One of the advantages of living high among the hills south of Evergreen is the quiet. A creature of habit, Jim Samuelson rose early on Apr. 4, and went downstairs to relax and wake up easy in the pre-dawn hush. Or he tried to, anyway.
“The dog started barking and he wouldn’t leave me alone,” Jim says. “He started barking at the window, then he’d run back and bark at me, and back and forth and back and forth, just staring at me like he was trying to tell me something and barking like crazy.”
It was about 7:15 a.m., and Jim wasn’t interested in chasing down phantoms. He and his wife, Connie, occupy two wooded acres far up a maze of switchback roads that see more natural traffic than the human kind, and their dog, Sammy, a smallish brown and black fellow of no identifiable age or lineage, can usually find something in the neighborhood worth yapping at. On that cool Wednesday morning, however, something in Sammy’s voice, his eyes, his urgency, moved Jim to action.
“He was really agitated,” Jim says. “He always knows when something’s wrong.”
If Sammy is especially protective of his comfortable household and quick to note anything amiss within that happy sphere, it’s probably because he used to be on the outside looking in. The Samuelsons met Sammy in 2002 under what qualify as extraordinary circumstances.
“We were living in San Jose, Calif., and at about 11 o’clock, one night, we heard an explosion outside,” Jim recalls. “We went outside to see what it was, but all we saw was this little dog in the street who was obviously terrified. We calmed him down and went back inside, and then there was another explosion. It turns out one of the neighbors was throwing fire bombs at his wife’s car, or something. Anyway, we took the little dog inside with us.”
After a week of steady trying, the Samuelsons located the pup’s nominal owners, a free-spirited and not particularly dog-ready young couple who willingly turned their sometimes-pet over to Jim and Connie. Ever since then, Sammy’s been repaying the Samuelson’s kindness with the only gifts available to his kind – unshakable love, steadfast loyalty and, above all, eternal vigilance.
“If we lock the cat out at night, he’ll bark at the door until we take care of the problem,” Jim says. “On that morning, when he started running up and down the stairs I knew that something must be going on.”
Half expecting to surprise a sleepy fox or a raccoon on his way to some mischief, Jim stepped out the front door and looked around. Houses are far between on Falcon Ridge Drive, and at first he saw only trees and shadows and the eastern horizon just beginning to smolder. Then, making his way farther toward the road, he discovered that something was most definitely going on.
“I looked down the road and saw a big boulder lying in the street, and then I saw an upside-down SUV on the edge of the road with its lights on. It was clear that Sammy had heard the crash.”
Jim hurried to the stricken vehicle, apprehensive but resolute. The vehicle’s turn signal blinked a steady, silent orange halo onto the road’s rough surface and the radio sent quiet voices into the chill air. And that was all.
“There was nobody in the car. I could see that it had rolled down the hill from the switchback above my house, about 60 feet. From where it landed I could see the switchback below, and there was a man lying in the road 60 feet farther down.”
After failing to raise anyone at a nearby house, Jim raced home to call 911 and grab an armload of blankets. At 7:30, just minutes before sunup, he knelt beside the fallen man. It was his neighbor, 37-year-old Robert Ryan.
“I know him, but his face was covered with blood and I never recognized him,” Jim says. “I waited with him until the paramedics and police came, and then I waited until they all left. There aren’t a lot of people on our road, and it was at least 30 or 40 minutes before another car came by. If Sammy hadn’t heard him, he could have been laying there a long time.”
But Sammy did hear him, and Ryan may well be alive today because of it.
Jim quickly surmised what authorities later concluded – that Ryan’s vehicle plunged down from the first switchback and came to rest at the edge of the road in front of the Samuelson’s house. Probably injured and certainly dazed, Ryan crawled out of his battered car through the passenger-side window, unaware in the darkness that another sheer cliff yawned below. His second fall was, in all likelihood, the most terrible.
Robert’s wife, Kristal, is thankful for many things. She’s thankful that her husband is a fanatic about wearing a seat belt, a quality she believes helped him survive the ordeal. And she’s thankful that, despite suffering a major skull fracture and serious brain injuries, Robert is doing remarkably well.
“He’s awake, eating, talking, walking and taking showers by himself,” Kristal says. “It’s tricky with brain injuries, but he’s back to calling me a hundred times a day like he used to, so that’s a good sign.”
And she’s thankful for a caring neighbor who stepped up to help Robert and kept right on helping.
“Jim drove me down to the hospital and stayed with me that whole day. I can’t thank him enough.”
And she’s really, really thankful for one on-the-ball dog named Sammy, a 20-pound mutt with sharp ears and the heart of a lion.
“How do you thank somebody who saved your husband’s life?” Kristal asks. “I think I’m going to buy him a day at a doggie-spa. And I hope he keeps barking like crazy and being the fantastic dog he is.”
