes a sculptor and the teacher turned activist. Everyone's dreams are different--like the former pilot who swam the English Channel--but just the idea of a dream can be powerful and contagious. As Goethe said, "Whatever you can do or dream, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now." Turn the page to meet people who are making their dreams come true.

The Lifelong Thrill Of the Wave

Fred Sears, 59

Surf Bum

Morro Bay, Calif.

Fred Sears is packing his white F-350 truck for his annual trek from his home in Morro Bay, Calif., to Baja, Mexico, its enormous bed filled with surfboards, wax, wet suit and sunscreen. He is as stoked as any surfer dude in his mid-20s, which by some accounting is what he is. Sears grew up in Hermosa Beach, Calif., and surfed as much as he possibly could during his teenage years. At 15, as soon as he got his driver's license, he began sweeping floors at Hobie SurfBoards, eventually working up to glassing and polishing the boards, and then he insisted on staying at the beach to go to college in San Diego. When it came time to get serious about work, he even decided that he wasn't going to get a "real job," that he would stay close to the sea instead. That meant another go-around--you guessed it--making surfboards, and then, Sears groans as he says this, "the death knell came when I bought a commercial-fishing boat. My mentor said, 'It's time to put away the toys, son.' Of course I said, 'You're wrong. No. I can do it all.' My plan was I was to fish six months a year and surf six months a year. But over the course of the next 15 years, I surfed less and less and less."

The fishing life was demanding. Throughout the 1970s, he would be gone for nearly five months at a stretch on his boat, The Aguero. In the 1980s, after his daughter Heather was born, he tried to fish closer to home, but that still meant leaving for 10 or 14 days, seeing his family for two or three days and heading right back out as soon as the weather allowed. What happened to the fish-six-months, surf-six-months plan? "Well, by 1976 I had to take on a winter fishery, which was herring," says Sears. "And by 1983 I had to take on a fall fishery, which was swordfish. So it was pretty much a big deal if I got 10 days to go on vacation once a year. The economics were tough. That battle was straight uphill." During his tenure, Sears caught hundreds of tons of salmon and albacore. In 1997 he quit.

Given Sears' strong legs and barrel chest, it's hard to imagine, but at that time, he says, he thought he was "washed up physically." So it was pretty much on a lark (and to fill up all those landlocked hours) that he drove to Mexico in a little pop-up cabover camper, with his old 9 ft. 6 in. long board strapped to the shell because, why not? "What a wonderful physical experience!" an exuberant Sears says of his time that first winter on a little-known beach in southern Baja. "You know, it all came back to me--the physical connection with nature, the spiritual connection with nature." After returning home to California's central coast, Sears bought a new board and drove to Mexico again the next winter, this time staying for six weeks, long enough to get back into great paddling shape and for his old skills to click. The next winter he took his wife, a former librarian and amateur painter, and stayed for six weeks again. The next winter they doubled their time, enjoying the waves and the migrating gray whales, and they have been spending three months in Mexico each winter ever since. Sears does not surf when he's at home in Morro Bay, but in Baja he's the chairman of the beach, loving every moment, whether it's talking with the young guys on the sand or paddling out to carve some S-turns on a perfect glassy-faced wave. "Surfers would look at what I do at home and say it's a lack of commitment," he says. "But what I'm really committed to now is having a more well-rounded life than when I was fishing."

Carving Out a Brand-New Identity

Jean Dibner, 62

Sculptor

Newton, Mass.

Once upon a time, Jean Dibner was a senior vice president of Avid Technology, a digital film-editing company. Now she spends her days carving granite and clay as a sculptor--but she's the first to admit that the transition "didn't just happen." Yes, she volunteered for early retirement in 1999, thinking that after raising four children and sending them to college and being a major breadwinner, "it was time to do something that was really energizing to me." But there's a lot of ground to cover when someone switches from running worldwide businesses, traveling nonstop and working 60 or 70 hours a week to learning human anatomy and making works of art meaningful enough to be shown in galleries nationwide. "It was a whole process to clarify what I even wanted from sculpture," says Dibner. "Was my goal just to create beautiful sculpture and put it in my home? Or did I want other people to see it and enjoy it too?"

The journey from business executive to sculptor was similar to the transition she made in 1980 after 17 years of staying home with the kids. Back then, aptitude tests revealed that she would make a perfect engineer, and she plunged back into school for a degree in computer science at age 40. With degree in hand, she began a high-tech career that included stops at Digital, Apple and IBM. This time, however, she didn't need someone to tell her what she was interested in. While at IBM, Dibner started taking sculpture classes, riding the T to Boston's Museum School after work. Once she decided to accept an early-retirement package and devote herself to professional sculpture, she threw herself in headfirst. That meant, initially, a very rigorous study of the basics, including form and technique. Then she retreated to her studio and logged the long, lonely hours that separate the people who only talk about becoming artists from those who succeed at finding their own voice.

Those hours weren't as lonely as they might have been for some. Dibner's husband Andrew also left a technology career (he founded Lifeline, the personal response service advertised with the unforgettable tag line "I've fallen and I can't get up") to work on his sculpture as well. Still, the change from having profit-and-loss responsibility for $300 million in revenue and 350 employees to waking up each morning and staring at clay in the basement took some getting used to. "You work so hard to get yourself where you are, and a part of your identity is the title," Dibner says candidly. "Sometimes I'll be somewhere now, and somebody will say, 'What do you do?' and I'll say, 'I'm a sculptor,' and they'll say, 'Oh, that's nice,' like they think it's a hobby, not something meaningful and serious."

But that's a small price to pay for leading the creative life. "So many people say, 'Gee, I'm so envious. I wish I had something like that,'" says Dibner. "But I believe that everybody does have some creative response to life. You just have to figure out what it is."

Uplifting the Downtrodden

Pam Barratt, 66

Social-Justice Activist

San Diego

When Pam Barratt was still working full time as a chemistry teacher and raising her two children, life as a social activist was complicated. Sidwell Friends, the Washington-area private school where she taught, was surprisingly accommodating after she was arrested in 1988 while protesting U.S. involvement in El Salvador. Her son and daughter tolerated the seven families of refugees from Cambodia, Vietnam and Czechoslovakia who moved in and out of their home over a 13-year period. But Barratt was torn: teaching chemistry to wealthy kids forced her to temper her passion for social activism. "I was always interested in social-justice and poverty issues," explains Barratt. "But I was working so hard." Then in 1993, with her children grown, Barratt remarried, retired from teaching and moved to England. "All of a sudden," she says, "I was able to do all these things that I've always wanted to do."

For starters, she booked a ticket to Bolivia with her husband Ken Barratt. Both of them are active Quakers and wanted to visit the relatively large population of practicing Quakers in Bolivia. "Well, when we got there, the poverty was overwhelming, and the people were marvelous, and so back home we raised a bit of money"--a couple of thousand dollars--"and sent it to them. And then we went back the next year unannounced." The small donation had paid off. The Bolivians had finished a four-room schoolhouse and improved their water supply. Barratt had also sent some old chemistry equipment, and when she arrived, she found eight girls sitting around a table in the school looking at molecular structures, a sight that warmed her heart.

That was the genesis of Barratt's first postretirement venture, Quaker Bolivia Link, a nonprofit founded in 1995 that funds dozens of projects in rural Bolivia, mostly high in the Andes where government funds rarely reach anyone. Most of the projects focus on stabilizing the food and water supply, though the organization takes its direction solely from locals and strives to help them achieve what they need most, be that greenhouses, schools or trees. "We don't really take them out of poverty--we know that," says Barratt. Over the past 10 years, Quaker Bolivia Link has raised $600,000. "But we take them one step up and give them a sense of hope and empowerment."

In recent years, however, with Quaker Bolivia Link fully up and running, Barratt has been raising awareness about poverty closer to home, in San Diego, where she and Ken moved in 2001. Now she pours her creative energies into Street Light, a newspaper for the homeless that she co-edits. Not only are the vendors homeless, so are many of the reporters, writers and board members. "We try to give a voice to this segment of society that is not just ignored but almost treated like untouchables," says Barratt. Her official role at the paper is to find stories and sign up people to write them, but she ends up doing nearly everything. "I'm the only one on the editorial staff who's retired, so I'm free to go out and take a picture in the middle of the day or cover a story," she says, "and I do a lot of reporting and writing as well."

Some Like It C-C-Cold

Charlie Berger, 66

Adventure Tour Operator

East Bettford, Vt.

"I've always seen my life as interesting, but since I've retired, I've been able to do more of the interesting part," says Charlie Berger, a retired veterinarian who, upon moving to East Bettford, Vt., took two Alaskan wolves with him. In his spare time he volunteers to tend the dogs in sled races, such as the Iditarod that runs from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, and he leads adventure--natural history tours to remote areas of North America. This past November he went to Churchill, on the Hudson Bay in Canada, to take 14 souls to see polar bears. Last year he led a 500-mile canoe trip down the Yukon.

Berger's life is frenetic and cold. He loves the cold: "We became human, literally. We got all our human abilities, our language, our art, our science, from living an ice-age type existence." And he wouldn't have it any other way. "It's great to get people out in the middle of the wilderness," he says, his enthusiasm palpable and contagious. "We live on such a great continent, and people don't realize what's out there." His favorite spots include the Yukon, Alaska, Newfoundland and Ontario, all spectacular, freezing and grand: "To be one of the 5% of the human population fortunate enough to live on this continent is just a blessing in itself."

Before selling his Berkeley, Calif., veterinary practice of 39 years and moving to Vermont, Berger did his best to compartmentalize, working 70 hours a week and then taking a month or two off to pursue his other interests. It was always exciting and always hectic but also an arrangement that he backed into, a reaction to life's inevitable twists and turns. "When I went to vet school, it didn't quite occur to me that being a veterinarian was an indoor job." In fact, Berger assumed he'd be a zoo veterinarian, but he found that world, in his estimation, "to have the worst aspects of the military hierarchy--just too regimented for my type of life." In the late 1960s and early '70s, he managed to see a lot of exotic animals, when, at least in Berkeley, "every rock star who was making god-knows-how-much money thought the coolest thing to do was go out and buy his kid a Siberian tiger." But the laws changed, and Berger realized he had to bring himself to the wilderness instead of the wilderness coming to him.

For a man of such wide-ranging passions, figuring out his fantasy life, let alone achieving it, has been a work in progress. For a while Berger thought the perfect life would include spending lots of time in British Columbia, taking groups of kids hiking and canoeing, a practice he got into after setting up zoos and teaching nature at summer camps in the Catskills. "Then it occurred to me, after putting a whole load of canoes on the Yukon River and tying them up and giving a reading of Jack London's To Build a Fire, which is a wonderful short story, while we were drifting past Dawson, which is the start of the great gold rush, and looking up and seeing two kids with headphones listening to Metallica ... I decided that adults are much more interested in learning things like that."

What's next for Berger? Dog-sled-racing season and then, next summer, the Phelon River, one of the most remote waterways on earth. "One of my good friends said, 'Berger, this is not a rehearsal.' If you've got to retire and have nothing, it's a bit like dying. But if you have visions and ideas of what you're going to do--and those can be as simple as reading and walking--retirement can be the most energizing part of life."

Swimming for His Life

George Brunstad, 70

English Channel Swimmer

Ridgefield, Conn.

Swimming for 16 hours straight in freezing water, fighting a 2-m.p.h. current and dodging ships might not be everyone's fantasy. But surrounded by his family on his 69th birthday, upon being asked how he wanted to celebrate his 70th, George Brunstad heard the words "swim the English Channel" pop out of his mouth. At that point Brunstad, who happens to be actor Matt Damon's uncle, had been swimming competitively in Masters programs for 31 years, and he had won more than 100 Masters championships. As he recalls, "Everyone said, 'Yeah, you can do it! That'd be great!' And my wife stood there with her arms folded and her lip kind of out, shaking her head no way." Brunstad then informed his wife Judy, a devout Christian, that Channel swimmers Jim Bales and Dave Parcel had used their swims to raise significant sums of money for charity. "She said, 'Is that right? So this wouldn't just be for your personal glory?' And after that she got on board with a vengeance."

Neither Brunstad's work life nor his pre--Channel swimming retirement would have suited the lazy or faint of heart. In the Air Force, he flew B-52 bombers. The day he left the military, he began piloting for American Airlines, and upon his mandatory retirement at 60, he bought a Russian-designed, Chinese-built MiG-17 fighter, which he used to do tricks at air shows, zooming at speeds up to Mach 1.1 and pulling up to 9 Gs. ("Isn't that what every grandfather does?" Brunstad asks.) But his real passion all along was long-distance swimming, particularly open-water swimming, which he discovered in 1992. Competing in races, often in Long Island Sound, Brunstad loved not only the physical challenge but also the camaraderie with competitors. When Brunstad decided to attempt the English Channel, he knew he would be swimming for the history books, trying to beat the record for the oldest swimmer, set by Clifford Batt of Australia at age 67 in 1987.

He also knew he would be swimming to raise money to build a medical center, school and orphanage in the Haitian village of Hinche, which he and Judy had visited with their church group.

To train for the Channel, Brunstad cut his swimming back from five to three days a week, stroking 4,000 m to 6,000 m in the pool on Monday and Wednesday, with his longest swim on Friday, which started out at 8,000 m and increased to 22,400 m, just shy of 14 miles. To train for the cold water, Brunstad took cold showers all winter and swam in Long Island Sound. When the sound got too warm, he rented a cottage in Brunswick, Maine, where he would swim in the open water for up to eight hours at a stretch.

On the day of Brunstad's 70th, the weather was too bad to attempt the swim, but three days later, slathered in lanolin and petroleum jelly, he slipped into the water at 9:13 a.m. at Abbot's Cliff, south of Dover, England, and emerged on Sangatte Beach, south of Calais, France, 15 hours and 59 minutes later. Every half hour along the way, he was thrown a nutrient drink. Every two hours, he took a swish of Tom's of Maine mouthwash to rinse the salt water out of his mouth. With the current, Brunstad estimates he swam a total of 32 miles, the last 200 yards of which he did accompanied by Alison Streeter and Marcella MacDonald, two of the strongest Channel swimmers in the world. "I had an adrenaline rush about 100 m from the shore," he says. "A spotlight came on, and I looked up, and I could see buildings along the beach, and I could see a church, so I just really put my head down and dug, and all of a sudden I stroked my arm down and hit sand! We ran up on the beach, the two girls and I, and there were about a dozen French people there at 2:12 a.m. their time. We put our arms up in the air like Rocky and said, 'Praise God. God is great.' It was just surreal. Then we just waded back into the water and"--because even at 70, you can't just immigrate to France via swimming the Channel--"swam a couple hundred meters back to the boat."

If you're living out your dream, tell us about it at time.com/secondacts