Getting At Thomas's Story

 

Hard to believe that an entire decade has passed since I started taking notes on a memoir about Sgt. Thomas Tibbs. Eighteen months after being rescued from horrific conditions, he had made so much progress (progress that began with the love and patience of volunteers at Friends of Upland Animal Shelter), I knew I wanted to chronicle his story, beginning to end. If I could discover much about his beginning.

Turns out, that has been a challenge.

Seven years ago, after I retired from teaching and returned to my first love, I pulled out my notes from three years prior and started adding to them. At that time, I was able to contact two gentlemen who were administrators in animal control at the time of Thom’s rescue. One refused to talk to me. The other agreed to a phone interview, then spoke incessantly about how difficult it is to be the director of a county animal shelter—one that is notorious for having a “high-kill” rate. He kept me on the phone for four hours and never answered any of my questions.

Last Thursday was a beautiful day in the High Desert of Southern California. I drove up to Apple Valley to visit the very modern library there, to see if perhaps a reference librarian could help unearth some stories that might have run in the local newspapers in 2013.

Nope. No reference librarian at all. And no newspapers. “We don’t keep those for more than a week or so,” one of the kind ladies at the desk told me. There were two of them, and in between checking out books and telling people the restroom code, they listened, intrigued, as I told them Thom’s story. Neither remembered it from the news. Both wanted to help. One of them began an internet search using names I gave her—and came up with all the information I already had.

I left a bit discouraged, but undaunted. From there, I did a long drive down a dirt road, looking for the property where Thomas was born—Rainbow’s End Animal Sanctuary. If ever a name were ironic…. The property is allegedly (according to a Facebook page, so the info is taken with a grain of salt) on Zuni Road, so I drove the length of that long, meandering road. No way to tell where it might have been.

Still undaunted, I pulled to a stop by some rural mailboxes to snap the above photo (and check in with a friend who had been calling, worried, for hours, knowing I would be on this quest by myself in the middle of a rural area). As my little Subaru idled, a white-haired woman pulled up to get her mail, and I sauntered over to ask her if she’d ever heard of the “sanctuary.”

What she told me in great detail I will not discuss here, so as not to subject you, my dear, dog-loving Reader, to the horrors she shared with me. If you can follow this thread: Her neighbor’s husband’s brother used to work at the sanctuary. The neighbor, a dear friend of the woman I was speaking to, died of cancer.

“So you no longer have contact with the husband?” I asked, knowing all too well the answer.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t even know where he is or how to get in touch with him.”

Maybe it’s just as well.

I couldn’t leave Apple Valley without stopping by the overflowing shelter there, walking through the kennels and finding four or five or six dogs I wanted to take home. Before that, I asked a woman at the desk if anyone working there now had worked there in 2013.

“No, I don’t think so,” was her reply. I gave her my contact numbers, telling her briefly about Thomas, about why I was seeking information. She said she would have someone call me if anyone knew anything.

So far, that hasn’t panned out, either.

Here’s what I know, and it boils down to two dynamics:

1. Somebody up there knows something.

2. I’m not just stubborn, I’m Irish stubborn.

So yeah, I’m not giving up. Thomas will have a book about his majestic self because he’s—he was—beautiful and he deserves it, my sweet boy. And I have a thing or two to say about companioning with a feral dog.

As always, stay tuned.