Sometimes when your present situation is a challenge, it can be helpful to look back and recall a time in your life when things were better or at least different. Think about Maria in “The Sound of Music” when she is trying to allay the fears of the children when they were frightened by the thunderstorm. She encouraged them to think about their favorite things in life. For her it included “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,” etc. She has a long list but the first two of hers are favorites of mine as well. Some other favorite things for me are memories of my travels and scenes of the views outside my favorite dwelling places.
Because of the nature relaxation videos I was watching while I wiled away the hours in the hospital, I started thinking about my trips back and forth across the United States. I mentally counted the number of times I’ve driven across the country. Unless I am forgetting a round trip, it has been only ten times rather than a dozen as I had thought previously. Of course, there were also dozens of airplane flights too but that topic is for another day and another blog maybe.
On each of these trips, I have had at least one cat with me and 5 times I had 4 cats with me. I nearly lost Bingo on one of those trips, but thank God Jan and I found him in the bushes when we doubled back to the hotel to look for him. He slipped out unnoticed when we stopped to check out. He never got out of his carrier, but for some reason he did during that brief stop and he slipped unnoticed out of the car.
On the first trek, there were 5 people so I had lots of human company, 1 cat (Sandy), and a small amount of time when I wasn’t driving. There were 3 drivers and 2 vehicles so we took turns. When I wasn’t getting a break, I was driving the 27-foot moving van. That cured me of any desire to drive a big rig. A 27-foot truck was plenty big enough for me.
My friend Jan was with me on 4 of those trips. I drove solo for all the rest, including when I drove from Seattle to Minneapolis and back for GCLS in 2012. My cats stayed in the hotel while I attended the conference. My high school friend, Gail Patin, was with us for one trip. She ended up changing a tire on Jan’s van. “We don’t need a man! I can change the tire.” That was the best quote from that trip. 😂 She was right. She still roars her woman power to this day. She’s definitely one of my heroes and favorite friends. 😃
The only other time I blew a tire was on my Civic, which I was towing behind my moving truck—only a 17 footer that time—when I was moving back to Florida from Seattle. There was no way I was changing that tire on the highway side in (BFE) Wyoming. I was far too close to the interstate and the speed limit (read, “mere suggestion”) was 70 mph.
I know for a fact that people use that freeway through nowhere as a speedway. I used it on one trip to see how fast my Honda Civic would go. I got up to 95 mph three times before I spotted another car in the distance and slowed down just in case it was a cop. I finally figured that 95 was a respectable number for an economy car. 😉 Yes, I have gotten numerous speeding tickets over the decades but for nothing anywhere near as fast as 95 mph.
Please don’t attempt this experiment yourself. I had been driving my Civic for five years already and on trips like these, I had already caught her sneaking up to 85 mph without me noticing it. She liked speed and she loved deserted highways. Her favorite road however was 101 along the Oregon coast. That had lots of curves and hills. She giggled a lot on that road.
The amazing thing is that my Civic just hummed the entire time I was driving that fast. No rattles, no hiccups, just a well-oiled machine smiling because her driver was letting her stretch her legs for a change. Yes, she was a she. I named her Amaterasu after the Japanese Goddess of the sun. She was a Japanese car and was pretty much all windows. That wasn’t a big deal in Seattle where drizzle is the forecast much of the time. On the few hot days of the year, the sun really heated up that little car, thus the moniker.
The first cross-country trip, with my then partner and her two children, was the one when I drove the 27-foot moving truck. That trip was what you might call “eventful,” kind of like how you use the word “interesting” in the Chinese curse, “May you have an interesting life.” The best thing that happened to me on that trip was when the Olive Garden waitress dumped an entire glass of iced tea in my lap. Expecting me to let loose a string of expletives, I looked right at her and said, “Thank you! That’s the best thing that’s happened to me all day.” I wasn’t kidding either. It was a hot summer day and the air conditioner in the truck had stopped working that day so we had to stop to get it fixed in St. Louis. So you see, it truly was the best thing that happened to me that day. They even gave us free dessert.
For better or worse, I have had an “interesting life.” Would I do anything differently? Oh yes, I would not have lifted those two heavier than usual boxes in a shipment of about 80 boxes. That led to blowing out my back, which ultimately led to this time in my life in a wheelchair. I would not have lifted any of those boxes, without testing them first, had I know there were two that weighed as much as those two did. Most of the boxes weighed thirty to forty pounds. No big deal. But two boxes out of that shipment weighed closer to sixty pounds. I heard and felt the first pop after the first of the heavy boxes. The second box had an accompanying pop as well as a strange sensation. I didn’t know what had happened, but I did know that it wasn’t good. The following weeks proved my hunch to be true as the popping sounds led to all kinds of numbness, tingling, and pain in my feet, legs, and back. After a couple of trips to traditional medical doctor’s yielded nothing, I turned to a chiropractor who took x-rays of my back and showed me what had happened. It wasn’t pretty. He also told me about an early in life neck injury that occurred when I flipped my brother’s bike and landed on my head, raising a big knot on my noggin and damaging my spine in the neck area. That was when I was nine. I lived with this injury without treatment or even notice until my chiropractor took and examined the x-rays. He ended up treating that injury as well as the low back ones since there were no further charges for treating the whole spine. It was a good idea anyway since healing one part of the spine and not the rest leaves the job incomplete and is likely to impact the newly injured area negatively.
So aside from wanting to change the part about getting injured in a way that left me vulnerable to further injury, I must say that the down time when I couldn’t return to work for several months was put to good use. I took a trip to the Oregon coast and picked up a small piece of tumbled driftwood. While riding back to our cabin at the KOA, I started turning the piece of wood over and over, stroking its smooth sides. I felt a story coming to me. It had to wait a couple of days for me to return home, but when I did, the words started pouring out. I did little else besides type and sleep for six days.
From this burst of inspiration arose my first published novel, Driftwood. I had already written one work of fiction and was working on two others when Driftwood pushed its way to the fore and dropped in my lap at a absurd pace. I had to shape it and flesh it out for another few weeks. Then I edited and re-edited for several more months until one day I finally deposited it into the hands of my first publisher. The book not only was received with welcome arms, it was used to launch a new line of LGBT classics.
Later while nursing my back, I wrote another novel and finished one I was halfway finished writing. These were Higher Loveand Artemisian Artistrespectively. These two were also published by my first publisher, as was Gaia’s Guardian. Two and a half novels while I was out commission for four months was not bad, considering. Would those books have been written and my career as an author been launched if I hadn’t injured my back and stayed out of work to come back from the injury? I honestly don’t think so. At least not when it happened.
Another thing I wouldn’t have done is use scented Epsom salts when I didn’t know what was in them. That error in judgment nearly cost me my life from the huge allergic reaction and subsequent infection I had. This event has exacerbated my difficulty with standing and walking. If not for that horrific allergic reaction I might still be walking now. I certainly wouldn’t be on embarrassingly personal terms with dozens of Fire Rescue folks and EMTs in Polk County, Florida or hospital staff at two different hospitals in the area. I would gladly erase that lapse of judgment and its consequences in a heartbeat. I can’t really come up with any lasting benefits of this time in my life that couldn’t have found another way to unfold. Check back with me in five years and see if my mind has changed about that.
Anyway, back to the trip down memory lane in regards to all the road trips across the US. In all the trips with cats, I had only four attempts to escape the confines of whatever vehicle we were driving. The first was Bingo’s successful escape at the hotel that could have turned out so differently but didn’t. I can’t even begin to express how devastated I would have been. Thankfully, we found the boy in the bushes next to the hotel office. Otherwise, I probably would have moved to Paducah, Kentucky at least until I found my adorable boy again.
In his next incarnation as Bootsy, he escaped twice from the pickup I was driving. Once in Phoenix when we stopped to visit with my dear friend, Lynn Ames. She quickly donned her her superhero cape and collected Bootsy out from under the car parked next to us at our hotel. Then Pixie, my current youngest, decided to follow Bootsy’s lead and make a break for it. We had already been in the car for three days and she needed to stretch her legs. So she jumped out and took off at a fast walk, heading in the direction of a gas station. Perhaps she felt in need of a few catnip treats for the road. Lynn trotted after her and gathered Pixie in her arms to be returned to the fold. Lynn did this knowing that she was allergic to cats. That’s my kind of hero. I honestly don’t know how I would have hobbled that far behind Pixie.
Bootsy was nearby and had an invisible leash tethering him to me his entire life. Pixie does now, but she sure didn’t then. Her tie to Little Grey might have brought her back, but I was still in my probationary period back then as far as Pixie was concerned. We were new to one another.
On the way back to Florida, six months later, Bootsy snuck out of the truck at the hotel in Fayetteville, North Carolina. It was late when we stopped for the night next to a soldier who was loading his car. I saw Bootsy and couldn’t believe it was him. He must have been ready to leap as soon as I opened the door. I asked the soldier if it was his cat and he assured me it wasn’t so I started trying to figure out how to get him from beneath the car next to me when I spied a cat toy that was brand new. I had just sent a mental smoke signal for angelic help a split second before and, lo and behold, there sat the perfect toy to get Boo’s attention. I unlocked the door to our room quickly and tossed the colorful fuzzy ball towards the door. Bootsy shot out from under the car towards the ball. I grabbed him and put him inside the room with the ball then went back to gather the rest of the furry children. I picked up Little and Pixie at carried them in at the same time since the truck was only about a yard from our room. Then I came back and put Anjolie in a carrier and got her and the other carriers in with me. After I got the rest of our stuff, i went inside to spend our last night on the road together. I had only one more long day of driving and we have not hit the road since. That was in October 2012. I don’t plan on any cross country trips in the immediate future, as least not in a car or truck. So far, I have made it to my destination with every cat cat I had when I started. I plan to make sure that always happens. I couldn’t have predicted that traveling with cats would be so great. It’s been a lot more work, especially with four of them, but it’s been a fun adventure and is worth a book full of stories by itself. I am grateful for the memories of the road trips, the cats, and the road trips with cats.
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