ADELE FERGUSON: One of the few good 2011 tales

NOT A WHOLE lot of good things happened to qualify for my usual list of favorite newspaper stories of the year but here’s No. I by Phil Ferolito which ran in the Yakima Herald-Republic in September. It’ll warm your heart.

Noya Deats’ routine walk along the Roza Canal in Moxee turned disastrous when her two dogs, Fawn and Nia, decided to take a swim.

Despite signs warning folks to stay out of the canal, she said, she’s let her dogs off their leashes before without any problems.

But this time, once in the water, neither dog could get out because of the swift current. Unsure what to do, Deats ran alongside the canal to keep up with them while she called her husband, Matt, and the police.

She had run about two miles, running and talking on the phone at the same time, when her husband arrived, obviously from not too far away.

He climbed down a canal ladder, his body half submerged in the water, and tried to grab one of the dogs, barely touching her collar as she passed by.

Meanwhile, a Yakima County Sheriff’s deputy also had arrived and tried to lasso the dogs with a rope. At this point, Fawn, a Labrador mix, was able to keep her head above water but Nia, an Australian shepherd, was struggling.

THE HUSBAND was trying to figure out a way to jump in and grab them but be didn’t know how to handle it.

Then, about three miles from where the dogs had entered the canal, God took a hand. Reporter Phil Ferolito didn’t say that. I am saying it.

Jesus Villanueva, 54, a farm laborer who speaks only Spanish, was putting agricultural chemicals into a bin alongside the canal when he heard a noise and saw the deputy. He thought he heard someone say two cars were in the canal which didn’t make any sense to him, but he took a closer look and saw a woman running frantically along the canal with two dogs in the water.

After watching the deputy try to rope the dogs, he stepped up and said, “Let me see.” Seconds later, be lassoed each dog in rapid succession, pulling them to safety.

“I was amazed,” said the dogs’ owner. “He just kind of came out of nowhere. It was amazing how fast he lassoed them.”

VILLANUEVA was equally amazed. He said he learned to lasso in Jalisco, Mexico, where he worked on a cattle ranch, but it had been 30 years since he had roped anything. Yet it took only one lasso try for each dog to get them.

The dogs were lucky Villanueva came along because it’s nearly impossible to make it out of the concrete lined canal at that time of year. There’s nothing to grab onto and the sides are slippery.

There was a picture of Matt and Noya Deats in the paper sitting with the dogs and their benefactor, Jesus Villanueva, so this isn’t something somebody made up.

And when I say God took a hand, I mean it. The current may have been fast but obviously slow enough that help had time to arrive in the form of, first, Matt Deats, then the deputy and, finally, the hero of the near tragedy, Jesus Villanueva.

God bless him and thank God for the dogs’ sake that he was there in Yakima by the irrigation canal when he was needed, and answered the call.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)