The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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There are plenty of folks who would gladly send their hard-earned dollars to the TV ads for abused dogs and abandoned cats but would never give one thin dime to some charity that helps us humans. Which, in all fairness, is their right. Their money, their choice of charities. We can’t save the world so pick a cause and hope it does some good, maybe even makes a difference.

The Tyee Rescue Farm, just down the road from the now shuttered Tyee Store, take in unwanted dogs and cats, injured raccoons, eagles with broken wings, lost possums, unsaleable ostriches, crippled llamas, sick parrots, three legged squirrels, well … they take in whatever critter or creature gets dropped off by its owner or the Island County deputies, the concerned citizens and even Jim Jensen, the official ‘animal control officer.’ Martha Petersen started taking in strays back about 1975, built a small kennel, taught herself basic veterinary skills and within a year she was swamped with a veritable zoo of inmates, detainees, patients, the unloved and the unwanted. Which, when her husband John left her the night she drove to the State Park to retrieve an injured deer, she became too. Unloved, I mean. John said he’d had enough. “You love that rabbit more than me,” he accused her before she shut the door on both their way outs.

Martha has told that story to most every volunteer and staffer who’s helped her build her 10 acres to what it is today. Kennels and barns, sheds and walking paths, a small hospital, aviaries and pig pens. “He said I loved that rabbit with the ear half torn off more than him,” she’d narrate, immobilizing a crow’s bent wing or applying antibiotic to a raccoon’s dog-eaten tail while the newest volunteer held the injured beast. “And you know,” she’d say, pausing for effect like she always did, “he was right. The animals people bring in when they don’t want them anymore … you know what? They’re better off here.”

Love, all I can say, is love. Martha, I guess, has more than most. John? I’m betting he doesn’t have a dog or a cat or gimpy alpaca. He probably counts himself the lucky one. Maybe they both are.

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Sarah Jensen runs the South End Animal Rescue here on the island. She’s got an old barn, some sheds, half a dozen outdoor pens, a small vet clinic off the house plus a few acres of fenced pasture where horses and alpacas and llamas patrol the grounds along with a menagerie of dogs, goats and the occasional Vietnamese pig. She doctors eagles and cats, raccoons and the usual squirrels. Most return to the wild but some stay with her the rest of their lives. Her longest guest by far is Quixote, a donkey she had to amputate its hind leg back she guesses around 1995.

Quixote wants nothing to do with the horses or the alpacas and especially the cantankerous two llamas. He gimps around the pasture waiting for Sarah, apparently the love of his donkey life. A truck had hit him on the highway where he’d made his escape from the Drummond place north of the Diner where he’d mostly been staked to an iron rod and left day in and day out tied to a shackle on the metal stake. His life with Drummond was about 20 feet in diameter, water bowl, moldy hay, a circle of mud to stand in or lie down in or just try to ignore. Why old man Drummond wanted a donkey is anybody’s guess but when Quixote snapped the rotten rope and hit the road before being hit himself, the last thing he wanted was a 3 legged jackass, or so he declared when Sarah presented him with a bill for an amputation.

Life is hard enough on the South End for us 2 legged denizens, but if you visit Sarah, you’ll feel like we’re the Lucky Ones. If you take an apple like I do when I drop by, Quixote, who is not above being bribed, you’ll appreciate that the world, hard as it is, also has a few Sarah Jensens to offer balm and medicine and compassion. Quixote too is one of us, the Lucky Ones. You decide to visit the Rescue, bring an apple. Or three.

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