Anamaki Chronicles - The Forest Gump of Dominica - Dr. Rick, Dr. Rick! Come Quick!

 Anamaki Chronicles

The Forest Gump of Dominica
Dr. Rick, Dr. Rick! Come Quick!

Rick Stobaeus is the quintessential country doctor to the people of Dominica . . . for their animals.

Wayne D. King

This week I learned that my old friend Rick Stobaeus had suffered a stroke. Fortunately, his long-term prognosis looks good but anyone who knows Rick Stobaeus knows that a wheelchair is not the preferred mode of transport for the peripatetic Forrest Gump of the Carribean Nature Island of Dominica. That’s why I’m convinced he will not be tied to that chair for very long. The determination in his eyes alone conveyed that story to me when I spoke with him recently.

Rick and I have known one another since high school. (He’d be very upset with me if I didn’t mention that we were students at Northfield Mount Hermon in Gill Massachusetts. Rick never misses a chance to promote his high school alma mater).

Back in the 70s, when he was taking care of Mr. Leavitt’s lab animals and helping to revitalize the farm program at NMH it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that animals were his life’s calling. He has carried that love for animals into his professional life.

Just before the Pandemic locked down the Island nation, and much of the world, I had the pleasure of traveling to Dominica to visit old friends who had landed on the island for different reasons and from different points of reference.

Wini Dean, was a business leader and a fixture in the state capital in New Hampshire, operating the most chic boutique in the city. Wini had moved to the island with her new love reggae musician Free Joseph. Free Joseph was a native of Dominica. As fate would have it, Wini chose an apt time to make her transition - it was almost as if she knew that her boutique “Isis” would not have the same cache it once did after the events of 9-11. Rick Stobeaus moved down a few years later after some unpleasantness that stemmed from a dispute over the burial of a horse, for which he was vindicated, leaving him with a bad taste and hastening what was a transition he had already been planning.

I stayed with Wini and Free in their home in in the Lubiere section of Roseau, the capitol city of Dominica (aka Dominique) and visited Rick at his home in the “Belles” area of the “Nature Island”. Between them I got what can only be described as the “cooks tour” of the Island nation, experiencing both the incredible beauty of the island and its unique culture as well.

The Belles is in the highland rainforests of Dominica a land of pure mountain springs and rivers, hot springs, boiling lakes, and crystal cascades.

On my very first day there Rick took me to a hot spring where I witnessed him working the crowd like a seasoned politician - in a green veterinary smock of course. In fact, in the entire time I was there he never once was seen without his green doctor's smock - unless he wore no shirt at all. It wasn’t just his uniform, it was his flag.

The only competing interest for Rick - besides his four-legged and winged patients of course - is his new home. Rick knows a little something about rebuilding his life, he’s had to do it before. So when he and his wife Carol began building their little island paradise on Dominica he made sure to plan it so he could offer old friends a refuge and even have the space and place for rounding up a few new ones.

In just about ten years, since he closed his animal hospital in the states and moved to this Caribbean nation of fewer than 100,000 people, Richard Stobaeus has become a fixture on the island and the “go-to” guy for whatever ails the pets and the livestock on the island of Dominica. Part guru, part gadfly, part politician, Stobaeus crisscrosses the island daily on his rounds, treating goats, spaying and neutering cats and dogs, educating and cajoling farmers on the best way to keep their animals happy, healthy and productive and acting as the cheerleader-in-chief for the island of Dominica.

I joined Rick for a day of rounds that took us all over the island from beautiful long stretches of sandy beach to a chocolate shop where they grow their own cocoa right on site, to the markets of Roseau, the capital city, where just driving through the city with windows down brought shouts of “Dr. Rick! Dr. Rick! Dr. Rick!” Rick seems to revel in the attention.

In the car as we went from farm to farm, he alternated between telling me stories from his youth and waxing poetic about the future of his adopted homeland. When he wasn’t reminiscing, he was describing his hopes for the island. His big dream is to start a Veterinary college on the island. With already-existing infrastructure, in the form of a recently abandoned Medical school, and the support of the political establishment on the island, it appears that he is well on the way to realizing that dream.

Life may have thrown Dr. Rick a curveball but it hasn’t struck him out. I’m betting he’ll be back in the batter’s box soon enough, flying his green flag and rocking his ponytail.

Images from the Trip

Remembering Ruth Horner - Host of Green Berets and Longhorn Cattle Alike

 Rattlesnake Ridge: Remembering Ruth Horner 

Host of Green Berets and Longhorn Cattle Alike

It was spring of 1973. I stood in the middle of a beautiful field along the Pemigewasset River as veterinarian Paul Piche administered to a large longhorn steer prostrate in the middle of the field. She was suffering from dehydration, a secondary condition brought on by another that I don’t really recall in the fog of time. Dr Paul had treated her for the primary condition, but the fact that she could not stand, attributed to her weakness from dehydration, was now the primary danger to this massive old girl.

Looking over our shoulders that day was a scrappy 70+ year old woman named Ruth Horner. With an old scarf wrapped around her head and a tattered coat and staff to help her maintain her balance, Ruth fretted over her poor girl.

She was also muttering something about her “green berets”. It was so completely out of context that I wondered at the time if Ruth wasn’t a bit “dotty”, in the parlance of the day.

Doc Piche said that she was going to need another liter or two of glucose solution to replace her fluids but if we could just make sure that happened he was confident that she would be up and walking by morning. I was young and filled with the enthusiasm and vigor of youth so I volunteered to go home and get my sleeping bag and stay the night with the old girl.

And so I came to know Ruth Horner. Ruth was no slouch, though you would not know it from her dress when she was home on the farm. For many years she was secretary to one of Plymouth’s most prominent attorneys. George Ray, who was also Plymouth’s town moderator for many years. She knew where all the bodies were buried as it is sometimes said. Alas, she never told me because she was very serious about keeping the confidences of her old boss.

Her home, a modest old farmhouse nestled into the side of a hillside in Thornton had running water only because the gravity-fed spring that came from the hillside managed to deliver it - cold of course - year round unless there was a particularly cold spell, but she had to heat the water herself on her wood cookstove. Her “bathroom” was a “two-holer” privy built into the woodshed that was at the end of a narrow hallway, more inside the attached barn than the house itself. Having never had occasion to use it, I can’t personally attest to the fact that the annual Sears and Roebuck catalog served as her source of toilet paper, but that was common lore.

Ruth at her cookstove

Her cookstove was also her only source of heat.

For about five years after that fateful night, I would visit Ruth in the fall and cut up firewood to ensure she had sufficient wood to keep her warm for the winter.

But on that first night, I shared a cup of coffee with Ruth to warm up before I headed out for the night to keep my patient company. She told me that she had kept a small herd of longhorn herefords for many years. I assume now that she must have sold one or two a year to help make ends meet but she spoke of them and treated them like her beloved pets when she wandered around among them during the day.

Again that night, Ruth made mention of “my green berets” arriving the next day but I was too polite to press her for details about it, still thinking that she was rambling incoherently.

The next morning, at about 5 am, old “Mollie” stumbled to her feet. There was no TikTok moment when the old girl expressed her thanks by nuzzing me as I watched from my sleeping bag. For me, her survival was thanks enough. I watched her amble toward the barn where I am sure an extra helping of grain, along with her hay would be waiting.

Suddenly, the sky was filled with the thumping of rotor blades, and as I looked up, dozens of parachutes unfurled as Army Green Beret paratroopers descended onto the fields of Ruth Horner’s farm. Within an hour the camp had been established for several hundred Green Beret soldiers who, as it turned out, annually used Ruth’s secluded field as their White Mountain training base.

As I left that day I watched as Ruth walked across the field, her herd keeping a safe distance and a wary eye on the jamboree, her wooden staff steadying her progress.

No doubt she was headed off to share breakfast and company with her Green Berets.

Post script:

Sometimes my friends joke about my obsession with photographing washlines. It all began with this image I photographed at Ruth’s house. She was agast that I was taking a picture of her “undies” - so I promised her I would not reveal the source of the image, I hope she won’t haunt me now that I have - 50 years later.

“Washday at the Claus House”

For a signed original of this image, click here:

https://www.waynedking.com/collections/129533

For an unsigned open-edition print of this image, click here:

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/washday-at-the-claus-house-wayne-king.html

About Wayne D. King: Author, podcaster, artist, activist, social entrepreneur and recovering politician. A three-term State Senator, 1994 Democratic nominee for Governor. His art (WayneDKing.com) is exhibited nationally in galleries and he has published five books of his images, most recently, "New Hampshire - a Love Story”. His novel "Sacred Trust" a vicarious, high-voltage adventure to stop a private powerline as well as the photographic books are available at most local bookstores or on Amazon. He lives on the “Narrows” in Bath, NH at the confluence of the Connecticut and Ammonoosuc Rivers and proudly flies the American, Iroquois and Abenaki Flags. His publishing website is: Anamaki.com.