‘I just want my bed’
Abandoned to face Tantallon fire, senior and her sheltie make new friends in Beaver Bank
Kate Kirkpatrick stood out by the road as she’d been told.
She stood in her housecoat with her sheltie named Joey watching the smoke swirl amongst the Timber Trails Mini Home Park on Sunday evening.
Neighbours frantically packing children and lives in vehicles to flee the growing wildfire had told her someone would stop and pick her up.
“I felt like I was in Ontario again,” Kirkpatrick she said of finding herself 69 years old and seemingly forgotten.
Joey didn’t seem to mind, so long as they were together.
Eventually she saw four RCMP cruisers parked up the highway, the officers apparently discussing something.
“I certainly don’t walk very well so I called out to them not to leave and started toward them,” said Kirkpatrick.
So it was that on Monday morning, Kirkpatrick was sharing a couch with 91-yearold Ken Handy and his caregiver Deanna Hemeon at the Beaver Bank Kinsac Community Centre.
“Handy like the handyman,” declared Handy, wearing plaid pajama pants and a leather motorcycle jacket.
When his home on Lucasville Road was ordered evacuated around 4 p.m. on Sunday, his caregiver had to leave to go get her own family. So Hemeon, who wasn’t working at the time, was called to come for him.
“Nobody came to his house, nobody checked on him,” said Hemeon.
“I don’t think Ken realized the danger, or wanted to go.”
Some 14,000 people were ordered to flee in front of the fast-moving wildfire on Sunday afternoon that was driven through Upper Tantallon by southwest winds gusting to 50 kilometres an hour through the parched forest and homes.
Halifax’s first-ever fivealarm fire came hot and fast with first responders overwhelmed and overtasked.
Hemeon took Handy to spend the night at her apartment in Halifax and then they both arrived at the Beaver Bank comfort centre on Sunday morning after seeing it listed on television as somewhere to go.
Staff brought them coffee, muffins and fresh fruit.
Joey made friends with a Rottweiler named Angie.
“Joey’s been great,” said Kirkpatrick of her fourth sheltie in a peripatetic life that brought her to Timber Trails via Heart’s Desire, N.L., and Ontario.
“Joey loves people and loves other dogs.”
Handy alternately wondered aloud whether there’d be looters and bemoaned losing his driver’s license to age’s decline a year earlier.
None of them know when they’ll be allowed to return home.
While Hemeon will continue to host Handy, Kirkpatrick expects she’ll be spending a few more nights on the Kinsac Centre couch, eating muffins.
Joey wouldn’t mind that. But she’s finding it long already.
“I was always pretty good at rolling with the punches,” said Kirkpatrick.
“But the older you get the more you want to be home. I just want my bed.”