Tragedy inspires mom’s vision for special needs ranch

By Pam Kragen

Special to the Ramona Sentinel

For Nicola Bridges, the wake-up call that changed her life came on March 27, 2013. That’s when the Ramona resident’s phone rang in the middle of the night with news that her son, Jack, was hovering near death in a Maryland hospital.

Jack Godfrey suffered a severe brain injury when he was assaulted by a fellow student outside a bar near their University of Maryland campus. Although given just a 10 percent chance of recovery, he survived and — after many months of intensive therapy and several subsequent seizures — he returned to school. The experience of nearly losing her eldest son convinced the 48-year-old Bridges that the dream she’d harbored for nearly 20 years could wait no longer.

This past June, she and her husband, Tony Oxley, started Capability Ranch, a 10-acre learning and activity center in Ramona for children and young adults with special needs.

Jack was the second of Bridges’ two children to struggle with serious brain issues. Her 19-year-old son Owen Godfrey was born with autism, and ever since the family moved to North County in 2010, they had difficulty finding daytime activities for Owen.

The couple exhausted their savings to buy the 1950s-era ranch once occupied by the Wildlife Research Institute in the Ramona Grasslands preserve. Oxley — who is 53 and Owen’s full-time caregiver — is renovating the property himself. The couple’s goal is to launch the first calendar of activities and events in January.

In late July, 21-year-old Jack flew out to visit the ranch for the first time. During his three-day stay, Bridges said she told her son she planned to quit her full-time job so she could focus on the ranch because “time is fleeting.” It would be the last time she saw Jack alive. On Nov. 6, he died in his Maryland home. Autopsy results are pending, but doctors suspect a fatal brain bleed or seizure related to last year’s attack.

“Someone once told me right after Jack’s assault that in every bad and tragic situation, you have to look for a gift,” Bridges said. “The gift that came out of what happened last year was that it spurred us to do what we wanted to do anyway, which has turned out to be the best thing that happened in our life. And now with Jack gone and the realization about how quickly things can change, we know we made the right decision.”

On Friday, the family hosted its first fundraiser and open house for Capability Ranch at 18030 Highland Valley Road. The event also served as a celebration of Jack’s life. Visitors were invited to bring daffodil bulbs, a living plant or a packet of seeds, a potluck dish to share or a small donation for the ranch, which is a pending nonprofit. Details can be found on the “Capability Ranch” page on Fundrazr.

Opening Capability Ranch in Ramona has been a full circle experience for Bridges. In the early 1990s, she and her first husband, journalist John Godfrey, lived in Poway, where their two sons were born. The family moved to New York in the mid-1990s, when she went on to become a features editor for Scholastic, editor of “Working Mother” magazine and co-founder of Clubmom.com.

In 2001, in the midst of a divorce and reeling from Owen’s early diagnosis and the pressure of work and parenting in new and at that time rarely reported territory, she moved back to her native Great Britain. She found a job with the BBC in Wales and fell in love with Oxley, her high school sweetheart from Yorkshire, England. In 2005, they moved to New York, where she took increasingly demanding jobs in content production for iVillage, Rodale, RealAge and ShareCare.

As her income increased, so did her stress level, and she longed to do something more fulfilling with her life. She also found that California offered better medical and therapeutic programs for Owen than New York. So, when Jack headed to college in 2010, Bridges and Oxley moved with Owen to Rancho Peñasquitos, where she telecommuted and flew several times a month to ShareCare’s Atlanta headquarters.

After Jack was assaulted last year, Bridges said she decided to “get off the digital treadmill,” get herself mentally healthy again and rethink her priorities.

“Tony said we have to change our lives, so we sat down and said ‘what do we want the story to be for the rest of our lives and how will we create the chapters,’” she said.

Since Owen was a little boy, Bridges said she dreamed of running a ranch for the learning disabled. Dean Weese, who has taught special education for 19 years in the Poway Unified School District and is now Owen’s transition teacher at Abraxas High, said several programs like Capability Ranch have sprung up locally in recent years, but not all of them offer a quality product.

“What’s great about Capability Ranch is Nic,” he said of Bridges. “Being a mother of a son with autism, she can pull from her experience to create quality, structured activities that can fill time after school, on weekends and when these kids graduate from high school.”

In January of this year, Bridges and Oxley started searching for properties around rural North County and in April they found the ranch in Ramona.

The former Wildlife Research Institute property has acres of pastures, animal stalls and several buildings. One is a red barnlike structure that Oxley is revamping as the Jack Shack activity room. To generate income for renovations, they’ve opened a guest cottage on the property. They’ve recently rescued two horses to serve as therapeutic animals and also plan to bring in some calves and a donkey.

In January 2015, they plan to offer hikes, art classes and craft-making activities two to three days a week. Within a year or two, they hope to have classes Mondays through Fridays year-round. Bridges said she’s recruiting San Diego-area artists to teach classes in clay art, cooking, soap-making and other crafts, and she’ll plan day trips to area bowling alleys, movie theaters and more.

At the top of the Jack Shack is a bell tower and Bridges intends to ring the bell at special events in her son’s honor. Jack surprised his doctors with his capability to recover — albeit briefly — and Bridges said she hopes Capability Ranch will also be able to unlock the hidden potential in the youths it serves. The ranch’s name was inspired, in part, by Lancelot Brown, the famous 18th century British landscape architect.

“In the 1700s, he was known as Capability Brown for his talent of turning rough ground into creative and beautiful stately homes gardens in England,” she said. “It resonated in many ways for us, because our goal is to help developmentally delayed young adults shine.”