But today, he felt good as he welcomed the motley crew to what they called their 707 meeting. “Good morning,” Michael said, scanning the faces of the street kids.
Two years ago, after the long drinking binge that had followed giving up Tabor, Michael had found himself standing outside a liquor store on Hawthorne, waiting for it to open at 7 a.m. A group of drunks and addicts were waiting with him with a sense of grim camaraderie. When the doors opened, they shuffled in, bought what they could afford, and prepared to get smashed.
But that day, Michael suggested that they do something slightly different. He proposed that, after getting their booze, they walk to the nearby Sewallcrest Park and talk. Everybody could still drink, but it might also be helpful if they shared what was going on with them. That was how the 707 meetings got their name: They were held just after the liquor stores opened at 7 a.m., and it took seven minutes to walk from the liquor store to the bleachers in the park. Michael hosted them once a week whenever he was in town. It gave him a point to his life, a purpose.
Most of the skinny, scruffy street kids in their early to midtwenties who hung out in the park looked high and mellow, smoking whatever, cradling cans of beer or swilling malt liquor from a paper bag. Many of them came from unstable, uncaring families and migrated up and down the West Coast with the change of seasons. Some of them thought of themselves as outcasts, but all were still desperate to belong, and they found a sense of family and community among themselves. Tumbling from doorway to doorway, they moved and grazed in packs, divvying up whatever food, drink, and cigarettes they had and guarded one another’s scant possessions.
Michael knew most of them pretty well and usually started off these meetings by checking in with each person. “Shane, how ya doing?” he asked a gangly kid with long, messy brown bangs. “Have you talked to your mom?”
When Shane admitted he hadn’t spoken to his mother in a while, Michael handed him the pay-as-you-go phone that Walter had given him years ago; it was now battered and the screen was cracked, but it still worked. Shane had borrowed it in the past to cajole money out of his mother, but Michael wanted him to talk to her without asking for anything.
“C’mon,” Michael urged him, handing him the phone, “just talk to her.”
Shane wandered off with the phone. Others in the group talked about their problems. He shared some of his feelings, too, although he didn’t mention Tabor.
Over the last couple of years, he’d occasionally visited her at Ron’s house. He would stand on the sidewalk, shout out her name, do the “Tabor whistle” and throw down his pack. She’d run down the porch steps and jump on the pack, kneading it.
But at his last visit that spring, after a nine-month stretch of not seeing her, he realized something had shifted. She was sauntering across the grass of the front yard when he arrived, and she trotted up to him. He had expected the usual warm welcome, but she was standoffish and just stared at him. Then she scrambled up the porch steps, pulled open the screen door with her claws, and scuttled back inside the house.
Michael could almost hear her thinking: “No way you’re taking me back to Idaho on another four-thousand-mile road trip.” At that moment, he felt sad that she no longer needed him, but happy that she was safe and content at home.
At the park, Michael encouraged a heroin addict to go to the methadone clinic. He told a crystal meth user to stick to weed and booze. Michael understood that there was no magic fix to their problems. Part of the reason people listened to him was because he wasn’t much better off than they were: he still drank and lived on the street. But people showed up because it was clear that Michael cared.
Later that afternoon, a car from a local mission pulled up to the pavilion, as it did every day, to distribute free food. The volunteers—many of whom had been out on the street themselves—handed out cups of coffee, sandwiches, potato chips, apples, and bananas to the homeless people around the park.
After sitting down to a communal lunch with his buddies, Michael said it was time to go. There was a crispness in the air, the weather was getting colder. He was leaving that afternoon for warmer climes. He had less than ten dollars in his pocket. It would only get him on a local bus or train—but it was enough to get moving again.
AFTERWORD
On June 20, 2013, I was researching an article when the headline Homeless Man Travels 3,600 Miles to Take Cat Back Home caught my eye. After reading the story of the stray cat and homeless drifter traveling across America, I knew I had to find this man. His story was filled with love, loss, adventure, mystery, and tenderness.
First I called Michael King’s foster father, Walter Ebert, in Helena, Montana. I told Walter that I wanted to write a book and help change Michael’s life.
He just laughed and said, “Good luck. I’ve tried to get him off the street for years but finally gave up. Money is like water in Michael’s hands. He’s got a good heart, but he’s a big drinker.” At that moment, Michael was hitchhiking his way back to Portland to take the cat home to the original owner, but Walter said that if he heard from him, he’d pass on my message.
Afterward I contacted Ron Buss in Portland. And that same day, while hitchhiking to take the cat back home, Michael phoned and poured out his heart to me, a total stranger, about giving up Tabor, how it was the hardest thing he ever had to do. When I met him in Portland three weeks later, he looked crushed, and his sea-blue eyes misted at the very first mention of Tabor.
I have followed Michael’s and Mata’s lives ever since and have interviewed Michael, his street friends, and Ron for this book. In May 2014, Michael invited me to meet Walter in Montana. Kyle was also visiting at the time; he and Michael were planning a camping trip around Montana, since their previous trip with Tabor had been cut short.
While sitting in the kitchen with the three of them, I asked Michael if he was still drinking. He went quiet for a while and then said, “Yeah, but mostly beer. It takes the edge off of sleeping in cold doorways. I didn’t want to lose her, so I had to keep it together quite a bit.”
Seeing Michael upset, Walter recounted his own long struggles as a drinker. “It’s not easy quitting,” he said. “When you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, maybe you’ll do something about it. I had bottles by the half-gallon out in the garage, one out on the tree stump, and one on my kitchen windowsill, so when I went out to mow the lawn, I knew exactly where my drinks were. Until I looked at myself in the mirror one hot summer day, and I called this friend of mine and said, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough.’ I checked myself into the state hospital and I drank half the bottle on the way there. When we got out of the car, I hid it under a tree in the parking lot. About five minutes later I decided I needed a drink and came out of the hospital waiting room to find it. Somebody snatched it, and I was mad as hell.
“Everybody that sobers up has that moment. All the talking in the world isn’t gonna do any good. Like my friend Father Joe Martin, who was an alcoholic, said: ‘There are those of us that won’t get sober in this lifetime.’ ”
In the summer of 2015, I went back to Portland again to see Michael, Ron, and Mata. I met Michael in Colonel Summers Park. These days Michael has a renewed sense of purpose and sees it as his mission to watch out for the street kids and young runaways along Hawthorne.
He still drinks and struggles with depression. He had recently returned from Montana, where he had spent five months nursing Walter, who was very ill, and looking after Walter’s cat, Gus, as well as another rescue. “Walter took in a young black-and-white called Winnie who’d been attacked by a dog,” Michael explained. “I talked to Walter the other day about how I’ve got to stop doing this. He wants me to retire in Helena, but I don’t know what to do there. If anything, I’d house up in Portland.”
While looking after Walter, he was stone sober, but slipped back into street life when he came back to Portland. “I’m tired, almost done with this life,” he said, recounting how, last October, he tried to stop drinking. “I went
out to the woods in Sisters, Oregon, and DT’d for two days. I was sick as a dog, and I just looked back over the last five years and went cold turkey. I don’t want to be that guy constantly blacking out in alleys, not knowing where I am. Maybe I’ll retrain as a nurse. I looked after Mercer, and my father just before he died.”
But it would be another eighteen months before Michael would go to rehab. One day, the realization that many of his friends were either dead or in jail hit him hard. He finally “got sick and tired of being sick and tired,” as Walter had put it, and realized he needed to deal with his addiction.
Michael also knew his days on the streets were numbered. Turning fifty was a game changer, he said. “I can’t be a beach bum anymore. The sun bothers me.” Though he often thinks back to his days on the beach with Tabor in Ventura as some of his happiest. And meeting Linda Tabor, the kind pensioner who regularly brought him and Tabor food, was the start of a grand friendship. They still write each other letters, via Walter’s address, and Michael sees her whenever he goes to California.
Michael, Kyle, and their friends still miss Tabor and the spring and summer they had her brought them closer together. Her spirit and energy was everywhere, and Stinson, Kyle, or one of the other kids would mention her being someplace, a park, a doorway, or doing something amusing.
Kyle claimed that Michael never really got over the heartbreak of losing the cat. “When he went to say good-bye to Tabor on his own the morning after we took her back, Ron gave him a little money as a thank-you, but he didn’t keep any of it. When he came back to the squat, he was pretty depressed and throwing crumpled twenty-dollar bills at people with tears in his eyes.”
Michael shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “Guess I fell in love with a cat,” he said, and for a while, she was his happiness, but looking back on it now, he thinks he was meant to pick up the cat to bring her back to Ron.
When I suggested adopting another cat, he said, “I’m done with cats.” But soon afterward, Michael would rescue a black-and-white kitten he named Wendy. He took Wendy on the road for a few days and found a home for her in San Francisco. He would eventually find a tiny, tawny puppy, whom he called Abbey Road and kept.
Kyle is back to being homeless after the shared house he lived in with friends fell apart. When I asked him what he planned to do next, he shrugged sullenly. “There’s nothing romantic about waking up in cold doorways and feeling useless,” he said once his friends dispersed, but he hoped to go back to school if he could figure out what he wanted to do. “I don’t want to only make it to forty and die. But making that transition back into society makes me nervous.”
When I visited Ron, he whisked me inside to see the cats. He opened the door to his bedroom to show me one of Mata’s favorite spots. “Norwegian Wood” was drifting out of the room, and on the dresser in a pool of sunlight, Mata was cuddled up to the calico kitten, Puzzle, now a full-grown stunner.
Mata leaped off the dresser and ran to me, clawing her way up my leg, as if she were greeting an old friend. Ron said, “Mata’s turned into a couch cat and rarely goes out like she used to.”
Outside in his back garden, Ron shouted out to Creto, who was sunbathing on the roof of the next-door neighbor’s shed. Nearby, stirring up the dirt beneath a rosebush was Jim, the buff chocolate-faced Siamese.
Since it was a breezy, sunny June day, Ron thought it would be lovely to take the cats to the seaside. On the drive up to Sauvie Island, just north of town along the Columbia River, both cats sat calmly like seasoned travelers. Mata hopped onto my lap and stayed there. She clearly loved road trips, her little head swiveling from the road ahead to the passenger window to get a good look at the scenery whizzing past.
Ron took us to a quiet part of the beach edging the woods, where dogs weren’t allowed, and we sprawled out on a blanket. Mata nestled between us; Creto hid in the shade of a bush just behind us.
As we sat there, over a picnic of veggie sandwiches and root beers, watching the setting sun and stragglers along the shore, a raggedy black kitten suddenly appeared out of the thicket, crying. Seeing the other cats and the food, she approached us meekly and meowed.
She was a pitiful sight, with big, sad eyes that swallowed her heart-shaped face, and pointy ears and paws too big for her bony body. This tiny, starving creature had clearly been left to fend for herself in the woods. She looked weary, but her desperation and hunger made her bold. When I called out to her, she immediately padded over. She wolfed down two tins of Sheba, one after another, and meowed for more. Mata and Creto couldn’t take their eyes off her. Mata seemed to feel sorry for her.
“We have to help her,” I said to Ron as we watched the kitten polishing off her last tin of Sheba without pausing before guzzling a cup of water.
“Oh, absolutely,” he replied. “Poor thing, she wouldn’t survive here much longer with all the coyotes, ospreys, and owls.”
For about an hour, Ron left me with the cats while he went up and down the beach, asking if anyone knew anything about the little stray. When he returned, he said, “I asked everyone I saw . . . about fifty people, and only one person said he saw an elderly man with a black kitten but saw him leave without her. Guess she’s going with us. . . . How shall we do this?”
“We don’t want to spook her,” I said, opening a can of tuna and placing it in Mata’s carrier. The kitten willingly walked in. When Ron shut the door behind her, she looked over her bony shoulder and carried on eating.
After finishing, she head-butted our hands through the bars of the cage and brushed her whiskers against them, purring loudly the entire time. As I spoke to her softly, she thrust out a skinny paw and touched my face. The little pads on her paws were worn and burned, probably from days of walking on the hot sand.
Ron hoisted the carrier, and we walked back to the car. I stumbled behind them in the sand, holding the other cats’ leads, trying to keep up as they pulled me in different directions. Creto was happily trotting ahead toward home, but Mata wasn’t quite ready to leave the beach. I had to carry her, squirming and screaming, back to the car.
As Ron put the carrier with the kitten on the backseat, Creto jumped in beside it. Ron looked at me and said, “You know, we almost didn’t come here. I was thinking about going to Rooster Rock, but at last minute I thought you should see this place. It was fate. But Mata rescued her as much as we did.”
He named her Sauvie and took her home. The next morning, he took her to his vet, who said she was about four months old, severely dehydrated, and probably hadn’t eaten for ten to fifteen days. Ron believed that he was meant to find her.
That following weekend Ron put “found kitten” posters in Sauvie Island’s general store and on the trees along the beach, but no one responded, so Sauvie became a permanent member of Ron’s feline family.
As Ron said, “It’s the perfect ending to a pretty amazing story.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Rescue—Don’t Buy
I hope Strays will inspire you to help any animal in distress that crosses your path.
How we treat the voiceless and vulnerable is a reflection of our decency as a society—and while our treatment of some animals has improved over the last few decades, we still have a long way to go. The nation’s shelters are overrun with unwanted animals, and more than 70 million stray cats alone are roaming the streets, suffering and starving.
Being homeless is a death sentence for animals. Every year nearly 6.5 million lost, abandoned, and abused cats and dogs enter shelters across the United States.I The lucky ones get adopted and a few reunited with their families, but many don’t make it out alive. Of the cats and dogs being taken into shelters, a staggering 70 percent are killed, and horrifically, sometimes in front of each other—many public shelters find it easier to euthanize healthy, adoptable animals rather than save them and at the annual cost of about $2 billion to taxpayers.II In my research, I discovered that motherless kittens are systematically killed because most shelters don’t want to waste
resources to care for them. Every single one of these animals is precious, and all they need is someone to give them a chance to be saved. No animal, domestic or wild, should have to suffer and be denied “their little share of the earth’s happiness,” as the great animal-rights author Matthew Scully put it so eloquently in his dazzling and deeply moving book Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. The successful shelters, such as Best Friends Animal Society, North Shore Animal League, and NKLA (No-Kill Los Angeles), have long embraced no-kill policies.
If you’re thinking of adding a furry family member to your home, adopt, don’t shop. Save a cat or dog from a sad and uncertain future—NEVER buy from breeders or pet stores, which contribute to the pet overpopulation and appalling suffering at kitten and puppy mills. What many people don’t realize is that when they buy a cat or dog from a pet store or on the Internet, that animal most likely came from a kitten or puppy mill—“factory farms” for cats and dogs—where mothers are forced to produce litter after litter until they drop dead, and kittens and puppies are usually sick, weak, riddled with infections, and living in filthy, cramped, and grim conditions. This cruel, inhumane multimillion-dollar trade is a worldwide problem, and the only way to end it is for people to always neuter and stop buying animals altogether. Meanwhile, according to the Humane Society of the United States, only about 30 percent of pets in homes come from shelters or rescues.III In light of the continuing crisis, there’s no such thing as a responsible breeder—just varying degrees of parasitic greed and awfulness. Even if you have your heart set on a particular breed, such as Maine coon or Siamese, for example, turn to the shelters/sanctuaries/rescue societies. They have every type of pedigree desperately waiting for homes, too. Every time someone buys a companion animal from a pet store or breeder, they are condemning another one to death at a pound that could’ve otherwise been rescued.
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