"Very funny,” I texted back to our friend Steve. He had just sent me a ridiculous message asking if we could pick up a cat on our way to their house.
We were on the second day of a two-day drive from Seattle to visit Steve’s family in Golden, a small mountain town in southeast British Columbia. Steve has a dry sense of humor. The idea of tossing a cat into our packed-to-the-brim car with our crying one-year-old daughter and whining four-year-old son for the last one-and-a-half hours of the 11-hour trip was obviously his idea of a joke.
I had to admit, when I imagined a cat amid the mayhem of two little kids and their tired, stressed-out parents, it was kind of funny, in a comedy-sketch sort of way. Like our own version of National Lampoon's Canadian Vacation.
Then my cellphone rang. It was Steve explaining that no, actually, he wasn't joking. His neighbor's cat had hitched a ride on someone's trailer the previous night and ended up in Revelstoke – a town which was conveniently on our route to Golden. It would be a huge favor to his neighbors and save them a three-hour round-trip drive if we could stop in Revelstoke and pick up their cat.
My husband Mike looked at me with raised eyebrows as I hemmed and hawed into the phone.
“What was that about?” he asked after I set the phone down.
“I thought Steve was joking at first,” I said, “but he wants us to pick up a cat in Revelstoke.”
“Shit.” Mike muttered, so the kids wouldn’t hear.
“I know.” I said.
***
I really wanted to be the kind of person who would pick up a cat in Revelstoke. When we were younger, before we had kids, Mike and I did things. Adventurous things. Mike lived in Taiwan for 3 years. I travelled alone for several months each in Europe and Central America. On our honeymoon we stayed in $5-per-night beach huts in Malaysia with unspeakable bathrooms and invisible bugs that left us dotted in red bites. We stayed in a jungle camp in Borneo where the rainforest floor was coated in a crisscrossing, crawling layer of millipedes. We fed pancakes to wiry-snouted wild boars. We handled adversity with good humor. When a menacing monkey charged Mike on his way to the shower, we laughed about it. OK, I laughed about it, and eventually – a few years later – Mike laughed a little bit too. At that time in our lives, when things went sideways, we'd think about the funny story it was going to make later.
But after having kids in our late 30s, it became more challenging to just go with the flow. Sometimes the funny future story no longer felt like a good trade for the immediate pain in the butt. Things with kids were just... harder. We didn’t want to trade our under-planned budget travel for all-inclusive kid-friendly resorts. Bouncing across Mexico in a cheap rental car, eating tortillas, avocados and beer on empty beaches appeared doomed to turn into sitting at an all-you-can-eat buffet watching a guy in a Fred Flintstone costume dance by the pool.
Our kids weren’t very good travelers. Other parents would tell stories of their babies and toddlers instantly falling asleep when buckled into their car seats. Not ours. Our children immediately transformed into little howling Tasmanian Devils. Trips to the grocery store were torture. Long car rides were hell. I made myself nauseous and half-dislocated my shoulder as I twisted my body backward to soothe my screaming children. I held their hands, handed them toys and sang to them. Nothing stopped the crying for more than a few minutes.
But we were getting better at it. As the kids got older, they cried less. We fed them a constant stream of movies, kid-music and snacks, which mostly calmed the tiny back-seat beasts. They still whined, demanded urgent pee-stop in the middle of nowhere, and forced us to make inconvenient, messy, passenger-seat diaper changes. But they also slept and sang songs and had toddler conversations. Traveling was getting easier, but 11 hours was definitely pushing our limit.
If Steve had called ten minutes later, we would have been past Revelstoke and we could have honestly told him – alas - we had missed our opportunity to pick up the cat. But as it turned out, we were just coming into the town and had to decide on the spot: do we tell our laid-back friend Steve that we uptight Seattleites aren't going to help out his neighbor? Or do we stop and pick up the damned cat?
I looked at Mike. “It’s probably really uncool to make Steve’s friends drive three hours to get their cat when we are driving right through Revelstoke.” I said.
He looked at me, resigned. “Yep.”
***
Fifteen minutes later, we were continuing down the winding mountain road, past mountain sheep and elk crossing signs, with a smallish, fuzzy, orange, golden-eyed cat named Cheddar hopping around the car. The cat leaped from seatback to lap to seatback, claws partially exposed, grasping for security. Cheddar was a bit shaken up after his recent adventure: his unexpected hour-and-a-half ride the previous night, his overnight in a 20-degree trailer, his discovery today by an unfamiliar family in Revelstoke, and his brief stay in a hastily assembled cardboard box in the back of our car. Now, having escaped the box, he was trapped in a moving vehicle filled with noisy strangers of various sizes.
Our one-year-old daughter loved cats, but rarely saw real live felines - mainly because we were not "cat people" and we didn’t have many friends with cats. Her word for cat was "mao-mao," and we were to hear it in various pitches and decibel-levels over the next hour and a half. She emitted joyful shrieks of glee when the cat poised itself on the seatback in view of her car seat. Her hands outstretched towards the cat, she squealed, "Mao-Mao!!" in anticipation of the cat jumping onto her lap. Then, when the cat jumped past her outstretched arms and landed above her head, just out of reach (Cheddar was apparently no dummy), she screamed at the top of her lungs, tears streaming down her face, "MAOOO-MAOOOO!!!!" During Cheddar's brief lapses in reason when he did settle into Lyra's lap, she giggled and squealed excitedly, until her tail pulling caused the cat to seek safety elsewhere, and her distraught screaming began anew.
As it turned out, it was a little like a comedy sketch. I laughed at the range of emotion caused by the cat. My daughter even said her first two-word combination: when the cat curled up in her brother's lap for a snuggle, Lyra was SOOO infuriated that her brain rapidly developed new synapses and in her suddenly advanced state, she screeched, "MYYYYYYYYYYY MAO-MAOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!" I appreciated this developmental leap, while at the same time cringing at the rising volume level in the car.
It continued more or less like this for the hour-and-a-half drive to Golden. I tried to simultaneously soothe my screaming daughter, while protecting my husband from Cheddar. At one point, Cheddar got past my defenses and jumped onto the steering wheel. The cat barely got a chance to exhibit his driving skills before he was evicted from his perch by my husband’s arm and sent scrabbling for a grip along the dashboard, ultimately falling back into my lap.
We eventually arrived at Steve's house, safe and sound and slightly rattled. The cat jumped out and was greeted with shouts of "Cheddar!!" by Steve’s daughter and another neighborhood girl. The girls grabbed the frazzled cat and lugged him back to his rightful home. We human travelers were met with warm greetings and cold drinks from our friends.
After we had a chance to wind down from our drive and ease into our vacation, I was able to reflect a bit. We made this trip happen with two small children. Maybe this parenting thing was getting a little bit easier. Maybe our adventurous lives weren’t over, even with kids in tow. We proved to ourselves that we are the kind of people who would pick up a cat in Revelstoke. And it actually does make a pretty funny story afterward.
