40 years after Texas flood trauma, Sissy the Gainesville Elephant takes to water again

Sissy the Elephant is 54 now.

She is one of Texas’ most famous survivors.

In 1981, when she was 13, she clung to a treetop by her trunk for 36 hours, treading water, as a deadly flood inundated the Gainesville, Texas, zoo.

Now, a half-century after she originally came to Texas from Thailand as “Sis Flagg,” the star baby elephant of a petting zoo at Six Flags Over Texas, she is finally happy again, playing and cavorting in her own habitat home at a sanctuary in Tennessee.

This month marked another breakthrough for Sissy, traumatized by that flood at the Frank Buck Zoo and then caged alone, chained and regularly beaten during a vagabond tour of other zoos. After killing a keeper in Gainesville, she was labeled a mad elephant.

Finally, she found peace at the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, south of Nashville.

For the first time in a long time, she recently now allowed keepers to spray her with a fire hose.

Until this month, she would struggle to bathe herself. But she didn’t let keepers spray her with water.

No doubt that had something to do with the October 1981 flood in Gainesville, where the young elephant — then named Gerry II — grabbed onto a tree downstream and lifted herself 15 feet off the ground waiting for the floodwaters to recede from Elm Creek.

“I know Sissy is dangerous,” sanctuary founder Carol Buckley had said in an interview when the elephant arrived there in 2000. “But I also think she’s a sweetheart who needs to know that someone understands her.”

At the time, Buckley described Sissy as a trauma victim and a battered elephant “who everyone has written off.”

It has taken 22 years for Sissy to let a keeper hose her down.

The sanctuary wrote on Twitter June 9: “Sissy has previously shown signs of being fearful of water. Caregivers were thrilled that she was so willing to participate in a bath with a calm demeanor throughout.”

She shares her home with a younger African elephant rescue, Nosey, seized by animal control officers after 29 years with the traveling Liebel Family Circus. They eat breakfast together and graze the fence line, a sanctuary spokeswoman said.

“She now has the opportunity to live out the rest of her life in retirement, thriving and growing in confidence over the last 22 years,” sanctuary spokeswoman Ashley Dehnke said.

The 1981 flood was actually the third Sissy survived in Gainesville, where she grew up alone with no parents or playmates after outgrowing the Six Flags petting zoo.

For more than a day, zookeeper Vince Reynolds thought she had been washed away and drowned.

Then, “I heard her trumpet lightly,” he told the Star-Telegram. “I really don’t see how survived it. She’s utterly exhausted.”

She’s a happy senior citizen now.