Saved

by Karin Winegar

  “You dance, don’t you? Do the Hokey Pokey,” she asks. And the rooster obediently does a spin and drops a wing, spins, ducks, and drops the other wing.

  Diane scoops up Pokey and cuddles him. Pokey chirps and murmurs, tipping his head side to side, considering the situation. She offers him to a physically challenged girl being driven in a golf cart to visit the chickens, but the girl wants no part of the rooster. Diane persists, “Oh, he’s talking to you!” she says, as the brightly feathered rooster hums and chirps.

  We straggle on, kids on foot and in wheelchairs, mothers, and City Kitty with his tail in the air, up a rise to the stable to visit Lucky Lady, a small white Arabian mare. When she was two, she pulled away from her trainer, flipped backwards and struck her head. Now the mare is blind, but she uses her whiskers like a cat to sense her surroundings, the stable walls, the stall door, and the hands stretched out to touch her porcelain-fine face.

  A boy named Jonothan glows and coos at Lucky Lady, who snuffles at his hands. He suffers from two types of muscular dystrophy, and when he also developed Kearn-Sayers syndrome, a rare congenital disorder, he started to lose his vision and has difficulty walking. He is now in a wheelchair, which a friend has rolled into the stable aisle.

  Diane was exposed to the magnetism and power of horses growing up in Twin Falls, southern Idaho, where her father raised and trained Thoroughbreds. “My brothers and sisters had horses too,” she recalls, “but as a child, I was never really comfortable on horses; I was nervous about them. So I had a crow, a lamb, and a rooster.”

  Only as an adult and after a divorce did she learn to ride, Diane admits. Her first mount was a three-year-old mare named Sheba. “I was in situations with her and was amazed by her. We rode past snakes and everything. Our rides were magical! After I moved up here, I rode for awhile, but as I started really listening to animals, I started to see we humans use animals for our own benefit, and in many cases it is harmful or hurtful. Riding started to feel like the wrong thing to me.”

  “We humans buy and sell horses and train them, and if they can’t do it, like the Black Beauty story, they are taken away from their friends (and they do have friends, both human and animal) and from their homes,” she says. “Often they are treated in ways I’d never want any animal to be treated. I am not going to change the world, but I chose not to ride any more. We do drive a carriage here, and the children can ride, but I personally chose not to do those things.”

  Diane’s hopeful herd of one hundred, give or take a few, includes five enormous emus, a pair of turkeys named Butterball and Tom, a quartet of fallow deer named Comet, Cupid, Prancer, and Dancer, and a dozen ducks, some of them blind from toxic chemicals. “They are so fascinating to watch. They didn’t go into ‘Oh dear, I’m blind’—they just figure it out and go on,” she insists. “For animals, it’s the same when people treat them badly. They say, ‘Oh well, I still love you.’”

  “I always pick the turkeys to talk about; they know their names, and they come when I call them,” she says. “I kiss them; they sit on my lap and talk back to me.”

  The summer after she rescued Butterball and Tom, Diane was conducting a seminar on the barn porch, and Butterball waddled all the way up to the barn, sat down smack in the circle of people and went to sleep. “She was so funny, and it is a long hard walk up that big hill on those little turkey legs,” Diane giggles.

  The ranch is a great leap from where Diane has spent most of her life. She earned a teaching degree in public safety and a master’s degree in environmental health and community medicine, and she worked in the oil service industry, as a director of marketing and human resources director, and traveled the world. “I was always very busy and goal-oriented, but I knew there was this other way to be,” she explains. It took a divorce and a job change to bring her into a quieter realm. “I wished I could create a special place where people would come and feel loved, a place they could be away from everything that felt bad in their lives,” she says. At Whispering Hope, she has begun to offer that.

  “The last fifteen years or so have been about spiritual transformation, learning about myself, letting go of my fears and critical attitudes. I finally got it, at least most of the time—how to be in the moment, nonjudgmental, and loving.”

  In other words, she aspires to be pretty much like Eeyore, Butterball, and Lucky Lady. “Animals are so sweet; they have no judgment,” says Diane. “I used to be a perfectionist, cleaning, working, and worrying. Now I love my life; it is so joyful.”

  28

  SPEAKING UP FOR CASSIDY

  RANDI GOLUB AND HER CATS

  CASSIDYTHE CAT was one needle-prick away from eternal sleep when a bold decision stopped the procedure. The young gray-and-cream cat, whose hind leg had been shattered by a .22 caliber bullet, was full of fleas, half-starved, and reeking, and a second bullet was lodged close to his spine. The veterinary staff at the Eugene, Oregon, animal hospital had decided the best thing to do was euthanize what they figured was a hopelessly injured feral cat.

  Randi Golub was head veterinary technician, and it was her job to administer the tranquilizer that precedes the fatal injection. She had done that, but as she spoke to the cat and stroked his scraggly coat, he purred and licked her hand. “The injection was drawn, the vet was standing there with it, but something about this cat got to me. He just didn’t feel feral. I felt so sad—and I felt we should try to save him,” says Randi.

  Randi, who does in-home nursing care for cats, as well as boarding and hospice care for them, had seen thousands of cats in varying stages of distress. “I could never stand doing euthanasia unless it was the right thing, and I felt this was not the right thing. The second question that popped up in my mind right then was, ‘Who is going to be responsible for him?’ We can’t save him and then leave him to spend his life in a cage,” says Randi. In that instant, she turned to the vet and asked her to halt the euthanasia. She took responsibility for Cassidy, and she has never regretted it.

  Randi and her husband, John, share a 1961 bungalow that is half-hidden behind mounds of lavender on a quiet street near the Willamette River. Randi’s station wagon is parked in the driveway, its rear window advertising her services as a cat nurse and cat hospice provider.

  Chuck, a gray tabby with a weight lifter’s build, chirrups a welcome to me at the door, and Q-tip, a one-eyed white rat, greets me with a nip on the finger through the bars of her cage. A stunted black female cat named Mini skitters playfully across the linoleum, and wide-eyed, elderly Kringle (“The most annoying cat I ever met,” laughs Randi. “He won’t leave you alone”) attaches himself to my side.

  Cool, rainy Eugene is known for being the town where the sixties went after the sixties were over, but this home is strictly warm, sunny pre-World War II Florida—pastel yellow and periwinkle walls, framed vintage beach art, woven rattan furniture upholstered in 1940s tropical foliage fabrics, and floors of speckled linoleum. Quiet jazz—Billie Holiday and Stefan Grappelli—trickles through the rooms.

  Randi is a youthful, middle-aged woman, short and motherly with close-cropped blonde hair and deep-set eyes behind narrow glasses. Gold cat-head earrings flash at her earlobes. Cats pose on the kitchen counter, two play under the sofa, another dances down the hall—but I notice that the house is astonishingly clean and odor-free. “Thirteen cats is not a number I recommend for anyone,” Randi concedes. “And I won’t say it isn’t tiring, but they give back so much to us that it’s easy for me.”

  She calls to Cassidy, who rises from a fluffy blue cat bed on the floor near a bookcase, his gait a curious combination of scoot and hop. Despite his missing back leg, he manages to get up on my lap, fix me with his topaz blue eyes, and mark my chin with his cheeks. He has large, lynx-like gray ears, and a coat of cream patches alternating with gray tabby stripes—possibly a combination of Siamese and domestic shorthair. There is no stump to his left hind leg; it simply isn’t there. A small white tuft marks the scar along his lower spine where the secon
d bullet was removed. I stroke his throat, Cassidy purrs blissfully, and soon the air is full of white fur that settles on my black jeans and turtleneck.Cassidy lost a hind leg, but he now inspires and brings comfort to senior citizens, children, and people in hospices. He helps teach compassion to everyone he meets.

  Saving Cassidy required a team effort beginning with Brooks Fahy, an animal lover who had noticed the stray cat. He followed a trail of blood, put on fireplace gloves, and crawled under a porch to retrieve him.

  “We saved his amputated leg with the gunshot,” Randi explains, holding an X-ray up to the light from the large patio doors in her living room. A ghostly constellation of lead bits gleam along the delicate, crushed feline femur. “We know who the person is who shot him. She lives in a rural area about half an hour from Eugene, and when we questioned her, she admits she shot at him, but we don’t have the time and money to prosecute her.”

  After Randi’s eleventh-hour decision, another veterinarian volunteered to amputate the leg and remove the second bullet. “The worst was the seizures afterwards,” says Randi. “He couldn’t hold his head up or walk. We had to hold him up in the litter box; we had to hold his head for him to eat or drink.”

  For the first week, Cassidy needed twenty-four-hour care; several vet techs, a veterinarian, and Brooks Fahy each took him home for a couple of nights and stayed up nursing him. Then he needed to relearn to walk. “When I first put him on the grass for traction, it broke my heart—he tried so hard, but he couldn’t stand,” says Randi. As Cassidy became stronger, Randi rigged a bath towel and a cat harness to suspend him like a puppet. She placed mats against the walls of the rooms and towed him around, steadying the three-legged cat as he regained strength and grappled with his altered sense of balance. Over a month, he taught himself how to walk again, going from the harness to leaning against the walls for support, she explains. “He had tremors, but through the whole thing, he was purring and loving and licking my hand. He is the most loving cat.”

  In September 2007, Cassidy passed his Delta Society test, becoming one of a few hundred cats in the country to be a registered pet partner. (Delta Society is a Washington State-based international nonprofit organization that improves human health through service and therapy animals.) The test involves a physical exam and a temperament test to determine how the animal reacts to new people and noisy or strange situations. Now Cassidy and Randi go to assisted-living homes, where Cassidy brings out the best in human beings.

  Cassidy provided an opportunity for Randi to take a lifetime responsibility for a needy creature, and she didn’t hesitate. But he’s not her only inspiring dependent creature.

  “Jimmy Jam! Come on, Jimmy!” Randi calls. A slender orange kitten bounds out of an adjoining room, a delicate youngster with a long muzzle, outsized ears, and distinctive butterscotch whorls along his sides. He scampers around to nose Cassidy, who has settled down in a tiny blue tent, one of a dozen cat beds in the living room. Then Jimmy strolls over to select a catnip-stuffed mouse from a basket of toys. When I pick him up and cuddle him, colorless sutures abruptly poke me in the face—the kitten’s eyelids have recently been sewn shut.

  “He’s blind,” Randi confirms. “He was a stray with terrible eye infections, and we hoped to save one eye, but we couldn’t. If you didn’t know, you could barely tell he can’t see.”

  I put Jimmy down and he darts off to wrestle with a beaded curtain hanging in the doorway between the kitchen and laundry room, while Randi shows me the wider part of her feline realm. “This is my WiFi cat-fé. I can take my laptop outdoors here,” she says, parting the sliding doors and leading the way through a fenced garden that encircles three-quarters of her bungalow. “At the end of December, we only get about six hours of daylight around here, so I’m out here as often as I can be.”

  The yard contains a huge southern magnolia, a cluster of Oregon’s omnipresent rhododendrons, pink-red camellia buds already unfurling in the February chill, and an herb garden with rosemary and lavender. Tiki torches surround the garden.

  Someone shot Cassidy twice, but cat nurse Randi Golub of Eugene, Oregon, saved his life.

  If Randi is the local cat whisperer, she says, laughing, then John is a “car whisperer” who diagnoses high-end autos—but he’s also a big softie. “My husband is a real motorhead, but he loves the cats—he’s the one who instituted a tiki-torch ceremony when we bury a cat here. He leaves the torches on all night for them.”

  Randi has other ways of honoring her late customers. “One year, five of my clients’ cats passed away, so I planted three hundred bulbs—tulips, crocuses, lilies—as a memorial to them. And we hold a celebration of life, a garden party, and people bring photos of their animals. I like to find ways to deal with sadness and channel it constructively. This year I planted four hundred bulbs.”

  Beyond a fish pond (guarded from great blue herons by a toy figure of Godzilla) is an arched roof housing a shady cat run with ramps, toys, and towers. Finches flit in the shade of a massive, deep green deodar tree that shelters a yellow one-room cottage with blue shutters and white trellises. The interior is beyond spotless, with blue counters, two skylights, air filters, an aquarium, and fish mobiles. The cottage holds a maximum of four cats; each kennel has an outdoor run, a bed and chair, toys, and lace curtains. Today the foursome includes Teddi, a sixteen-year-old that was once hit by a car and needs to have her bladder expressed daily, and Sparky, an asthmatic cat that travels with his own inhaler. Their owners are on vacation, and they have entrusted their fragile darlings to Randi. “I am booked here for the next two years—especially Thanksgiving, Christmas, and summers,” she says. “I really wouldn’t trust anybody else to do this. And people are so appreciative and grateful.”

  Being a full-time cat caretaker—whether it’s Cassidy and Jimmy or her clients’ cats—means very little downtime for Randi. She is literally captive to her cats, held hostage by their needs and her big heart. Fortunately for her, “Nothing fires me up like working with animals,” she says. “I got this animal thing from Dad. He’d come home from work, and his greatest joy was to have our two Siamese cats sleep on his big belly. Dad sold floor coverings, and to this day I can’t have a scrap of carpet in the house, which is a good thing considering the life we live.”

  She grew up in Pennsylvania, the youngest of four children, and holds degrees in animal-center management and veterinary technology. Until a few months before she met Cassidy, Randi had a Siamese cat named Violet that visited reservations, nursing homes, hospices, schools, and libraries with her. And Cassidy has succeeded Violet. “It’s a way for people to get their hands on a warm, furry, loving body,” she says. “I see people in their wheelchairs off by themselves, isolated, but with a cat there, they begin to share their lives and they talk—maybe about the animals they had when they were eight years old. They can’t remember what they had for breakfast, but they can tell me about their puppy.”

  Cassidy revives their love of life by demonstrating his own joyful personality, Randi believes. “Some things are more difficult for him because of his physical condition, but he’s the happiest creature I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I watch him sleeping in the sun on his back, and I feel so lucky that I was somehow there when he needed me. And I also feel fortunate that I listened to myself, that I spoke up.”

  Randi and John have not had a vacation for more than two years. Nonetheless, she describes herself as feeling blessed. “Cassidy has transformed my life, because he’s a living, twenty-four-hour-a-day reminder of how you can overcome any kind of physical or emotional obstacle, and learn how to trust,” says Randi. “It would have been easy for him to withdraw, to be scared and not trust people, but even while he went through pain, he was loving and trusting. He reminds me on a daily basis what trust is all about.”

  “I can tell he’s grateful for everything I’ve done for him, but I’m the one who is immensely grateful.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANKS TO THE following kindhe
arted and extraordinary people, without whom this book would not have been possible: Cathryn Andrews and Norton Stillman of Nodin Press, who inspired and fostered the book from the beginning. They share our lifelong tenderness towards animals and our sense of obligation to help them. The lovely and photogenic Kimberly Carlson and her charming goldendoodle, Chloe, for modeling for us. Barbara Baugnon at the Oregon Humane Society was a tremendous help with our three Oregon stories. Bill Dorn and Bill Hammond, who guided us throughout this project. And our wise and patient editor, Renée Sedliar.

  Our deep gratitude to Dr. Jane Goodall and Dr. Temple Grandin, two of the busiest people on the planet, who both saw fit to take the time to read our book and graciously provide a foreword and preface, respectively.

  To all the subjects in the book. It was a privilege to spend time with these kind people and their animal companions.

  —KARIN WINEGAR AND JUDY OLAUSEN

  KARIN WINEGAR wishes to thank the following: Peter Moore for his support and patience. The wise, funny, and gifted team of Jacquie Trudeau and Renée Fredrickson; the members of the Monday group (Mindy, Stu, Theresa, Teresa, Carey, Michael, Jeff, Ed, Jim, and Shirley); and Nancy and Mike McAllister, Allie Hamilton, John and Betsy Phillips, Sara Grace, and Bill Ersland, who know what it means to rescue and be rescued. Thanks as well to Joan Ericksen and Peter Lancaster for their generous professional advice; to neighbors Felicia Spivey and Tony Buettner for their lead to Phil the deer man; to John Sherman for the lead to Don and Lillian; and to Nevada Barr for introducing us to Elton and PeeWee and letting me sleep on her sofa with her darling dogs.

  The animals throughout my life who made it worth living, including but not limited to: Rudy, Heidi, Bruni, Venus, Cupid, Zuma, Wendy, Peter, Mitty, Molly, Filly, Sugar, Silver, Mr. Smith, Licorice Bit, Chocolate Bit, Caramel Cat, Kitkat, Romeo, Summer, Wheatie, Shadow, Houdini, Bill, Chico, Sam, Dude, Marquis, Blaze, Prinz, Smokey, Bailey, and Mine Too. And my long-suffering parents, Deanne and Wally Winegar, who delivered many animals to me and tolerated the ones I brought home.