Hope is a Thing With Feathers That is Eaten by a Cat
I like to say I’m one of perhaps five confirmed cat people in the outdoor industry. Break out some dog treats and a west-coast style IPA at your local trailhead, and you’ll be swamped by ten off-leash cattle dogs named Traverse and ten evergreen-tree-forearm-sleeve-tattooed guys named Travis, and all twenty will be very, like, totally stoked to meet you.
I am rarely stoked to meet anyone. In fact, even the word stoked annoys me. So it’s probably inevitable that I would end up as a cat person, even though it took me till my mid-thirties to realize it.
Why am I a cat person in a dog-person industry?
The cat that did it was a 16-pound, three-foot long, seven-year-old ginger tabby that I got from a local shelter. He was battle-scarred and notch-eared, with worn, yellowing teeth, glaucoma, herpes, and the one-two death-sentence punch of feline HIV and feline leukemia.
I’d gone to the shelter to get a kitten. My wife had just suffered a miscarriage, and we were unashamedly looking for something adorable we could shower with transferred love. My wife had to work, but I was a full-time freelance writer. That means I had tons of work but was cheerfully ignoring it, so I was happy to go to the shelter alone.
I spent some time with younger cats, most of who studiously ignored me, as cats will. But then I noticed what appeared to be a giant orange blanket gently snoozing by himself in a cage. I asked about him and was told he was the shelter’s longest-running resident. Nobody wanted him cause he was old and sick and beat up and probably didn’t have more than a few years left in him. I took him out of his cage, and he flopped into my lap and promptly fell asleep. I had found a kindred spirit.
My instructions were clear: bring home a kitten that was playful, young, short-haired, energetic, and small enough to fit into our tiny 650-square-foot rental house. But I am a world-class bleeding heart. I still cry like a baby up when Sam slings Frodo over his shoulders and starts trudging up Mount Doom. I’m tearing up now just writing about it.
So when my wife got home from work, she found me sitting on the floor with a fluffy, grumpy, half-blind, terminally-ill mountain lion in my lap and a chagrined expression on my face. We named him Bothy. A Bothy is a stone hut in the Scottish highlands where any wayward traveler can take shelter from a storm—so I guess I owe Travis and Traverse a bit of an apology for my snark earlier, huh?
I initially had some thoughts about turning Bothy into an adventure cat. You know, the type of feline who will ride in the front basket of a bike, perch on top of a pack, or loaf comfortably on the front of a paddleboard. And in fact, Bothy took to a leash and harness pretty well. He loved sitting outside on his leash and luring enthusiastic neighborhood dogs to their doom. They’d come bounding up to say hi, and Bothy would sit calmly until they were within range and then stoically slap the ever-loving shit out of them. Sixteen pounds of cat goes a long way, and Bothy was an old-school street brawler who took a lot of pleasure in delivering low-grade concussions to dogs that had three times his weight but only one-quarter of his contempt.
But Bothy was supremely uninterested in adventuring. Aside from punching well-meaning dogs, he had three great loves—basking in front of our wood stove, stealing human food, and sleeping in laps (but only if said lap had a blanket in it, Bothy apparently could not bear the touch of filthy human skin upon his pristine orange fur).
Bothy was a thief of the highest order. He stole chicken breasts from dinner plates while we sat at the table. He pulled shrimp out of the frying pan as it was cooking. He chewed through a box of Cheeze-Its and gorged himself until he was sick for a week. He once took precisely one bite out of twenty different flour tortillas.
He purred so loudly that it would keep us up at night. The dishes rattled in the cupboard when he jumped down from his perch. If he felt like napping, he’d meow at one of us until we sat down and pulled a blanket onto our laps. He hated when I took a shower—would bite the back of my calf as I stepped under the water to try to keep me out of it. He tripped me this way on more than one occasion, sending me sprawling to the bathroom floor. But he loved when we took baths and would perch contentedly on the side of the tub and let his long fluffy tail soak in the water. I know, I know—one should not let one’s cat soak his tail in the same water one is also soaking in. But you try telling a 16-pound cat what to do, okay?
Choose your battles.
I made a bed for him on my desk next to my computer, and he hung out there most days while I went about the ridiculous and doomed occupation of writing for a living.
Bothy was so full of life that we sorta forgot he was sick. Yes, he was on a lot of meds—pills and eyedrops and so forth. But that was just part of the routine, and Bothy was so big and chonky and orange and evil and snuggly that it just didn’t register with us from day to day. And my wife and I had spent the year since our miscarriage fundraising for and eventually undergoing fertility treatments. We didn’t want to think about death. We convinced ourselves Bothy might make it four or five more years.
Then he took a downward turn, and he took it fast. Within a month, he went from vivacious, glossy, and muscular to lethargic, scrawny, and matted. His eyes became caked with black goop. His breath smelled bad. In the time it took me to schedule a vet appointment, he lost over half his body weight. By the time the appointment came around, he’d stopped sleeping in our bed and had taken up residence in our closet. The bloodwork returned, and the vet was astonished that he was still alive. He was suffering, and the choice was both easy and heart-rending.
I was, once again, alone—my wife was out of town for unavoidable family reasons. I held Bothy in my lap as he died, with the sharp scents of floor wax and antiseptic rising from the floor around us. It was a dark parody of how he’d fallen asleep in my lap the first time I held him at the shelter.
When you write narrative non-fiction, you tend to look for those kinds of bookends. Writing becomes a way to bring order to a fundamentally unordered universe. At least that’s what I believe about why I write. It certainly isn’t for the money, and it’s barely for the fun. I’m no longer religious, but habit is habit, so my mind sees random events through the context of three-act structures. It finds narrative providence where only chaos exists. It helps, sometimes. Honestly, I think I was a bit happier when I could believe that everything had a point.
So even though I know better, that’s how I choose to think of our time with Bothy. He came into our lives at our darkest moment of loss, and he left a few weeks after we underwent our successful fertility procedure. It’s neat and ordered and feels better than acknowledging the absolutely bonkers–random nature of life and death. And so, yeah. Maybe we found each other at exactly the right moment. Maybe we saved each other. I have room in my philosophical dreamings for at least that much, Horatio.
If Bothy could have spoken, he’d likely tell me what nonsense all that is. But he’d have tolerated it, not necessarily out of dog-like unconditional love, but out of the cat-like realization that sometimes idiot humans have to believe slightly in the stupid shit just a little bit every day, and there’s nothing to do but accept it.
And THAT’S why I’m a cat person.