Panicked, Michael staggered into the woods, scanning the brush around the towering ponderosa pines for the cat. “Tabor, where are you?” he called out. Still nothing. “Tabor, come on, girl, where are you?”
Madison and Stinson joined the search, and Bobby woke up to trail behind them. They went off into the woods, calling and listening for Tabor.
After about forty-five minutes, they met back up at their campsite.
“What was I thinking bringing her here?” Michael said, desperation in his voice. “I just wanted Tabor to see the wilderness, to understand that the world isn’t all street corners and freeways.”
“I was worried about bringing Bobby, too,” Madison said. “This place is full of cougars and bears.”
“Damn it,” Michael said. He hadn’t thought about cougars. “This is sooo messed up.”
Stinson went over and put a hand on his back. “Calm down, Groundscore. She’s around somewhere.” Stinson was good that way; whenever Michael got mad or wound up, Stinson could talk him down. “But we better start looking before something eats her.”
The three of them split up again. Under the light of the moon, Michael saw large paw prints in the dirt, too large for a house cat. All around him he heard rustling in the bushes and trees, and he thought he caught glimpses of unidentifiable creatures melting into the dusk. In a sense, he felt like he was being punished for running away from home so many times when he was a kid. The difference was that his parents didn’t care nor want him back, but Tabor was everything to him.
As he went deeper into the woods, the blackness engulfed him. He had no flashlight, and his eyes hurt from squinting into the dark. He kept tripping over tree roots and rocks.
“Howdy,” said a voice on the path in front of him.
Michael looked up to see a stocky little man in a Stetson being tugged along by a chunky chocolate Labrador. A cartoonish cowboy, he looked like Yosemite Sam with caterpillar eyebrows and a bushy mustache.
“I just saw a huge cougar on the trail, and we’ve heard coyotes out here,” Yosemite Sam said. “I really hope you find your dog tonight.”
Michael didn’t respond. There was no point correcting the man or getting into a conversation. It had been nearly two hours, and he was worried sick about Tabor. Owls were hooting above his head, and there was constant rustling around him.
Twigs crackled and branches snapped and a hand took hold of his shoulder, startling him. It was Stinson. He led Michael back to their clearing. On the way, Michael saw a sign: WARNING COUGAR SIGHTINGS ON DEER TRAIL.
Madison was already there, sitting on a rock by the fire, petting Bobby. “Nothing,” she said, looking up at them, her dark eyes wide with concern. “I really hope Tabor’s all right and just hiding somewhere.”
Stinson lit up a cigarette when they got back and after a few drags, stamped it out with his shoe, and said, “We’ll find her. Come on, let’s go back out again.”
Michael imagined how scared Tabor must be. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “I’ve been drinking less for months now because I didn’t want to have Tabor taken away from me. Instead I lose her in a national park.”
“It’ll be okay,” Madison said, trying to calm him.
“No, it won’t,” Michael said, his voice tired and ragged. “She’s all I’ve got.”
High above them, a bird let out a warning squawk. The bird squawked again.
“Ssshh, hang on,” said Stinson, glancing around and listening intently. “Did you hear that? It sounded like a meow.”
Stinson shone the light from his cell phone up into the trees. The beam skimmed off branches and caught a pair of glowing eyes. It was Tabor, perched on the bough of a tree, lazily looking down at them. Her drowsy gaze made it obvious she’d been up there the whole time, asleep.
“She has a wicked sense of humor,” Stinson said, laughing.
“Yay! Stinson saves the day again,” said Michael. It was Stinson who had picked up Tabor that rainy night in Portland. All he could feel was joy. At that moment nothing in the world mattered except this cat.
When she climbed down, Michael scooped her up and pressed his face into her furry cheeks, which smelled like spring leaves and earthy bark. “Oh, my God,” he said. “You’re all right.” Tears shone in his eyes. He was relieved that nothing had happened to Tabor, and happy to have her back, but he was also disappointed in himself: he hadn’t pulled himself together enough to look after her properly. This was the second time his carelessness had put her in danger.
He told Tabor that he loved her and she head-butted him and licked his face with her sandpapery tongue. “I’ll get it together,” he whispered into her fur, and meant it. “You’ll see.”
The following morning they drove to downtown Mount Shasta for more supplies and then continued south on to another campground near the Buddha Hole on the south fork of the Sacramento River.
Following the barely marked byzantine park trails, they walked deeper into the forest and found a hidden, sun-drenched nook. Dipping down the rocky incline, they settled on a brushy knoll along the riverbank. The Buddha Hole was a crystal-clear emerald swimming hole fringed by a tumble of boulder fields, cedar, and pines. This particular stretch was where all the hippies came to go skinny-dipping en route to the Burning Man festival in the desert.
While Stinson and Madison started pitching camp, Michael put on Tabor’s long lead and tied it to a slender sapling. Tabor, stretching her legs and yawning, moved into the shade beneath a lacy tuft of fern, where Bobby had already made a cozy nest, and plopped down beside him for a long nap. That afternoon, as Stinson and Madison swam and splashed around in the shallows, Michael sat and read alongside Bobby and Tabor, wary that the cat would be snatched away by cougars or coyotes.
Later the three of them smoked a bit of grass, drank, and talked into the night. After all the stress and drama of the previous day, Michael thought he could do with a couple of beers, and although he could sometimes go weeks or months without touching a drop, he got carried away, since he was stoned.
As he tore through another six-pack, Michael launched into one of his road stories: “Last summer I met this woman on the sidewalk and she said to me: ‘You drink beer, then?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘How many beers do you drink a night?’ I said, ‘Dunno, about six.’ And she said, ‘How many years have you been drinking beer?’ I said, ‘About thirty years.’ She said, ‘Do you realize if you didn’t drink beer and you’d put all that money away thirty years ago, every month in a high-investment account, you’d have enough money today to buy an airplane?’ I said, ‘Fucking hell . . . that much.’ So I said to her, ‘Do you drink beer?’ She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Where’s your fucking airplane then?’ ”
The wind blew in from the Sacramento River and it got chilly, so Michael built a campfire, got out his camping stove, and fixed them something to eat. When the fire burned out, he started another one.
Winding down by the fire, Michael watched Tabor collapse into a deep sleep. He carefully lifted her off his lap, wrapped her body in her fleece blanket and put her in her mobile home. Stinson and Madison had already passed out cold. Feeling chilly, Michael crawled into his bag, still wearing his clothes and shoes, and without meaning to fell asleep before the flames had died out.
Michael woke up to the sound of Tabor wailing in her carrier, where he’d tucked her in for the night. She’d been desperately trying to rouse him. He smelled smoke and when he looked down, the bottom of his sleeping bag had burned away up to his knees.
Tabor’s yowling and screeching woke Stinson, too, who sprang up when he saw the smoldering sleeping bag and shouted, “You’re on fire!”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Michael said, still drunk and strung out, moving his legs and thumping them on the ground to put out the fire in the dirt.
The fact that he could have been severely burned hadn’t quite sunk in.
The next morning, though, Michael was rattled. He’d almost lost Tabor and he’d
woken up in a burning sleeping bag. Michael thought about how he’d spent much of his recent adult life blacking out and blocking out bad memories. Except now he had a cat who depended on him and loved him wholeheartedly, and he was endangering her. He decided he would stop drinking for the homestretch from Mount Shasta to Portland.
Chapter 17
Big Sky Country: Devils & Dust
A couple of weeks after leaving Mount Shasta and arriving in Portland, Michael realized that he needed to visit Walter in Montana. Walter was the closest thing he had to family. Whenever Michael was desperately hungry or cold, he could count on Walter to wire money for food or a motel room. When Michael got arrested for vagrancy or public drunkenness, he paid the fines or bailed him out of jail, usually grumbling, “I’d like to be sitting under a tree doing nothing, with my personal banker on speed dial.”
Walter reminded Michael that he wasn’t worthless, that he was loved.
Soon after returning to their squat in the UPS bay on Hawthorne, Michael invited his friend Kyle to go to Montana with him and Tabor. Just nineteen, brash, tough, yet vulnerable, Kyle was a lot like Michael had been at that age. Kids on the run usually won’t listen to adults, since most of the adults they knew had mistreated or abused them. But Michael was a drifter, too, so in some ways, he was a father figure to Kyle: a guy who’d seen a lot of ups and downs and was willing to listen and dispense his bits of wisdom.
Michael and Kyle shared a fascination for wild places. In Montana, the blue skies went on forever, and the sweeping alpine valleys and raw, rugged prairies were almost otherworldly in their wild beauty. Wildlife—moose, bighorn sheep, and bison—could sometimes be seen from the road grazing in the valleys and roaming through carpets of bright yellow glacier lilies.
Michael knew from previous trips that passing through Idaho would be their biggest nightmare. Hitchhiking there was illegal. So, before leaving Portland, Kyle posted their photos and a “ride wanted” message on Craigslist Rideshare. Having already spent weeks on the road with Stinson and Madison, Michael hoped to get to Montana quickly without lingering anywhere. But when they didn’t get any responses to their posts, they decided to set off anyway. They could check in on shares from the road.
Barely four hours after leaving Portland, they were left off in Hermiston, an eastern Oregon farming community widely known throughout the Pacific Northwest for its watermelons. The back roads were lined with dried grass, telephone poles, and homemade farm signs for raspberries, rhubarb, and fresh eggs. They were stuck on the dusty roadside under the power lines of Hermiston for half the day.
Seeing Kyle getting anxious and occasionally moaning, Michael tried to reassure him: “The roads are kinda slow.”
They were forced to walk six miles to Stanfield, another rural outpost, to look for a better hitching spot, and settled at a promising crossroads that had a decent amount of traffic, mostly truckers, motor homes, and a few hippie vans. After a depressing hour of flashing various signs—EAST, MONTANA, HELENA—without success, they made a new one, DESPERATE FOR RIDE WITH CAT. But no one stopped.
It was Kyle’s first long-distance hitchhike, and he was unprepared for the hard stretches of waiting, the sheer exhaustion, the monotony, and the boredom. He had brought his skateboard, so he broke up a few afternoons on it, but it was so hot, with temperatures in the 80s and no shade, that he couldn’t keep it up. After sitting on the road in Stanfield for three dismal days, staring at the sky, kicking rocks, and seeing cars blow by, they were both frustrated, their spirits worn down.
Kyle finally had had enough. “This is a drag,” he said, standing up and flinging on his pack. “I’m heading home if we’re not getting any rides forever.” He crossed to the other side of the road.
Michael was just as fed up but didn’t say anything—he’d learned to be patient with street kids, just as he had learned to be patient with Tabor. Before he had Tabor, he wasn’t too bothered about being stranded on the side of the road. But now he worried about the cat getting stressed from the heat. He always kept her shaded with his snap-brim hat or inside her carrier during the hot parts of the day. Fortunately, Tabor was remarkably laid-back, content to just snuggle on their laps during the day and in their bedrolls in sleep-outs beneath the underbrush at night.
On the other side of road, Kyle got a ride right away from a scruffy guy who looked as if he lived out of his car. But the ride seemed to take him farther into a desolate rural wasteland, with nothing but dry grass for miles, so Kyle bailed and asked to be let out. He crossed over the road again, and right away another car pulled over for him.
About an hour later, as Michael gazed at the glaring noon sun, which was getting brighter and hotter, thinking about walking to the next town, he saw a car moving slowly toward them with Kyle in the passenger seat. They picked up Michael and Tabor at the same crossroads where Kyle had left them. Together, they made the three-hour drive all the way to Idaho.
Their ride dropped them off at a rural exit somewhere just northwest of Boise in the late afternoon. Michael, Tabor, and Kyle now found themselves in the Idaho high desert. After walking a couple of miles, they were desperate and almost deranged from the heat. Even in her carrier, Tabor was visibly uncomfortable. They found some spindly trees and shrubbery to shelter under as the sun faded and prepared for another roadside sleep-out. Early the next morning, Tabor broke out of her carrier, ran over to Kyle in his sleeping bag and started pulling his hair. Michael woke up to Tabor’s loud meowing and Kyle yelling, “Go away.” When Tabor saw Michael’s eyes open, she rushed over to him, jumped on his chest, and began pulling at his beard.
“C’mon, it’s four a.m.,” Michael groaned, brushing her away from his face. “No, Tabor, no . . . stop!”
But she wouldn’t stop, so they decided to make an early start before the sun came up. Michael fed the cat and packed up camp. As they headed off, Michael told Kyle that nomads navigated their way around the wilderness using the sun and the stars. But somehow the two of them got lost in the dark and wound up way off the road to Montana, in some tiny town that looked like an abandoned Western movie set, with dusty storefronts dating from the 1800s. The side streets were lined with sagging, wood-framed houses and shotgun shacks that had NO TRESPASSING signs posted on the front doors.
All morning long they wandered along the town’s hot, dusty roads, looking for shade, clinging to the storefronts’ shadows to avoid the white, burning sun. Sweat dripped down Michael’s face, and his head was pounding. Tabor was panting in his arms. He worried that she would overheat, as cats can only sweat through their tongue and paws, so he frequently poured water into his hands and wetted her fur to cool her down.
At the end of Main Street, Michael saw a spot of shade outside a deserted antiques store. A wooden structure with a patchy corrugated metal roof, spread over three stories with a widow’s walk on top, it looked like a wrecked ship salvaged from the bottom of the ocean.
“We’ve reached the road to nowhere,” Michael said, and collapsed on a chipped, sea-green metal garden chair, stretching out his long legs. He took a look at the vintage signs for Coca-Cola, Virginia Slims cigarettes, and railroad crossings that were strewn around outside. Suddenly Tabor leaped out of his arms and shot into the shuttered store through a hole in the wall.
Exhausted and hot, Michael could only shrug. “Oh well,” he said, and put his feet up on the edge of a claw-foot bathtub. “Guess we’re stuck here for a while. At least she’s still attached to her leash. She can’t go too far.”
Kyle looked at him with a worried expression and asked, “How are we going to get her out?”
“She’ll come out when she feels like it, probably when she gets hungry. She’s having her siesta. Just leave her to it.”
While they waited, Kyle roamed the junkyard, which was piled high with antique road signs, rickety bicycles, rusting car parts and farm machinery, an art-deco-era turquoise Spirit of 66 gas station pump, and other curiosities.
“I’ve never seen s
uch weirdness,” he said, browsing around the bric-a-brac, then walking up to the building to peer through the cloudy, dirt-encrusted windows. He circled the building, looking through every crack in the wall, trying to catch sight of Tabor in the junk-filled darkness.
“She likes poking her nose into everything,” Michael said, unraveling the brown bandanna beneath his canvas hat and using it to wipe the sweat off his sunburned face. “She just wanted to escape the sun and cool off. We can’t always go where we want if she doesn’t want to move. She’s a female cat, so I have to treat her like a female cat and always let her decide.”
About half an hour after she’d vanished, Tabor stuck her head out of the splintered, sun-bleached planks, as Michael had predicted she would. He tempted her out with some Fancy Feast, then blocked the hole with a washboard and kept a tighter hold of her leash.
Sun-flushed and wilting with fatigue, Kyle worried they might be stuck there all day. “This really sucks,” he said, sitting cross-legged and leaning against the building in the only sliver of shade he could find. He mindlessly tore at the weeds and dandelions sprouting next to it. “Didn’t know it was possible to stay alive in these temperatures.” His mouth was dry, and his lips were burned. Michael had used all of their water to help Tabor cool off. “It’s like being on another planet. Venus or something.”
“Idaho might as well be another planet,” Michael said, half listening, his eyes fixed on a sun scorpion scuttling past his feet. He didn’t want to draw Kyle’s attention to it and alarm him, but he had to make sure it didn’t go near Tabor, whose face was buried in her dish.
The second Tabor finished her lunch, Kyle was up in a flash and halfway down the road. Michael picked up Tabor, boosted her onto his backpack, and followed.
A couple of blocks down the strip, they stopped outside a rickety old country store and café that looked like it was still in business. A handful of locals were going in and out.
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