One Life at a Time

Inside Boca Grande’s historic train depot, The Loose Caboose restaurant feels cool, smells like sweet cream, and is as richly paneled as any Gilded Age waiting room--which it was until 1958, when the passenger train stopped running. Once the place started dishing up ice cream, Katharine Hepburn adored its chocolate; Laura Bush favors toasted coconut.  Now co-owner Blanche Boudreau is whipping up Indian pudding flavor for some Civil War reenactors, when the cell phone on the counter buzzes.

“We got a call, Blanche,” says chef-owner Jacques Boudreau. 

Blanche doesn’t miss a beat, waves in a helper, picks up the phone. “Where is it? … OK, I’ll be right there.”

When she gets back home, she’ll likely be covered with slime, scrapes, or bird lice from one of her messier jobs—rescuing dogs, wildlife, and, now, humans.

See, “the Loose” has become a means to far more selfless ends than ice cream.

On this wealthy island retreat where even wild sea grapes are manicured like boxwood hedges, the Boudreaus are saving Southwest Florida one life at a time—personally and with spaghetti-and-meatballs benefits.

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In Mrs. Moore’s 11<sup>th</sup>-grade English class, Blanche couldn’t see the board and Jacques hated English. So they helped each other, married right after graduation, and began life together. 

Within 6 months of the wedding, Blanche had lost both parents.   

But bad situations sometimes lead to good outcomes—especially if you keep on helping each other.

“The Loose”

Eight years later, another bad situation: Blanche had emergency surgery and astronomical bills, so Jacques took a second job doing dishes at Lighthouse Hole on Boca Grande. He advanced quickly, absorbing more and more skills, moving on to become the Loose’s line cook. In one monthly meeting with the owner, Jacques kidded, “Wanna sell me the restaurant?”  The deadpan answer: “Sure.”

Blanche quit her job and came over to help. Neither one knew a blessed thing about how to run a restaurant, except that they’d do this together. 

Jacques enthused, “Oh man, this is neat! I get to learn how to make ice cream!” After six months, it was “Geez, I have to make the ice cream again?”  So Blanche took over ice cream, while Jacques honed his culinary skills. 

Rescue me

The Boudreaus started fostering dogs after daughter Miranda’s celebrity encounter.   A dog, escaped from the Bush family’s cottage, was skittering in panic down Boca’s main street, and Miranda ran out to catch it. When she phoned the number on the tag, the Secret Service swooped in. “Do you know whose dog this is?” No matter.  It was a dog in need.

They’ve been at it ever since.  First, they raised rescues for New Horizons, a Florida nonprofit that trains service dogs for the disabled. “Raisers” like the Boudreaus learn that, despite the anguish of repeatedly giving up dogs they’ve loved, that pain leads to a better life for the dog, for a disabled person, and for another puppy with a new chance.

They foster some of the worst cases for Suncoast Humane Society in Englewood; Englewood Animal Rescue and Sanctuary (EARS); Lab Rescue of Florida; and Abby’s Little Friends Dog Rescue in Naples.  EARS recently noted a marked increase in neglect and abuse cases—largely, Jacques thinks, due to the economy. “Instead of doing the right thing and giving them up, people tie a dog up in their yard”--or worse.  Shelters can’t house that many animals, so they use approved foster homes like the Boudreaus’.

Turning bad situations into good outcomes for dogs was just the beginning.

Vultures, eagles, and hogs

“One day after work,” Jacques says, “we made a couple hamburgers and went to the beach. There was this weak bird in the surf, and we couldn’t just leave it.”  (You see where this is going, right?)

Blanche wrestled the bird into the back of their truck and was at once swarmed with bird lice.  Undaunted, they tried for hours to find someone to take it.  Finally, a Peace River Wildlife Center volunteer took them home, where she deloused everybody.

One bird, and they were into full-on wildlife rescue—an aggressive bald eagle, a feral hog that serenaded Jacques with squeals from the back seat, turkey vultures. Vultures flap a lot, hiss viciously, and smell like, well, vultures, but they’re living creatures that sometimes need help, too. 

To their list of volunteer chores they now added building enclosures for the much-needed Wildlife Center of Venice, a rehab facility serving Sarasota and West Charlotte counties since Sarasota’s Pelican Man closed.  It isn’t open to the public like Peace River Wildlife in Punta Gorda, but it is open 8 to 8 and has an emergency number.  Says Jacques, “One handler met us as late as 10 p.m. to receive an animal.”

“So others may live”

Then along came Aussie rescue Molly, emotionally stunted from being crated all the time.  “How come this dog won’t do what it’s supposed to?” her former owners complained.  Australian shepherds are so driven that they suffer without a job to do--let alone from being crated 24-7. 

Soon Blanche was in combat boots playing hide-and-seek over and over, for hours, training Molly to find her in the woods. Molly thought this was great fun, of course.  She’s a different dog now that she has a job with PRSAR.

Peace River K9 Search & Rescue Association (PRSAR) is an all-volunteer nonprofit helping local, state, and federal agencies and individuals to recover missing persons.  Handlers and dogs, from shepherds to puggles, are on call 24-7 and certified in a whole curriculum of esoteric trainings--including tracking, scent theory, lost-person behavior, cadaver/forensic recovery, and crime scene preservation.  Their website, prsar.org, describes them as “ready to respond … ‘So others may live.’”

Molly and Blanche have been to a Punta Gorda junkyard practicing car scent-searches and to Rotonda Trace for water searches. Their next training is in human remains detection at a West Carolina University site darkly nicknamed “the body farm.” Blanche hears that handlers have “issues” there but is determined, especially having been on a search and knowing how important it is to the family.

Says Blanche, “It can be dangerous work, up to your knees in swamp full of ‘gators and snakes.  But finding your person is the best outcome you can have.  I can’t imagine being a family member and not having closure.” 

If you scrutinize the Loose’s wall-size mural, you’ll see Molly trotting off to give one of her newfound friends a dripping pink cone.  Or maybe just eat it.

A briefer column based on this story was published in the Charlotte Sun, June 13, 2014.