My Gentle Barn (5 page)

I spent that first year off crack at the edge of
impossible
. Every moment of every day brought the craving for the drug, a physiological desire now as innate as thirst or hunger or the need to sleep. I had to meticulously plan every day, where I would go, who I would see, who I would not see. Craving was worse by association: a location, the quality of light, the air temperature, certain types of people. For the first three months I went to an NA meeting every single day. Then I found a therapist. And even with all this support, that deep desire for escape—either in a puff of silver-white smoke or by death—never once left me, and never would, not entirely. But something had shifted in me that day on the floor, that moment when I’d gotten up off the carpet and chosen to bathe rather than to die. That moment had changed me on a cellular level and was silently guiding me back to life, always back to life.

I enrolled in college and signed up for every psychology course I could find. If the world thought it too strange to make a life of helping animals, I would help people. I started seeing my parents again on Saturdays, and they helped me out financially. I got a dog to keep me
company while I studied, and we visited the dog park daily. There I met professional dog walkers who made their living playing with dogs. It felt like the perfect side stream of income while I went to school. Before long, I had a pickup truck with a camper shell, business cards, and a handful of clients. Soon I expanded from merely walking dogs to grooming and training as well, and then I moved to a larger place so I could board dogs too.

But before I had even walked my first dog, I knew in my heart that this new business would not be an end but a means. The profits would be redirected toward another endeavor: rescuing animals from the pound. On some level of my being, I knew that was what I had to do if I wanted to keep choosing life.

With the cash from my first substantial paycheck in hand, I headed to the animal shelter with my heart racing, knowing that a whole new chapter of my life was about to unfold. Standing at the front desk, I could hear the barking echoing off the walls back in the kennels. It sounded like there were hundreds of dogs back there. This was not the solid, full-bodied bark of a dog behind the door of his house warning you not to trespass. This was a chorus of yelping with a high-pitched edge, the kind that said, “Oh please, oh please, help me leave this place.” I took a deep breath and walked through the door to the kennels, and an odor unlike no other flooded over me—the sour smell of pee on cement. Everything in this place was concrete and metal. No soft edges. When the dogs saw me, their yelps turned to whining and howling and many of them jumped up against the cage doors, sticking their paws out between the bars as I passed. Cage after cage of canines imprisoned for doing no wrong. I walked up one side, looking in at each and every dog, trying not to let the smell and sight of the filthy kennels overwhelm me. But halfway down the other side I burst into tears. Every dog was whining and begging and pleading to be chosen. How on earth would I make such a choice? If I took only one, would I be choosing the one who got
to live or would I be choosing the thirty who would die? Maybe I’d underestimated what it took to be a rescuer. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to do this after all. I closed my eyes and tried to pull it together and found myself praying to some unknown force.
Please, please help me. Show me who I’m supposed to take home, because I can’t make this decision by myself
. When I opened my eyes I saw that a big, black dog to my right was not alone in her kennel as I’d thought. She was partially hiding a litter of puppies—perhaps a week or two old and squirming on the concrete to get closer to her warmth. I hadn’t expected to see such young puppies at the shelter.

This mama dog was trying her best to look after her babies, but she was trembling and whimpering and hunched against the back of her kennel.

I wiped at my tears before I approached the warden.

“Can you tell me about that black Lab mother and her puppies?”

“They’re being put down today,” he said matter-of-factly.

“All of them?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But they’re just babies.”

“Well, no one’s adopting them. We need to make space. That one family is taking up a whole kennel. There could be five adult dogs in there.”

It turned out the mother had been confiscated from a man brought up on animal cruelty charges. He’d been running a puppy mill, keeping this dog in a cage to have litter after litter. She had given birth to this last set there at the shelter.

“Well, that’s who I’m taking home,” I said.

“So you want the mother, then?”

“And her puppies. I want all of them.”

I pulled my pickup around to the back door, and the shelter workers loaded the mom and her seven puppies into the truck bed.

As I was driving home I realized I was trembling. It wasn’t fear,
and it wasn’t exactly excitement. It was more like a flood of life force bigger than I could contain, a powerful sense of purpose and drive pumping through my body. This was what I was supposed to be doing, and now no one could stop me. No one would get rid of the animals I brought home. No one would interfere with my efforts to nurse them back to health. And I no longer cared if anyone laughed at me. It was a matter of life and death—my own life and death.

On that drive back from the pound, I got my first glimpse in a very long time of who Ellie was, and who Ellie was meant to be.

I decided on the name Rover Rescue, and for the first four years I wore every hat there was to wear—rescuer, rehabilitator, fund-raiser, and director of adoptions. I went regularly to the local animal shelter and chose the saddest, sickest, most scared dogs and cats and brought them home to heal them physically and emotionally, with the goal of placing them in a loving home. Each time I went to the pound I relied on the same inner guidance that had helped me with my very first rescue—the black Lab mama I’d ended up naming China. That guidance was something like the inner whispers that had connected me to the natural world as a child, and I was grateful to feel it rising up in me again.

After that first rescue, I had made a pact with the universe.
If you keep guiding me, if you keep showing me who to rescue, I’ll keep doing
this work
. Each time I visited the pound, I’d silently say,
OK, show me which one
. And every time, something drew me to the dog or cat who was supposed to come home with me that day. One time the guidance had even told me not to go inside the shelter at all, so I’d waited just outside the front door, and five minutes later a couple had shown up with the sweetest toy poodle who was going to be put down just for being old.

Most rescuers took only the young dogs with no health or behavioral problems because they were the easiest to adopt out, and the supervisor at the shelter tried again and again to convince me that was the only route to being a responsible rescuer.

“You’re giving valuable time to these old, unplaceable animals,” he’d said more than once. “You’re not going to be able to rehabilitate them. Then you’re going to be stuck with them.” But who was I to say no to the universe? I kept being guided to the animals no one else would ever choose. I knew that without me they had no chance at all.

The spirit that guided me didn’t abandon me after the rescue itself. It led me every step of the way until the animal was placed in a new home. One eleven-year-old German shepherd had been brought to the pound by her elderly owner, who was going in for an open-heart surgery she thought she might not survive. As an older, owner-surrendered dog, the shepherd was first in line to be euthanized.

“She’s not up for adoption,” the shelter supervisor said when I asked to take her home.

But the dog was a sweet, gentle soul and had no health problems. “I know I can find her a home,” I insisted.

The supervisor would not budge. “I don’t want you using your resources on an old dog.”

Now he’d overstepped the line. “How I use my resources is none of your concern. That’s my job, not yours.” I fixed my gaze on him. “How can you euthanize a dog when someone is standing right in front of you wanting to give that animal a home?”

He said nothing, but his jaw was clenched and his feet were planted firm.

I sat down in front of the shepherd’s cage and said, “I intend to sit right here until you give me this dog.”

He walked away but came back every fifteen minutes to check whether the stubborn rescuer was still sitting on the concrete floor. And sure enough, I was. Finally he returned with some papers and a pen. “You can’t have the dog unless you sign a waiver.”

“Sure,” I said, reaching for the pen. “I’m happy to sign any paperwork you need.”

At my next dog adoption day, which I held the following weekend at a pet store, the end of the day arrived and the German shepherd had not been adopted. As I started packing up, a fit woman in her sixties approached me and told me she’d really like a dog as a companion. Her husband had died, and she had lots of time and no one to share it with. She walked a lot, but was worried she wouldn’t be able to keep up with a young dog.

My eyes filled with tears, and a smile broke out across my face. “I have your friend right here,” I said, and led her to the German shepherd. The two made an instant connection; the shepherd was adopted less than a week after I’d pulled her from the pound.

I loved this work and was good at it, and perhaps the part I excelled at most was this final phase—placing an animal in a loving home. I had a knack for making successful matches. Of the five hundred animals I would ultimately place in new homes, I had only five of them returned—an extremely low number for a rescue operation.

Most of the dogs and cats I pulled were in bad shape and required extensive rehabilitation. This started with healing the animal’s body, and I saw every type of disease and injury imaginable, the saddest being those inflicted by abusive owners. If the animal was sick, we’d start off with a vet visit, and then I’d take it from there with daily medicine, supplements, fluids, and wound flushing. Knowing I had a small
nonprofit, the vets patiently taught me all I needed to know in order to carry out home treatments and keep my visits—and my costs—to a minimum. Once the dog’s or cat’s body was healed, the longer, more challenging process of emotional healing began.

The most important part of the rehabilitation process was listening to what an animal told me. If a dog was terrified 24/7, he was telling me that the abuse had been erratic, coming at him from unexpected sources or for no apparent reason. If a dog gets yelled at and sent outside for peeing on the floor, he learns not to pee in the house. But if he gets yelled at, hit, or kicked as a result of someone’s unpredictable anger and abuse, the dog learns to fear every human all of the time.

One small terrier was so petrified of people when I first met her at the shelter, her body shook so hard she was practically convulsing. When I arrived home with her, I opened the back of my camper truck, and she was sitting with her nose in the far corner, her body quaking violently. I climbed slowly into the truck bed and shut the door, sitting as far from her as possible with my back toward her. I knew this was a one-shot deal. If I didn’t win her trust before I took her in the house, she’d escape under a couch or a bed and remain a feral shadow from there on out. I wasn’t going to let that happen, and I was willing to sit out there for as long as it took. I followed my instincts and this dog’s cues every step of the way. I began inching toward her at a glacial pace, my back to her the entire time, never daring to look at her or even to turn around, so as not to convey dominance or any kind of threat. Forty-five minutes later, I finally was within arm’s distance of her. Listening not only with my ears but with my whole body so I could sense any signs of increased distress, I reached slowly behind me and touched her, then very gently stroked her wiry fur. For the next hour, I did just that; I pet this shaking dog with my back turned. Finally, when I was sure she wasn’t going to feel trapped or try to bite me, I gently brought her around and held her loosely in my lap. With my face turned away, I stroked her and quietly told her all about the second chance at life
that lay before her. “I’m never going to give up on you,” I said to her. “I want to be your safety and your warmth. I’m going to love you day and night.” After an hour of cradling her and talking to her, I finally felt her body begin to relax, and I was able for the first time to look at her. Eventually she even dared to steal glances at me. Four hours after pulling up in front of my home, I knew I’d won her trust and brought her inside to begin our next three years of rehabilitative work.

The longer a rehabilitation took, the harder it was for me to give an animal up. It was clear that first day that this little terrier was going to stay with me indefinitely. So I named her Rover after my nonprofit and gave her the job of mascot.

Every time I rescued a dog or cat, every time I proved to her that she could trust me, I felt one more small corner of my lonely childhood mending.