An Elephant You Never Forget
Akili the Elephant…
“I’ve been accused of being a dreamer. People will say, ‘Hey Ryan, you live in the clouds. Put your boots on the ground.’ And after you hear that a bunch of times, you’re like, what’s wrong with me? Why do I think all things are possible? And as I look back, I realize a lot of it goes back to my grandmother and her elephant,” explains Ryan Ponsford, the grandson of Dotty Olson, who raised an elephant named Akili for 20 years in Etna, California.
Akili was an African elephant, rescued from poachers and brought to the United States. To Dotty, she was a 50- year dream come true. “When my grandmother was 9, my great-grandmother bought her this little set of porcelain elephants as a gift, and my grandmother fell in love with them. She told her mom, ‘One day I’m going to get a real- life elephant.’ In fact, she said that to everybody, and they made fun of her. They called her Dotty the Dreamer or the elephant lady. Well, she ends up getting married and moving to Etna where she owned and operated Dotty’s Jolly Cone, now Dotty’s Corner Kitchen. And then one year on my grandparents’ anniversary, my grandparents went to Winston, Ore., to the wildlife safari. My grandmother wanted to meet the elephant trainer, and when she got there, there was another guy there too named Bill York. He was a real-life Indiana Jones with the hat and the cargo pants and the whole bit. And he had just returned from this rescue mission in Kenya where he brought back nine baby elephants because their whole herd had been poached. He was trying to find them homes, so he was visiting all the wild animal parks around the country. Well, my grandmother heard this, and she somehow convinced Bill York that she was supposed to have one of those elephants. So, in 1979, she ended up bringing home her own baby elephant.”
Dotty named her elephant Akili, a Swahili name that means “smart and intelligent,” and very quickly, Akili became a star attraction in the small ranching community, where she was a regular fixture in her enclosure next door to the Jolly Cone. Kids would come for ice cream and elephant rides, and she was always part of the local parades. To this day, locals still remember her fondly. “She played harmonica, she could shoot a basketball, she could do all kinds of different things,” Ponsford recalls. She was also something of a painter. “We would put up an easel and a canvas and give her a paintbrush. It took her a little while to figure it out, but she did. She picked her own colors and lines. She painted every canvas differently. My grandmother would say, ‘Akili, sign your name.’ And she’d put a little mark on the bottom corner of her painting.”
Ponsford can’t narrow down a single favorite memory of Akili because just her existence made his entire childhood magical. “We would spend all our summers up in Etna helping with Akili. One year, my grandma traveled with the circus for a summer. So, my mom, who was a musician, wrote a song about it and all of us cousins went to where they were performing, and we sang that song to open her act. Even sitting on Akili’s back while she’s cruising around grazing. It was just a different connection as a kid growing up that’s hard to fathom. You can hardly describe it to people. But it really helps make you who you are. And now our whole family has this kind of unusual mindset that all things are possible, and we embrace the quirky and whimsical. My mom used to say, ‘as long as everybody thinks you’re a little bit crazy, you can get away with anything you want.’”
Akili and Dotty have both since passed away, but Dotty’s Corner Kitchen and the Community Pool still bear Dotty’s name, and Akili has been memorialized in a town mural. Her mark on Ponsford is also indelible. “I’ve been around lots of different types of animals, including intelligent ones, but there’s nothing like what I’ve experienced with an elephant, or Akili specifically. They say an elephant never forgets in part because if one of the matriarchs passes away from the herd, the herd will return to that spot for a full mourning ceremony year after year. It’s a real connection. And Akili’s understanding of people and emotion was incredible. She could just sense things. She’d stick her trunk out, and you’d blow in her trunk, and that was saying hello and giving her a kiss. You could rub the inside of her mouth and she’d purr, like a real deep grumble. And she’d give you a hug where she’d put you in between her front legs and hold you there, which was also sort of terrifying,” Ponsford says with a laugh. He also grins when he talks about the level of commitment owning an elephant requires. “You can’t just go away for a weekend. Try getting a babysitter.”•
