A few nights ago, I couldn’t sleep. I’d thrown back a whopping dose of cough syrup before going to bed, hoping to shut down the dry hacking that was making my chest wall hurt and my head ache. Hours later, staring into the dark with red-rimmed googly eyes and a hammering heart, I thought I perhaps should’ve read the label before I sucked it down, in case it was a stimulant.

As the hours ticked by, I thought about all the times in my life I’d been visited by good ideas too late, or terrible ideas that I pursued hotly, not knowing they were terrible. There have been many, but one terrible idea stands heads and tails above the rest. It was an idea so ludicrous in scope it pains me to tell the story of it, and yet I must, if only as a cautionary tale.

I’m warning you, this is much bigger than cough syrup.

I was twenty-four and almost finished with graduate school. I lived in a tiny apartment over a barn on a horse farm, where my job, in exchange for rent, was to feed and ride and clean up after four horses and one goat named Ebony. Of the three jobs I’d held in my life—candy store clerk at Cumberland Mall in Atlanta, low-level counselor at a halfway house in Tifton, Georgia, and the current one, the current one was my favorite.

But I was about to graduate with a master’s in psychology. It was time to grow up, make something of myself. I couldn’t be a horse wrangler forever. Could I?

One morning, sipping coffee on the deck overlooking the pasture, I was visited by The Idea: I would build and run a long-term alcohol and drug recovery ranch! The ranch would sit on a hundred or so acres, with an approximately 8000-square-foot, multi-bedroom home that would house a dozen or so men and women in various stages of getting (and staying) sober. They would reside on the ranch for up to a year, working with the horses, tending the vegetable gardens that would supplement their healthy meals, and receiving all manner of therapeutic interventions and services (individual, group, and art therapy, as well marriage and family counseling where indicated) from highly-trained psychologists and support clinicians.  

But the clincher—what made my idea so stunningly original and possibly even Nobel Prize-worthy, was this: each resident would be matched with a dog from the local animal shelter. That dog would be theirs to love and to train, which would serve the triple purpose of teaching clients about commitment and behavior modification techniques they could apply to themselves, while saving a dog from the shelter.  Upon discharge, sober resident and beloved, obedient dog would sashay off together to begin their new fulfilling life, while I, smug in the knowledge that I’d been the catalyst, waved goodbye from the doorway.

There were about a thousand problems with The Idea, but I will just start with the obvious, which is that I had no money with which to purchase land or build such a facility, nor did I have any inkling how one might go about getting it. Likewise, how I would manage to hire all the psychologists and support staff needed to run such a facility, or what I would need in the way of pesky things like malpractice and property insurance and a marketing budget, not to mention the “minutia” of what it might take to keep a dozen grown human beings alive for a year—all of this was an uninteresting mystery to me.

But let’s keep going. After I hatched this absurd scenario of a ranch for recovering addicts and the dogs assigned to teach them important life lessons, I then attempted to enact it. I began by calling real, live realtors.

“Hundreds of acres?” they asked, incredulous. Why yes, they’d love to be of assistance!

I began receiving fat envelopes full of plats in the mail, showing the dotted outline of what could be mine if I acted quickly. I read the offers, perused the hazy black-and-white images of what looked like trees viewed from outer space. I got excited. This was happening! (It wasn’t.)

At some point in the process, I called my father and told him my plan. He thought it was great. (My father had a habit of responding to things he was told without actually hearing the words.) I told my mother. She thought it was ridiculous. My father, I decided, was a visionary. My mother, I decided, just didn’t like dogs.

I called more realtors. I wrote detailed plans in a notebook that included things like what the residents’ days would look like hour by hour, how much therapy they would get, what time meals would be.

And then, my friends, I found a “business” partner. He was an older man, a stranger, who I met I don’t know where, but possibly at a convenience store, because this was pre-internet. He loved my idea, thought it brilliant, and had many ideas of his own, like hug therapy (this is the only one I remember). We corresponded by mail, and then I excitedly drove the two hours to meet and discuss our business at greater length. I’d like to say that when I pulled into the dirt driveway of his ramshackle house in the shade of three enormous wooden makeshift crucifixes, it gave me pause. It did not.

Please don’t make me go on, because I could. I could tell about how my truck broke down just as I was leaving, and he offered to drive me home and I accepted. How, on the way, he turned onto a dirt road and drove deep into the woods, coming to a stop in a remote circle of trees for the purpose, I can only guess, of having a little naked forest-bathing time together, an idea he abandoned when I, visited by a moment of long-absent judgment, made clear my discomfort. How I STILL let him drive me home.

The ranch never came to fruition. The entire undertaking leapt to life June 18, 1986, and enjoyed a vibrant, hopeful and exciting existence until its collapse eleven short pages later, on October 24, 1987. I know this because the morning after I laid awake all night high on cough medicine, I went in search of the nearly forty-year-old notebook that housed the ludicrous plan. I found it in my attic, in a large plastic box with other personal relics of the era.

Just as I remembered, there were pages and pages of realtors’ names and their phone numbers, lists of therapeutic services that would be available to clients, random questions (will I need to hire a cook?), possible names for the business (Equus Corporation was a clear front-runner), and a note to self about having a business license as a sole proprietor (with “license” spelled wrong, crossed out, and spelled wrong again).

Fittingly, on the cover of the notebook that houses the only record of Equus Corporation’s ill-fated rescue and recovery ranch, there is a unicorn, that beloved emblem of the fantasy world. It stands, dare I say also fittingly, at the edge of a perilously high precipice.

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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She is the Literary Arts Program Coordinator for the Dalton Creative Arts Guild. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].