First Love Ranch Aims to Save Lives--and Itself : Washington state: Facility doesn’t have money to pay its $28,000 mortgage. Founded by a former heroin addict in 1988 as a ‘life-restoration’ center, it operates solely on donations.

Jimmy Lynn Swindell had no place to go.

He was addicted to heroin and had spent half his life in prison for committing crimes to support his habit.

He was a native of Amarillo, Tex., but there he was in 1989 in Washington’s Yakima County Jail, waiting to go back to the penitentiary for violating parole, when another inmate told him about First Love Ranch.

The ranch takes in the so-called dregs of society and helps them turn their lives around. It operates solely on donations and doesn’t charge those who come for help.

“I came here with no intention of staying,” Swindell said. “I was going to be here one night and as soon as it was dark, I was going to be gone.”

Now, 5 1/2 years later, at age 51, Swindell is the ranch foreman. He oversees all its male residents.

“If not for the ranch,” he said, “I’d either be dead or you’d be paying thousands and thousands of dollars to keep me alive.”

The ranch is the result of the dream and hard work of another former heroin addict, Doug Earp. Earp had started a street ministry in Yakima for troubled youths in 1981.

That grew into two safe houses, for men and women, which he operated for seven years until he realized his dream in 1988: a haven in the country for anyone in need.

Earp calls the ranch “kind of a life-restoration, Walton family type center” that helps people break their cycles of addiction and abuse.

It’s a registered nonprofit organization but receives no federal or state funds, mainly because of its Christian-based teachings, Earp said.

There’s nothing fancy about the ranch. It houses as many as 100 people at a time in men’s and women’s dormitories. Small apartments and trailers accommodate families. The furniture looks like it came from garage sales or the Salvation Army.

The residents share the cooking and eat communal meals of ranch-grown vegetables and whatever’s been donated. One former resident joked that when she first arrived she thought Christians were vegetarians--until a farmer donated a cow.

Money, says Earp, has always been tight. But he said he’d always been able to scrape together the $28,000 annual mortgage payment--until recently. The ranch faces imminent foreclosure if it can’t come up with the money.

Earp is hoping for a miracle.

Financing has been a “juggling act” from the day the ranch opened, he said, a fact he finds bitterly ironic.

“The amount of money this place saves taxpayers is hundreds of thousands of dollars per year,” he said. “If it weren’t for the ranch, Jimmy Lynn would be in the penitentiary at a cost of $50,000 a year. And I’ve got three like that right now.”

The ranch gets food donations from area churches and farmers. The residents also raise between 300 and 600 calves as well as vegetables on its 168 acres.

“Cash is hard, though,” Earp said. “The light bill alone for this place is $2,000 a month.”

Most of the ranch’s 50 current residents are from Washington state, though many come to First Love from around the country.

Kathy Nutley, 38, of Burgaw, N.C., was one. She had been a caseworker for the North Carolina Department of Social Services, quit her job and moved here after a close relative died. She said she couldn’t cope with the grief.

“As long as I live, there will never be a peaceful time in my life that I don’t owe to them,” Nutley said of the ranch.

“Although I didn’t have an alcohol or drug problem, I had a ‘busy-ness’ problem--I was too busy worrying about too many things. . . . To stop and put someone else’s needs ahead of mine, it makes everything else mean so much more. It gives value to so much more.”

Since leaving the ranch Nutley has married, had a son and gone back to work for the same North Carolina agency as an investigator.

But she keeps in touch with the folks at the ranch.

“They have done so many miracles there,” Nutley said. “You hear people say all it takes is love, all it takes is support, all it takes is someone to care.

“It takes those things, but it also takes determination and bravery like you’ve never seen and it takes it every day, every minute, every hour.”

Doug Earp, the founder, requires residents to attend Bible study each afternoon and a morning devotion service. Other than that, they do their chores and concentrate on working through their problems.

Earp, of course, has personal knowledge of what an addict goes through.

“Nobody has a wonderful life,” he said. “There’s an emptiness that comes at some point. For me, it came at 36 when I realized I was tired of going to jail (for selling drugs to support his habit), tired of going no place.”

Ranch manager Lonnie Bentz, 46, was one of the first residents. He fed his $500-a-day heroin habit by stealing and selling drugs. He broke his physical addiction by himself, but knew he needed help if he was going to stay clean.

“I needed a place that would protect me from myself,” Bentz said. “I walked in the door and said, ‘I need to change my life,’ and this place was open to me.”

Now, in addition to managing the ranch, he runs the Pasco Farmer’s Market and is president of the Washington State Farmers Market Assn.

He says he realizes how lucky he is.

“Not many drug addicts live past 45,” Bentz said. “They’re in prison, a mental institution or dead from an overdose.”