By Carrie Allan
This is a chain with many links. It starts in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and ends in Syracuse, New York. But there are a lot of links between the beginning and the end, and most of those links are people—disaster responders here in Mississippi, most of them running on caffeine, granola bars, and three hours of sleep. None of them could have made this happen on their own.
Link 1: Pet owners who wouldn’t abandon their animals
Start in Ocean Springs: Matt Walters and his wife and stepdaughter lost their home to Katrina. A pine tree fell through their kitchen ceiling, the house flooded, and everything they owned was destroyed. They had to get out of the city. FEMA gave them a bus ticket to Syracuse, New York, to stay with Walters’ parents.
But the bus wasn’t going to take dogs, and they had two: A pair of rascally, hyperactive terrier mixes named Daytona and Talladega.
Link 2: A responder who decided to help
They made their way from Ocean Springs over to The HSUS’s disaster response campground now set up at the Jackson County Animal Shelter.
Sheri Evans, a volunteer from Sumter County, Florida, was moved by the couple’s devotion to the two scamps. "His wife was just crying and crying," she said. "She’d lost everything and she was begging us to help her."
She was determined to help them.
Link 3: A responder who did the legwork
But Evans was at a loss. She ended up calling The HSUS compound at Hattiesburg to talk to Connie Brooks, a volunteer from Pinellas County. Connie started asking around to see if any volunteers might be New Yorkers who could take the dogs home with them when they rotated out of the disaster zone for rest. She found no one. She even tried calling the National Guard to see if she could get the dog onto one of the many planes coming in and out of the disaster zone. No luck.
Link 4: An airline employee who pulled some strings
Brooks mentioned the problem to another volunteer, Amy Reinhart.
"And I said, ‘Well, you know, I do work for Delta,’ " Reinhart says. "So I did some calling and checked in with some people and got them to waive the usual paperwork and the restrictions because it was such an awful situation."
She booked the dogs on Delta.
And, reassured that their dogs were going to meet them, Walters and his family got on the bus to Syracuse.
Link 5: A writer with a rental car
Here goes all pretense of proper journalistic non-involvement: I’m here in Hattiesburg tracking The HSUS rescue effort in Mississippi. The dogs needed a ride to Jackson for their flight, and I had one of the few vehicles not involved in carrying animals here from the coast, so I became the dogs’ designated driver.
They were quiet as mice for the whole trip—all the way to Jackson, not a peep.
Until we got the dogs into the hotel lobby at 2:30 in the morning, when they decided to bark. And bark.
And bark and bark and bark and bark, down the long halls, into the elevator, down another long hall—hotel guests popping out of their doors to glare—down another hall, and into the darkened room where another exhausted disaster responder (who’d been asleep for 4 hours and expected neither human nor canine company) sat up bleary-eyed from bed and regarded us with an expression of complete bewilderment.
I let the dogs out of their crates to stop them barking, and they immediately began to show the reason for their names, tearing around the room at breakneck speeds, leaping from one bed to the other, play-fighting, scratching, mouthing our hands.
I apologized profusely to the poor woman and we turned off the lights. The terriers continued their delighted leaping.
I put them on the plane five hours later.
Link 6: A family friend willing to help
The dogs arrived in Syracuse on Delta at 4:16, several hours before Walters and his family were arriving home. They enlisted a friend of Walters’ mother, Jean Whitmore, to pick the dogs up at the airport. She delivered them safely to the family.
Walters says the family will be staying in Syracuse for a while. They’ll be getting some help from FEMA soon, and he’s got a job lined up already. "We were more fortunate than some," he says. "We’re so grateful to have our dogs."
Even after their difficult journey, Walters says, he still had to deal with some practical joking from his mom. "We got home and we were expecting to see the dogs, but then my mom told me that they’d been delayed and wouldn’t be in till tomorrow morning. I was all upset but then I heard them barking in the backyard," he laughs. "I would have known that bark anywhere."
Carrie Allan is the associate editor of Animal Sheltering Magazine at The HSUS.
