Hauling Cats

I was in Houston this spring for a seminar and was offered two 12-week-old kittens by a friend. Okay, why not, I figured? My last cat, Max, died at age 15 in 2007 and I'd been pet-less since, for the first time in memory.

My friends in Houston promised to air-mail the felines to me. Okay, air-freight them. But they neglected to research the issue and simply showed up at Continental’s air freight counter, thinking they could chuck them aboard the next flight heading west. Wrong. With no vet’s certificate of good health, no flying.

This dragged on until I resolved to drive there and return with the cats. The journey may be slower, but it's far safer for the animal than air freight.

I speak from experience: Northwest Airlines lost my favorite cat, Fred, and sent him flying around the nation for two days in the belly of a Boeing 747. He lived for a month and then dropped dead at age three from a stress-induced aneurysm.

In small-claims court a Northwest Airlines representative dismissed my friend's death as a crass ploy on my part to generate a story. I won $50 in damages, the airline's maximum liability. (The Northwest Airlines guy chided me for failing to purchase insurance. They can kill a pet with almost no consequences although they're liable for much higher damages for lost luggage.) Not surprisingly, I'm of the opinion that air-freighting animals is to be avoided if possible. Doing so in the Arizona summertime might be considered cruel.

I reluctantly chose my police-package Ford Expedition for the trip, mainly because I anticipated that the cats would be screaming for the entire journey. And the Ford is big enough that with them in the rear cargo area, it would be akin to tolerating cats howling from two blocks away, something I could live with if I absolutely had to. By contrast, using a sedan would put their cat carrier in the passenger compartment. Way too close.

Like a proper 21st century, computer-savvy male, rather than dusting off the atlas to check road miles to Houston, I used Google. And Google assured me that it was barely over 1,000 miles. I hadn’t driven from AZ to Houston since my star-crossed trip to Baja, Mexico's La Carrera Classic II road race in the Cannonball Ford. (Car and Driver chronicled my 1988 race--and the fabled car's ignominious end--in "Cheating Death in the Desert". I'm still trying to live it down.)

I seemed to recall the distance as being somewhat longer than Google's number—it’s nearly 850 miles from Houston just to the New Mexico state line—but it’d been awhile and hey, Google knows best. But on the trip to Houston, I watched the trip odometer roll past 800 and I was still far to the west of San Antonio, which I knew to be at least 200 miles from Houston. I spent the night in bucolic Ozona (yes, it’s on the map, barely) and drove into Houston the next afternoon. It was 1,250 miles and after fighting gale-force crosswinds for nearly the entire trip, I was numb with fatigue.

I couldn’t bear the thought of returning the next day so I delayed my plans by 24 hours and chilled with friends. Then I loaded the cats at 6 a.m. and headed west. They stayed eerily silent, so quiet that I was beginning to think they’d both expired of stress-related complications. But every four hours when I stopped to pump $90 worth of 91-octane to refill the 30-gallon tank, I peeked in to see if they were breathing. And they were.

After 14 hours I stopped briefly in Tucson and let them out of their carrier for a snack and water. This elicited some stares: it's uncommon to see cats scurrying around inside a marked police vehicle. Then back inside and we hustled along the final 150 miles, arriving home not long after dark. During the 16-hour trip I burned 105 gallons of fuel, ate 3.5 pounds of trail mix and dodged eight radar ambushes. The cats were suitably impressed.