Star-Telegram.com
June 20, 2007
By Bud Kennedy
Original Article
They say Sissy always got nervous
when it stormed.
If you ever lived in Gainesville, which has
been struck by floods or tornadoes eight times
in the last 26 years, you’d get nervous,
too.
This week, the most famous survivor of the 1981
Gainesville flood was safe, far from rising creeks
and the city where as a teenager, she clung to
a tree in rushing waters.
Sissy hung on for 36 hours — by her trunk.
Sissy the elephant is nearly 40 now. She lives
in an elephant refuge in Tennessee, away from
the trauma of three Gainesville floods as well
as a baseball-bat discipline incident involving
zoo handlers in El Paso.
She was known as Gerry II in Gainesville, named
after the original elephant of the city’s
old barnstorming community circus.
After she was found in 1981, breathing through
her upraised trunk like a snorkel, she became
the poster elephant for the city’s recovery
from what had been the worst in a history of
floods.
One-fourth of Gainesville is in a flood plain.
Elm Creek and Pecan Creek split the city and
every few years swamp it.
Sissy, brought from Thailand when she was 5
months old to work in Six Flags Over Texas’ petting
zoo, had barely turned 1 when she moved to the
Frank Buck Zoo along Elm Creek in Gainesville.
She grew up without parents or elephant playmates.
She was 12 when the zoo flooded in 1981.
Zookeeper Vince Reynolds was quoted as saying
that he thought for more than a day that she
had drowned.
Then: “I heard her trumpet lightly.”
She was downstream with her trunk wrapped around
tree branches, lifting herself toward air.
“I really don’t see how she survived
it,” he said at the time. “She’s
just utterly exhausted.”
Sissy endured two more Elm Creek floods — once
standing frightened in knee-deep water — and
26 years of lonely life as the only elephant
in town.
She saw other elephants for the first time since
childhood in the 1980s, when the Fort Worth Zoo
tried to include her in a breeding program. But
that didn’t work, and she was back home
alone in 1997 when her life took a tragic turn.
A keeper was crushed to death against the doorway
to Sissy’s tiny enclosure. Some folks think
the elephant was startled by a trimmer or mower
revving up close by.
Labeled a killer and a “problem elephant,” Sissy
went to a program at the Houston zoo but was
returned to a traditional setting at the El Paso
zoo.
That’s where she was struck and clubbed
for an hour. The blows were captured on videotape
and shown on national TV.
In 2000, during the investigation, El Paso officials
agreed to send her to a “special-needs
elephants” home: the Elephant Sanctuary,
about 85 miles southwest of Nashville.
Carol Buckley, the sanctuary’s founding
director, said by phone Wednesday that Sissy
is safe, high and dry.
“She’s amazing,” Buckley said. “She
is one of the most gentle individuals I have
ever been around. Just think what she’s
been through.”
Sissy grew up playing with sticks and old tires
and made some of the tires her favorites.
Now, she has new favorite tires.
The sanctuary paired Sissy with an elephant
diagnosed with a stress disorder. The two hit
it off, and for the first time in nearly 40 years,
Sissy has a close friend.
Sissy will turn 40 on Dec. 1, 2008. She’ll
probably live to be about 60.
“She’s still a kid,” Buckley
said.
And she’s still a symbol of recovery.
Online: www.elephants.com
Video of Sissy, www.tappedintoelephants.com/rpm/essissyhero.ram |
