Pike's Peak

I ask the age-old question: 'what the fuck?'

Remember Spot the Difference? As I was cruising a circuit around the yard the other day I saw something very much out of place: an orange and white cat stuck in the razor wire on top of the fence.

I made a hard left and rolled up on the fellow holding court nearby; G– has appointed himself the expert on all things related to our yard cats and has assumed control over as much of their existence as he can without running them off. He passes himself off as the most knowledgeable person when it comes to our feline cohabitants but truth be told he strikes me as a dog person just playing a role.

Yet he is presiding over the scene. I ask the age-old question: 'what the fuck?'

"Oh, A– chased her up there this morning," he says with a chuckle and an Aw, Shucks shake of his head.

The Expert does not seem at all perturbed that my precious pookie Pike is perched atop a fifteen foot chain link fence and leaning against three lateral strands of barbed wire in order to distance herself from the much sharper accordion style concertina wire looping around her. Of course not – all he cares about is himself.

The cat I love most is encased in a razor sharp slinky. But he's still yammering on: "He chased D– [another of our yard cats] up the fence too. D– cut his paw but I got him down. I talked to [some jerk from the dog program whose name I don't even remember so I don't have an initial for him]. Jerk X says he's going to start keeping A– on a long leash since this is the eighth time he's chased one of our cats up the fence.”

All of this is useless information. I have no idea why he's telling me any of it. Pike is stuck on the fence. She needs to get down, immediately.

"Do you have a handball?" What street folks might call a racket ball; it's hollow, blue, rubber, a bit smaller than a tennis ball. Pike is locked up. If I spook her, the cat's instincts will kick in. She's looking down at a horizontal plane of chain link covering a walkway on the other side of the fence about eight feet beneath her. If she just jumps back she'll be fine, but if she tries to wriggle through the concertina towards us she will get shredded.

"Oh no, no, no, we can't do that. I already thought of that," sayeth the Expert. He's always already thought of everything. "I'm working on talking her down so she will jump onto that flat fence [the same horizontal span]. Sunny! Come on, Sunny! Come on, good girl! Pretty girl!"

The cat calls (ha ha) grate on my nerves, as does the fact that he's using the wrong name. People here call the cats by what they look like rather than bothering to get to know anything about them, and they took mortal offense the last time I named a cat according to its nature rather than its colors so I only tell the cats their names in secret now.

Pike ignores this ignoramus – a true good girl.

The Expert appeals to the cat's common sense, tries to talk her off the ledge, tells her how pretty and sweet and smart and good she is, and blah and on. I find the entire ordeal as annoying as it is pointless: all it does is stress the cat out, as evidenced by the way she remains completely frozen throughout his motivational speech.

Pike looks at me. 'People,' we both think.

I ignore him too and walk closer to the fence. In a state penitentiary this is risky business but this isn't an exterior fence; on the other side is just a dead man zone and another fence, then some administrative buildings. Still I'm not blind to the red paint and the warning signs and the fact that not one but two gun towers loom close enough that, were they of a mind, they wouldn't even need a scope to pop my top.

But Pike's in trouble. I get closer. Closer. I kick the fence. She looks down. The Expert drones on in the background, explaining to passersby the reason the cat is stuck on the fence instead of getting her down, regaling them with amusing anecdotes about other times she was stuck on the fence because that same dumbass dog chased her up it rather than doing a damn thing to help her.

Pike shifts her feet. She's locked onto me, watching me as she slowly maneuvers free of her nest of wire. I see her wheels spinning, sizing up her leap. We have a long history. She knows I am a cat, and that cats are good. She tenses–

"Come back, come back! Don't startle her," the Expert cries, startling her. I haven't moved in all this time but as he barges in Pike retreats to her stuck position within the concertina.

"Give her room so she can decide what she wants to do," the Asshat scolds. "Sunny! Up or down, sweetheart! It's cold up there, isn't it?"

'Help me,' Pike pleads.

'I'm trying, but it's so stupid down here,' I tell her. 'Hang tough.'

By now a dozen random people have come by and asked the same questions, prompted the same oratory from the Expert, and lamented A–'s bad doggie behavior. This doesn't help Pike. Some have philosophized about the nature of cats and dogs, shaking their heads and chuckling along with the self-serving tool managing the scene. This doesn't help Pike. The Expert remarks for the third or fourth time how she's been up there for an hour and a half, how he came out early and he's been stuck out here ever since. He's such a martyr, but canonizing him doesn't help Pike.

Throughout, the Expert has maintained his 'listen to how calm I am forcing myself to be' tone, jovial and longsuffering, chuckling, shaking that big empty head, smiling with the patience of ages. Underneath it all I see he's mad and that boggles my mind. I'm mad too, but at him for being stupid. He's mad at the cat for not bending to his will. Pike closes her eyes as he just keeps going and going and going.

"Sunny-girl! Sunny-bunny! Don't go to sleep up there, silly girl! That's not a good place to go to sleep, sweetheart. Pretty girl!"

Pike isn't about to go to sleep stuck in a bunch of razor wire any more than you or I would. The Expert is so enamored of his own wit and brilliance that he can't even understand she's closing her eyes because she wants him to shut up. It's Cat 101. Also a storm is rolling in, the wind is picking up, and it's blowing in her face. How does he not see this? I want to explain it to him but since I am also a cat he wouldn't understand me any better.

A pair of yard cops come by to ask the age-old question. The Expert gets to put his now-practiced routine into service for the pleasure of his true people, the fuzz. After he hams it up the cops tell him someone from Vector Control [who deal with bugs, birds, and animals on the facility grounds] is bringing a ladder so sit tight – and stay away from the fence. They aren't jerks about it but when I suggest I don't need a ladder and I can have the cat down in about thirty seconds if they let me climb up the answer is an unequivocal 'no fucking way, bub.'

Pike's been stuck going on two hours, and nobody seems willing to help her except me.

A sergeant comes by. The Expert gets to have the exact same conversation word for word all over again, but this time he can add on the bit about Vector Control and the ladder. The sergeant sagely suggests that the cats and the dogs probably don't get along because that's just in their nature.

Pike is meowing. I have never heard her do that. She's in misery, but the Expert takes this as an opening to start calling up to her again. She stops meowing and closes her eyes.

Another cop cruises by. I bite back a scream at the third rendition of Sermon by the Fence. Once he finishes the retelling the Expert wonders if the cop might not want to adopt the cat. She's twelve months old, housebroken, she's a sweetheart...

She's still stuck on the fucking fence. This is not helping.

While the Expert is busy shooting the shit with some medical staff, stuck on repeat, I get a little closer to Pike. I'm not close enough to the fence to itch a trigger finger but if she jumped or fell I could bolt forward and probably catch her. She's looking at me. Understanding. She's close. She's got her head under the wire now. All she has to do is jump, lean, or fall forward. Even if I don't catch her it's not that far; she's jumped off a higher fence than this before. She's tensing to spring–

"Get back, she's going to jump! Get back, get back and give her space! Come on, Sunny-girl!"

I haven't moved in over five minutes, but as the Expert swoops in with arms flapping to coax her down Pike flinches back. She almost falls right into the razor wire but her cat-like reflexes (ha ha) spare her a grisly fate. She retreats back to her original position, stuck and surrounded. She closes her eyes.

~

I read in a play once a line that's stuck with me for many years: 'hell is other people.'

For me, the struggle to understand the motivations of other human beings has been the foremost challenge in my life. I still wrestle with it. In the end I can see that the Expert is not a malevolent sadist, but the way he prioritized his own needs – to be recognized as the premier 'cat guy' above and beyond anyone else, to exert authority and control over a situation which required neither in order to ameliorate his own sense of powerlessness, and so on – over the needs of the cat he spent hours talking about rather than actually helping left me exhausted and pissed off for several days afterward. It's hard for me to be dismissive and write him off as merely an oblivious douche or an arrogant ass but that was as good of an answer as I could come up with.

I made a note to ask Dante which circle of hell we'd entered, and let it go.

A week later I gleaned some more insight into the nature of the machinations I'd so guilelessly stumbled into the midst of.

Pike did make it down off that fence that day. The Expert's carefully orchestrated rescue took place before the audience he'd been glad-handing, the hero of the day for all to see and talk about. I didn't make too much of Pike's prolonged absence afterward since I assumed he'd taken her inside to help her get over the stress of the ordeal he'd put her through (despite the fact that being trapped inside has led to innumerable stress-related behaviors from the cats; they are very much like the people similarly trapped in the same spaces and often act out the same way. This is obvious, but lost upon a vast intellect such as the Expert commands.)

A week on, I put the question to the Expert. He wriggled like a worm dodging the hook, but in the end he told me she wasn't here anymore. And I asked the age-old question, and he answered even as I saw his every instinct crying out for him to dissemble: he'd arranged for Pike to be adopted out in secret without consulting anyone else who'd had a hand in caring for her or about her. Gone without a trace so far as I was concerned. I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye.

It is not a bad thing for prison cats to be adopted. That's the goal, to give them a better life. But it is not the goal for someone to use a cat to create high drama, then assume the mantle of rescuer when he unmucks the mess he's crafted to serve his own interests. The Expert sat tall on his high horse, extolling his own virtues: he resolved a conflict between the dog program and the cats, but it is a conflict he set into motion and fanned the flames of until no one could ignore it, like a firefighter who bravely retrieves someone from a burning building that he himself put the torch to, then gets his smug mug slapped in all the papers.

But that's people for you. That's one of many reasons I'm glad I'm a cat.