You want adventure? OK, drive an animal sanctuary across country
I was doom scrolling through social media when I took notice of a post from my ex-business mentor, Leona Morrison, whom the algorithm had not shown to me in quite a long time, perhaps years. And she had a need.
“Morriplum Farm Sanctuary is moving from Southern Oregon to Maine, leaving June 4th and we need drivers,” she wrote on Facebook in May. “We had a few people have to cancel, so we are still looking for drivers to help move our beloved sanctuary critters to Maine.”
Oh wow, sounds like such a cool thing. If it weren’t for the rotten timing. Darn the luck. And then I snapped to attention. Wait, what? I literally wrote the framework for this exact hero’s journey, if you will, in my journal in September. Animals… climate change… meaningful… doing some good in the world… adventure. I’m 64 and I’m in this chapter of life where I went, whoa, it’s flying by now and I need to find my life’s purpose, and then it appears on Facebook. Well, I had to say yes. It was literally my words come to life.
Leona and her husband Scott Plummer began their Morriplum sanctuary in 2016 in Medford, Oregon, where the temperate climate had been ideal for their animals — cows, sheep, goats, the camelids — one each of an alpaca, Karina, and a llama named April, and birds. Plenty of birds, the land birds — turkeys, chickens, guinea fowl, a turkey named Paisley, and the water birds — geese, several species of ducks, and Gloria, the swan.
The couple estimated it would take four to six days to drive their animals about 3,500 miles across the country in two school buses that had all the seats taken out except for the first two rows. I thought it would take longer, but I’d never driven a school bus and let’s face it, I’m a city slicker when it comes to animals. I actually photograph dogs and cats for a living in Los Angeles, but my experience with wild things was very limited (well… cats. They’re always a little wild.) But Leona and Scott were desperate enough to let me join the adventure.
Why make such a journey in the first place? Back to climate change. “We’re climate refugees,” Leona said. “Privileged ones, but climate refugees all the same.”
Oh yes, the warming of the globe is taking its casualties, and not just some remote Pacific Ocean islanders forced to flee their homes because of rising water that you can forget about easily. It’s here now. The change came for them over a period of about three years, first with drier conditions meaning more irrigation and more hay to buy which means, naturally, more costs. And then the smoke from surrounding wildfires made the air foul with the threat of actual fires ever present.
“When looking for more sustainable options we realized two things,” Leona said. “Our beloved Western U.S. is all facing similar issues and the price of land here has skyrocketed such that we can’t afford to get a bigger piece of land… in the West anyway. So, we began looking for other options about three years ago and, after a long quest, we chose Maine and, after another long quest, we found a lovely property this fall.”
For their property in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, which has 10 acres of land, five of them a pasture with ponds, they were able to buy a 130-acre spread in Maine near the Canadian border, with barns and 15 acres in pasture and the rest forest. And with that, they’ll buy some time as the climate makes rains and drought and severe weather events more extreme and predictably unpredictable. From Medford, Oregon to Meddybemps, Maine.
It’s not unprecedented that a sanctuary would move because of climate change. Several others have relocated because of climate instability, notably hurricanes and drought conditions and land that has become too wet.
And of all moves, this was probably one of the longest ones in this country, though Sweet Farm relocated from Northern California’s Silicon Valley to New York in 2021 in 50-foot trailers. The couple contemplated hiring out the Morriplum relocation but for the price, they rolled the dice by buying these old buses and taking on the challenge themselves.
There’s not exactly a blueprint for doing such a long trip with animals, particularly those not meant for the slaughterhouse. They are all truly beloved members of Leona and Scott’s family; Elizabeth, the friendliest of the sheep, was raised by the couple when her mother rejected her at birth and even slept in their bed when she was a little lamb. Many of them had escaped some harsh factory farming situations and had their own traumas. So new rules had to be written and discovered along the way, both to haul them legally and to keep them safe in constantly changing circumstances.
I flew to Medford on June 3rd, and on the 4th, as planned, we loaded the buses. It was the very definition of bucolic on their land. Himalayan blackberry bushes and pink dog roses buzzing with bees lined the road leading to the 100-year-old farmhouse where the buses were parked.
So a surprise to me was that Leona and Scott also had six-month-old flesh babies! Boy and girl twins! That sounds like fun! No! I was scared because babies scare me and I don’t like being around them. There. I said it. I’d never had a maternal bone in my body and this trip wasn’t going to activate anything latent in me, either. The babies were assigned the mammal bus; I chose the bird bus.
After cramming in as much stuff as possible, we drove the school buses onto the pasture for the load-in of the birds in one bus, the mammals in the other. And so I got schooled on how to drive a bus by driving it, learning the nuances of the steering and brakes. Feeling the weight of how big this mother was that I was driving, how much diesel to give it to do something. And oh, that is a sensitive brake and a wobbly wheel. What is the turning radius? It was a lot of big for me to handle right there. Just like driving an RV, they said. And just for the record, if you’re not carrying paying customers, you don’t need a special license to drive a behemoth like the International and Bluebird buses we were driving. I hadn’t driven anything bigger than a VW bus since I was a teenager so I expected a bit of a learning curve.
I must confess, I mostly watched the bird-loading operation as the Los Angeles suburbanite in me did not know how to handle geese and ducks though at the end, at the chicken coop, I got pretty good with some hens, especially the cage with the color coordinated ones — they looked like they were wearing the new fall line in rust and cream and I had an appreciation for those ladies and their gent. Oh yeah, don’t mix roosters together. Or species. You do not mix a Muscovy with a guinea hen. You just don’t do that. It’s not going to end well.
The geese and the swan were not crated but Paisley, in contention for being the largest bird on the bus along with Gloria, eventually was banished to a cage and he wasn’t thrilled about it. The geese were free range in the bus, roaming the area where the seats had been removed. There were very large storage bins forming a slight barricade behind where the three seats were left in, but other than that, they were free to walk around.
Next, we loaded the mammals and you can imagine the excitement that was! A steep, slippery ramp up the back of the bus with quite a bit of pushing and pulling involved. The cows were staying behind for a trip next fall — a story for another day — and it turns out the goats as well but it took a lot of work to load 22 sheep, Karina and April, then off-load two sheep because it was a little too cozy.
It was three in the afternoon by then and we were really late; Leona and the twins, Susan Morrison, Leona’s sister, and Lisa Alaniz, a volunteer driver who works with a lot of sanctuaries, had control of the mammal bus. Scott, Greg Litus, a friend from Colorado Springs’ vegan community where Scott and Leona once lived, and I had the bird bus. Once everything and everyone was onboard, we then had to attach a trailer hauling hay to the bird bus. And we had to move, we had to go. You can’t keep animals in a bus in the heat without it moving and blowing air from open windows for relief. Nipping at our heels was a heat dome breaking through from northern California into the Pacific Northwest and we couldn’t be stuck in that. Chased by the weather.
So here’s where it starts to get interesting. You don’t have an adventure without a few adventures.
Once out of town, this part of Oregon is all remote. Forests, mountains, rivers, steep grades, narrow highways… you get the picture. Gorgeous Oregon. Beautiful. Until the alarm goes off. A bus alarm, no one knows what the alarm is for. But we are not doing well. It is clear that the bus is not doing well. We have slowed to a crawl. And so Scott has me try to text the man who sold him the buses, which were most assured to be in tiptop shape, to find out what that alarm could be. But hey. No texting abilities way out here in the wilderness. Also, no GPS.
So not too far along, maybe an hour into the trip, we are on the side of the road. Greg knew some stuff about buses. Or diesel engines. Anyway, whatever he knew, it was way more than what anyone else knew. Something-something REGEN system. That something-something wasn’t working.
The bus cooled off and a text eventually came through from the guy that sold Scott the buses. Turn on the heat controls on the driver’s side and the heat escaping prevents the engine from overheating. I had a Karmann Ghia in college that did the exact same thing up a 6 percent grade in Arizona. I was familiar with the heat on the feet and the slow, humiliating crawl.
We had to keep the water temperature gauge no higher than 230 or the alarm goes off. Above that threshold, it’s overheating. So if you’re going up a grade and get near 230, turn on the heat again and bring the gauge below that magic number. Kind of like the movie “Speed.” You got a number you’ve got to keep in mind. Otherwise, while we wouldn’t blow up, we would get the alarm that definitely manages to pierce the sound level in the bus, which is already pretty, pretty loud because of the honking of the geese, and crowing of the roosters, and quacking of the ducks and all of that clucking cacophony with a base of a cranky, throaty diesel engine roar. You don’t want to hear that alarm on top of everything else. Also, this did not fix the REGEN something-something. That was something else, still.
See, we’re all learning as we go because none of us have any idea what we’re doing. Three adults/drivers in each bus. Scott has about an hour or two more experience than the rest of us. Like an RV. Sure. We unclip the hay trailer from the bird bus to the mammal bus. The bus cools down, we kinda get disoriented without the GPS, but figure it out anyway and before we can make it out of Oregon, we are headed for a motel in Lakeview, just shy of our goal of Winnemucca, Nevada.
The perfect motel is in a teeny town, near our route, on the budget side and can take this circus at a moment’s notice. Because all of the animals stay on the bus… and so do the men. The perfect motel basically has a shower and wi-fi and is not too far from a grocery store.
It was 8:30 at night when we landed for our first night and if I’m honest, people, I did get a little hangry after all that loading we did earlier in the day. We are vegan on this trip so a lot of food gets ruled out quickly and the preference is we don’t have non-vegan food in the shared room. I am mostly vegetarian at this point but cheese has been my temptress for so many years, wouldn’t surprise me if my DNA is part dairy. And vegan rules are not some — not all! — vegetarian’s kinda flexitarian rules, depending on where you draw your line, so that I needed to navigate.
My roommate for the first two nights was 38-year-old Lisa, who is a self-labeled Vegan Extremist, she had the sticker, and indeed she was. Every night was a learning experience, the extended TED Talk on veganism, my cholesterol levels, did I do weight-bearing exercise, and try my lion’s mane mushroom powder in your coffee but I need to make my tea before you make your coffee. She had a great deal of her meals prepared for this trip that met her specifications. To be clear, I learned a lot from her and a lot of it stuck with me. What are the four reasons people go vegan? 1. Animal rights 2. Human rights 3. Human health 4. OK, I forgot the 4th. Oh, the environment (doh!). “Usually one alone is not enough to keep someone vegan,” she said. And I could see that.
She also lamented she wasn’t able to turn her vegan friends’ dogs vegan as well. And as a dog photographer, ya know, a good treat is a good friend to me and high-value treats have meaty meat, a few occasionally preferred banana-pumpkin biscuits aside. So I disagreed but was worn down when the health data for vegan dogs was admitted into evidence, when she said, “Well, what if I told you the research shows dogs that don’t eat meat are healthier? Would you change your mind then?” Sigh. I’m still going with no on that, your honor.
She was an avid volunteer at animal sanctuaries and this trip ticked the boxes for her, too, in such a different way than how I needed this adventure. She had really interesting stories about her experiences and she opened my eyes. I knew from my limited time working with rescues that some can turn into hoarding situations and it unnerved me to realize the same is true for farm animal sanctuaries. This is the information that comes from someone on the frontlines, who had seen some things. Indeed, Leona told me not a day goes by that someone isn’t begging her to take an animal in. Things can escalate and resources dry up. It’s a daring enterprise.
But back to food. I did not think out the food situation quite so clearly and I asked at the front desk about a place for a bite. “Oh honey, it’s late, nothing’s open,” said the clerk, lamenting my situation with a frown — or perhaps it was because of my odor, bird barnyard. Embedded in the fibers already. The grocery store was open and off I trudged to figure out my options and one thing I know, you can never go wrong with cherry tomatoes and cucumbers. With a piece of Dave’s bread and some chips, dinner. No, you’re right. Not satisfying.
Most of these budget places have a breakfast, pretty much any combo of cereal, biscuits and gravy, DIY waffles, and maybe some yogurt and toasty things. Juice and the occasional fruit. I scored a bagel, buttered it, hid and ate it like I was a raccoon caught pawing something in an alley. Not that that happened, I’m just imagining if it did, it would look like that.
So that wrapped up Day 1 and we needed to get out because the heat dome was still a threat. While it would have been one thing to get up in the cool break of day to get on the road, the trip kept time with the twins’ schedule so 8-ish became our usual shove-off time.
Not only was the sanctuary pushed out of its Oregon property because of the climate, we were planning weather avoidance as we crossed the country. Each day, I saved the headlines of extreme weather events. Not only this heat dome, but as we go toward the Midwest we need to avoid severe thunder and hail storms and flooding as much as possible.
In Nevada, the landscape changes. It’s scrubby. Dry. The restrooms are kinda nice except it’s there that we first meet pestilence.
