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Movies To The Mojave by Julia Burke

miniature goats. That was fine with me,” she said with a giggle in her voice. Her face lit up as if she were 30 again.
“Wayne had to get them out of his house since he couldn’t train them to use the litter box.”

“It didn’t stop there,” she said. Taking a sip of coffee, she continued. “People started dropping off different types of
animals and I thought, gee, kids in Vegas have nowhere to go. So I had to shake my piggy bank to build the zoo.”

Bonnie’s magnetic personality drew people to her including her husband-to-be. “I met my husband Al Levinson
because someone told him he should meet the dizzy blond running the bar in the desert.” A title
she wears proudly. “We were married for forty years before he passed away. We had
three children and in 1972 we broke ground to build Old Nevada.

I had two horses,” she said. “Then a man wanting to trade two horses for a car stopped at the
dealership run by my husband Al. Then I had four horses,” she said laughing.

Bonnie was and still is a spunky woman that is not afraid of hard work or learning
a new trade. “Our first restaurant menu was homemade biscuits with fresh honey. I harvested the
honey myself. I built the fireplace and the tables,” she boasted, “I laid the floor. I learned how to saddle a
horse and trim their feet.” Bonnie, a self-taught woman, did all those things without the aid of Google.
“You can learn anything if you want to,” she said. “Just figure it out and do it.”

In the fenced nonprofit zoo, most of the animals freely walk around greeting the visitors.
“Sometimes I have to laugh,” she said. “When an animal like a deer or burro walks up to a child,
some children climb their father’s frame.” She leaned in close to me as if she was telling me a
secret. “Many children have never been this close to a burro or deer,” she whispered.

These days Bonnie visits her animals while pushing her walker over the rough grounds. The two wolves, Tkai, a red
tundra and white timber wolf mix and Little Foot, a timber wolf, crowd the door to their cage waiting to lick her face
and receive the graham cracker treats from the bag hanging on Bonnie’s walker. The lynx cats, Simba and Nala pace
the cage waiting for Bonnie’s gentle caress. “I raised these cats in my house,” Bonnie said scratching Simba behind
his ear. “They needed something to climb on like this tree. They were climbing on my curtains.” Bonnie waves her
hand as if to say that a six pound lynx cat hanging on her curtains was amusing.
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