"Close to you"

We met Ryan at Sand Master Park in Florence, Oregon, where he was our sandboarding instructor for the afternoon. Easygoing and full of laughter, he felt like someone you could talk to for hours. As the sun dipped beneath the sand and our legs started to give out, we asked him our usual question before taking our last run.

His song was "Close to You" by The Carpenters. He first heard it around the age of three or four, playing in the background while spending time with his dad. He told us he doesn't have many memories with him, but that song has stayed—soft and steady like the few moments he remembers clearly.

Now 24, Ryan has lived just south of Florence for the past ten years. Before that, he grew up in Vacaville and Kansas. He's been working full-time at Sand Master for about three years now and called it "the best job in the world." But before the dunes, he spent five years working in Fire/EMS just out of high school, diving into some of the hardest, most heroic work there is.

After we drove away, Ryan sent us this message. We'll let his words speak for themselves:

"Well, I'd like to touch a little bit more about my comment on working in Fire/EMS for the last 5 years... I made a comment to y'all about how I'd been taking some relaxation time after some trauma I got my time working there, but it was truly an amazing experience all things considered."

He went on to share one memory in particular, about a house fire. After the flames were under control, he and his lieutenant noticed two kids from the family standing nearby, visibly shaken. So, with their parents' permission, Ryan let the kids spray a real fire hose from the truck, something he knew might offer them a moment of light. A week later, the station received drawings from those same kids. One read: "Thank you for saving my house. I want to be a firefighter like you."

"Often the world of Fire/EMS is full of death, sadness, trauma, and really just the worst things possible," he wrote, "but it's the moments like this that make serving the people of your community the biggest honor in the entire world."

Sometimes a song holds the gentlest part of someone's story. Sometimes the rest is shared a little later, when you least expect it.