What Women Do When They Give a Damn
On sisterhood, big cats, and the magic that happens when the right people find each other
I work at Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge.
Most people nod when I say that. Then I start talking. About the cats. The sanctuary. The enrichment program that keeps them stimulated, present, alive in ways that go beyond survival. About the calls we get from federal agents. The ones where we can’t tell you what happened. Can’t share the story. Can’t fundraise around it. We suit up, go in, stand in the war room, and bring the cats home.
I was telling my sister Lindsay this at a bar when I saw her face change. She was enthralled. By the time we left, she and my brother-in-law had commissioned a painting. The cats create art as part of their enrichment to stay curious, stay engaged. Salvador made it. One of seven tigers we drove 2,800 miles round trip to bring home from Nevada after a federal raid on Karl Mitchell, an associate of Tiger King’s Joe Exotic. Seven cats. No permits. When we released them into their habitat they stopped at the threshold. Alert. Every sense heightened. The fur on their backs rose. They stood there calculating, reading the air, weighing something they had no language for. And then, one by one, brave in the way that only the truly vulnerable can be brave, they let their paws touch grass for the first time in their lives.
Salvador made art. It hangs in Lindsay’s home. And it became, without anyone planning it, the thing that started everything.
That is how sisterhood works. You don’t engineer it. You follow a thread.
Lindsay is my blood sister. She has been my touchstone through every moment of my life. If you are lucky enough to be in her orbit, you know what I mean. Her loyalty is deep and real. It has been my oxygen. She doesn’t perform it. She just is it. When I called her and said I want to throw an awareness event in Connecticut about a wildlife sanctuary most people have never heard of, she didn’t ask how or when or what it would cost her. She said yes. That is who she is. That has always been who she is.
Then there is Judy and Tracy. Broadway actress and retired Navy captain. They met years ago, each recruited by another woman to a poker night. A book club with cards. And like most book clubs it devolved into wine and sharing and laughing and something real. That is where they found each other. Friends who witness each other’s lives. They have been moving through the world together ever since. They had both been to Turpentine Creek. Walked among the cats. Felt that particular quiet that settles over you when you look into the eyes of an animal that survived something it shouldn’t have had to. People arrive wanting to see exotic animals. They leave talking about survival. Judy and Tracy came back different and they never stopped talking about it. When Judy walks into a room you feel it. Not because she is performing. Because she is fully there. Tracy beside her, steady as anything.
Then Emily and Christie. Our animal curator and her childhood best friend, the girl from down the street. What Emily feels for these cats is not professional. It is devotion. The kind that shows up in how she says a cat’s name. Christie came because Emily asked. Emily asked because she trusts Christie the way you trust someone who knew you before you knew yourself.
And Victoria. Lindsay’s confidant, Who moved through that event doing things nobody asked her to do, solving problems nobody had named yet. She didn’t have to be there. She chose to be. That is its own kind of love.
I keep coming back to the fact that none of these women would have come together if it was not for me. It feels too large to claim and too true to ignore. This work costs something. But I did not set out to build a sisterhood. I set out to make people look directly at lives they would rather not think about. And somewhere along the way, the right people kept finding their way to the table.
Sandy, my colleague. My right hand. The one who holds the operational threads when I need to hold the vision. She has seen this work at its hardest and never flinched. Rose, our videographer, who shows up with her camera the way some people show up with food — quietly, completely, because she knows it matters.
And anchoring all of it, the woman who built Turpentine Creek over thirty-four years. Our founder and CEO, Tanya. She did not inherit this. She bought land with everything she had and built a sanctuary because she believed these animals deserved a life after the one that was done to them. She is quiet. Reserved. But when she begins talking about the organization she built with her own hands, something shifts. A light comes on. Most founders want to impress you. They want you to see what they have built. Taya moves through the world differently. She just loves what she built. Quietly. Humbly. Winthout needing you to be impressed. That is rarer than people know.
I have been doing this work long enough to know that the right people don’t always find you. Sometimes they do. When they do you feel it. The night before the event we were all together for the first time. Some of us had only ever been a face on a screen to each other. And something happened in that room I am still trying to find words for. It wasn’t that we got along. It was that we recognized each other. Across all of our different lives and histories and ways of moving through the world, there was this immediate, disorienting sense of, oh. You too.
We share something harder to name than a cause. A belief that the animals who cannot speak deserve someone willing to be loud. A refusal to look away.
That is what held us. That is what I think has always held us, even before we found each other.
Judy sang. If you have never heard Judy McLane sing in a room full of people who love something together, I’m sorry. Emily spoke about mama Shakira with the kind of specificity that only comes from real relationship. Our founder and CEO stood before the room and embodied thirty-four years of stubborn, unglamorous work.
Salvador’s painting watched over all of it.
People ask what nonprofit work is actually for. The transactional answer is funding, awareness, change. Those things are the point.
But the fuller answer is this: it is for rooms like the one we were in last night. Women who found each other through a poker club, a childhood street, a shared cause, blood. Standing together. Making something matter that the world has mostly ignored.
The cats at Turpentine Creek did not ask for the lives they were given before they arrived. They did not ask to be rescued. But someone showed up for them anyway. Thirty-four years ago. Kept showing up. Built a sanctuary out of a refusal to look away. And when those seven tigers stepped out onto grass for the first time, they did what the vulnerable do when someone finally shows up for them. They took the step. They trusted the ground.
Last night, a room full of sisters, in every sense of the word, did the same.
Learn more about Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge at turpentinecreek.org.
Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Earn the silence.