Editor’s Note: This story is part of a series about the interesting ways current islanders came to end up on Vashon and how being on the island has changed the course of their lives.

A watchmaker and a dental assistant walk onto an island. Seven horses, a rooster named Dave and some ukelele lessons later, they haven’t left.

Like many non-native islanders, Sharon and Richard “Dick” Danielson’s story of how they ended up on Vashon is one that starts with a chance visit, followed by happy coincidences, leading to an infatuation with the island community. For them, it all started in 1992 when the two West Seattle natives decided to take a trip to the island that had been outside their Gatewood Hill window for years.

“My husband and I were born and raised in West Seattle, but we had never been to Vashon,” Sharon said with a tone of disbelief at the fact it took them so long. “We had a view of the dock.”

At the time, Sharon was a dental assistant for a restorative dental practice and Dick was a third-generation watchmaker, but both were also rafting guides on the weekends and looking for a home that matched that outdoor spirit. Sharon explained that each river had a season and she and Dick would go from the Wenatchee to the White Salmon to the Upper Skagit, but their speciality was leading nature tours on the Olympic Peninsula. That Vashon visit 24 years ago brought an end to their wondering and searching.

“We were used to the outdoors,” Sharon said. “West Seattle was getting built up and it felt cramped. It was really odd, you hit your 40s and are like, ‘Is this all there is to life?’ We went through a mid-life crisis together and needed to be out in nature.”

The couple searched for a home for six months with Sharon hoping for space for horses.

“We didn’t realize how rural (Vashon) was, but it was just what we would choose. The second time we visited, Dick said, ‘I could live here.’ I said, ‘I could have a horse.’ He didn’t realize how horse crazy I was until then,” Sharon, who is now very active in the island equestrian community and has seven horses, said last week.

Soon they found a home and asked a friend who was a contractor and an islander what he thought. But what they got in return was more than advice as he told them he was selling his home and building a new one.

“We bought his house from him. On May 31, 1992, we moved,” Sharon recalled.

The first things they bought were animals. Sharon said the first horse came two weeks after the move, along with chickens all named after their neighbors from West Seattle.

“We had a rooster named Dave,” she said laughing.

Then came more horses. One of Sharon’s friends was heading to a horse auction to buy a pony for her daughter. She asked Sharon to come along to make sure she “wouldn’t do anything stupid.”

“They brought out the minis (miniature horses). My husband bought two,” Sharon said. “We named them Thelma and Louise and brought them home in our pickup because we didn’t have a horse trailer. We weren’t expecting to buy anything, let alone two.”

Standing on their property Friday, Dick had the horses eating out of the plam of his hand.

“Don’t ever go to an auction,” he said laughing.

That first purchase was 19 years ago. Seven horses of all sizes now roam the Danielsons’ property on Landers Road. The miniature horses have been trained to pull carts, and Thelma even acted as an unofficial therapy horse at the opening of Vashon Community Care. Sharon’s love for them is obvious.

“I’m a big proponent of miniature horses. Everyone can have them, you don’t need a lot of space. They do great on just a postage stamp of property. And, no one has been killed by a miniature horse,” she said.

While the horses are perhaps the most adorable of her passions, during a conversation last Thursday, it became clear her interests and opportunities for community involvement are varied. Sharon is not afraid to jump into any new opportunity, and her fearless attitude and infectious, joyful personality can be seen when she talks about her involvement in everything from ham radio to the ukelele.

“One of our neighbors was starting up a NERO (neighborhood emergency response organization) and said, ‘It would be great if you got your ham radio license,’” Sharon said. “I said, ‘I can do that,’ not knowing what I was getting into.”

She is fully trained as a ham radio operator and can teach others, but said she is only about communication and is not an electronics buff.

“I’m dumb as a sack of rocks when it comes to that,” she said. “I really enjoy the camraderie; the people I work with are so fun. I’m the biggest cheerleader for CERT.”

When she’s not training her horses or teaching ham radio, she’s playing a ukelele and could be seen onstage last weekend in the island play “The Reinvention of Albert Paugh.” She said she picked up a ukelele after a friend from the equestrian community told her about the island’s ukelele lessons and Vashon’s ukulele society.

“I said, ‘That sounds fun.’ I went and checked it out, and it’s only four strings, it’s not rocket science,” she said remarking on what she referred to as a funny little instrument. “You can’t play it without laughing.”

Sharon said she loves to meet all the island’s “fun, crazy” people, and Vashon provides so many opportunities to volunteer. And Dick, her husband of 48 years, gets dragged into it all with her.

“We do a lot of stuff together,” she said of their relationship. “I’ll say to him, ‘Oh, look. Here’s something. Hun, why don’t we…?’ He gets dragged into everything.”

But Dick doesn’t mind and has fully embraced his roles as mini horse-feeder, ham radio club co-president and all-around island community member.

He smiled as he fed the horses last week and said no place has ever felt like home as much as Vashon has.