Hopi Very Ill

My first cat, Hopi, is going downhill fast. She has been sick since the move. The move was hardest on Hopi for some reason. Afterwards, she began to lose weight, then she would rebound some. She's been back and forth to the vet several times. She's been tried on Albon, for possible coccidia, for three weeks and even metronizadole for possible helibacteria or giardia. None has been detected in her stool. However bugs like giardia and cocchidia can be very hard to detect in stool, being shed only occasionally from the bowel into feces.

Before I left for eastern Oregon, Hopi was on the rebound again. But she is a sensitive cat and my absence caused her a downward spiral I have not been able to reverse. Today she'll have an X-ray to see if she has tumor, i.e. lymphoma. Bloodwork a couple of months ago showed everything normal except white count was elevated slightly.

But the Neuterscooter vet, while in my place a couple weeks ago, felt her kidneys and said they're too small and that she is likely in some stage of kidney failure also. I'll be interested to see if the vet today concurs, when she goes in again, or maybe will find something else. She has no hope if she has been experiencing kidney failure. She has no hope if she has lymphoma either, although lymphoma rarely drags on with such extreme symptoms, diarrhea and vomiting, for over a years' time.

The only diagnosis now that gives Hopi any hope of onward life is IBS or pancreatic insufficiency. I have been giving her digestive enzymes, fluids, i/d, boiled chicken. Nothing seems to help. If she has no tumor and no kidney failure, she may have to enter the steroid world to save her life, if the steroids themselves don't kill her.

I love Hopi. She is the first cat I got. Hopi comes from the bushes on the east side of the Willamette river, under the overpass. A cat hater in Corvallis had stolen two cats one owned and Hopi, who was just a stray kitten then, who hung out with the owned male, and dumped them miles from Corvallis. They'd gotten almost back to Corvallis but could not find a way across the river. I helped them both out. The male went back to his home and Hopi stayed with me.

I remember it all like it was yesterday. Nine years ago. It was after dark on July 3rd 1999 when I drove over in the old Fairmont I'd just bought for $200 and parked along the bypass highway near the overpass bridge. The Fairmont barely functioned. I'd not had a car for many years and was excited to finally be mobile.

I'd seen a black and white male, from my perch along the river, where I basically lived, and had lived when homeless a couple times. I inhabited the rocky bank and concrete blocks known to the homeless as "the slabs", down from Mater Engineering. This is where the river cats I cared for also lived. I'd gotten over 30 cats along the Willamette trapped and fixed, using a wild cat fund I set up at Eastgate Vet clinic. It wasn't easy without a car.

I lived at the Julian Hotel for three years, a vile place and hotbed of drama and often crime, too. I moved out of the Julian to homelessness. I did not like the noise and drama of the Julian and I was afraid of the manager, who had come on to me, who was a distorted man in every sense of the word. Also, my fourth floor apartment roof leaked in about nine different places. The leaks destroyed everything. The Julian management was unapologetic about it.

But anyhow, a couple, with whom I still have contact, now living in Iowa, had bought me a live trap. Scott and Pam Chadwick were cat lovers who ran a nonprofit giving vouchers to low incomers to get their cats fixed. Shortly after I met them, they were forced to leave the valley, due to Scott's extreme allergy to grass seed pollen. But they bought me my first live trap, and boy what an investment they made in the futures of the cats of the midvalley in so doing. They know how many cats that trap has helped and how that trap changed my life. I tell them every year.

And so I began trapping the cats living wild along the Willamette. People dumped their cats along the river. Asshole type people.

I'd trap a cat in the night and carry the cat in the trap all the way back to the Julian hotel. Sometimes I'd be carrying a cat in a trap for over half a mile. Then I"d find a ride out to the vet clinic, usually with a city bus driver with whom I came to be friends. The wild cat fund was fed with bits of money donated by city bus drivers, poor people, and poor old people, for the most part. In this manner I got over 30 river cats fixed.

I saw the black and white cat first a month before July 3rd. He would sit along the river on the east bank and stare out across the river. But on July 3rd, the cat looked about done in. So I went over.

It was a long dark hike along a slight trail, used by transients, from the highway down under the bridge. Once there, I sat out wet food, then sat back to see who came out of the dark to eat it. Two cats came out--the black and white male, and, a little mottled female. After they gulped every crumb, they sat back and began to cry.

They were not feral. I called them over to me and they were desperate for comfort and love. And they didn't want left behind. The male was already neutered. I asked them to follow me. The male, however, collapsed after a few hundred feet, too weak to make it. I put him over one arm. The young female was very frightened of the night and would startle at every noise.

I crossed the highway with the male and put him into my car. I had no carriers, nothing. I went back across the road for the female. But she'd get scared just when I"d about have ahold of her and dart into the bushes along the highway. I finally had to leave without her.

I came back very early the next morning for her, however, with a carrier. She hadn't moved from those bushes. And when she saw the open carrier, she darted into it like a shot. There was no way she was going to be left there. She was so frantic and scared, I remember, so relieved to be sitting in that carrier with the door closed, because then she knew she was going home with me and was saved.

I ran an ad, or rather a friend ran an ad for me, since I had no phone at the duplex I'd moved into. No furniture either. Dorothy Hyde, now dead, a kind old woman from England, placed the ad and answered the call that came as a result, about the found black and white male cat. She came over to tell me someone had called, someone who had been missing their black and white cat for several months, someone who had two photo albums full of photos to compare or prove the cat was hers, if it was. So that someone came over.

It was her boy all right. Servana was his name. When she saw Hopi, she exclaimed "Oh my. She's grown." She had 40 photos, she claimed, of Servana, taped to her front door and claimed she knew karma would bring him home one day. Instead, it was me.

Hopi stayed with me. Hopi had been a stray kitten in her neighborhood that Servana used to sneak inside, so she could eat. They'd been missing for months. Servana's collar had been removed.

Even then I knew it was going to be a cat hating neighbor who had done this evil deed, had taken both out and dumped them miles from anywhere, and driven away smug and self-satisfied.

Evil people. Mean people. Control freaks and passive aggressives pull such awful acts of cruelty.

On July 5th, 1999, the city's river project began in earnest. A bulldozer tore its way down beneath the overpass bridge and smashed everything flat in sight, to create a staging area for the riprap the river barge would dump along the west bank.

Hopi and Servana would have been buried under the rubble of the city of Corvallis' river project, like so many other lives were.

The river project had catapulted me out of myself, however. I was terribly afraid for the lives of my rivercat family. I spoke at public meetings, something I'd never done in my life, against the project. I did not say why I was against it, because I didn't want to draw attention to the cats. I was so afraid for thier lives. Instead, I spoke about the wildlife I'd come to know along the river while living there. The big beaver I'd named Beavis, the river otters, the birds. A mother duck whose foot had been badly burned the fourth of July, by some asshole and his fireworks, would come to the slabs with her ducklings and lay beside me to rest, knowing she'd be ok with me there. I was accepted by the animals and birds of the river banks.

Once, during the heat of the project opposition, a boat went by while I was on the slabs, with a bunch of intellectuals in it, looking at the banks and stuff. Right within earshot they began discussing the likes of me, the homeless, and how destructive we are to natural areas. I got up and flipped them off.

Through all the hot air hearings I went to, including a packed house at La Salle Stewart, old men and hippies would vow to chain themselves to trees to stop the project. I was the only one ever arrested. I yelled at a river barge in the dusk of a rainy October evening. I yelled at them because they weren't supposed to be down there on the barge working. The riprap project had been halted by the feds, the paper had read that morning. But when I went down to the slabs, to try to find any of my river cats who might still be alive, they were there and I erupted. I yelled stuff like "This is the way this city works, in the dark. You've been banned from this river, so you sneak down in the dark." I yelled, "You've killed my whole family, why don't you just kill me, too." They laughed at me, the three men. And had me arrested for violent conduct. This nearly killed me.

I was found guilty of violent conduct. A self-appointed attorney I met five minutes before my trial didn't get me off. He did ask what part of the violent conduct code I was being prosecuted under. The city attorney said "tumultuous behavior". He said, but to cause a tumolt a lot of people would need to be present, wouldn't they, and it was just her there. Even the three guys on the barge were by then on the east bank. "Well," the city attorney said, "she caused a tumult to herself." And I was convicted on those grounds. Very silly and wasteful of taxpayer money, that's for sure.

At one point in the trial, my attorney asked the city engineer if they had a lot of vandalism during the project. He had said "yes". The attorney continued, "ever had a fire on the barge?" The engineer said "yes". "Was it malicious?" my self-appointed attorney then asked. "No," said the engineer, "it was started by a welding spark." Then my attorney said, "Would it interest you to know that Jody, and he pointed to me, was the one who reported that fire?" The city engineer's face went white. I"d save them a hell of a lot of money. I"d been down there two weeks before I was arrested, after my best friend committed suicide, seeking comfort, and seen the fire on the barge across the river. I wrestled with myself a few moments, then went up to Mater Engineering and asked the janitor to call the fire department.

Later, a city cop came by and harrassed me, as I sat there, watching the fire trucks go over. Officer Mann shone his flashlight in my face and asked what I was doing down there. I told him he knew what I did down there, because he did, that I cared for the cats. I then said I'd reported that fire. He was chewing gum, I remember, and he said "Yeah right you did." Later when I was limping across the parking lot to my old Fairmont (I'd badly injured my knee), he came driving up the bike path in his patrol car and for fun, put the patrol car spotlight in my eyes, as I tried to get to my car. It was sport to him. I sat in my car and pounded the steering wheel in anguish and despair.

My conviction was reversed. The self-appointed attorney appealed the conviction, said it was wrong and he couldn't leave it alone. But it never went to trial. I was political pawn at this point. There was to be a city vote on an alternate plan for the riverfront park and the city wanted no bad publicity. My self appointed attorney told the city he'd make sure the city got all the publicity they so deserved for the way they'd treated me and not just in this one incident, for all those years, if they didn't reverse the charges. They reversed the conviction. It's gone from my record, like a ghost, like the river cats and what happened to them.

I bet you won't hear any of that in any history of the river project. I bet you won't.

Here's something else I bet you don't know. Mumbles, the man who was later arrested for the murder of Junior, another homeless man I knew, saved me once from a serial killer along the river. I woke up from a nap at the slabs to find this guy hovering over me, somebody I didn't know, dressed nicely but he didn't belong down there. I started scrambling backwards on the rocks, and he said "It's ok, I'm not going to hurt you. I told him him to get the hell gone now." He went back up the trail. Only I didn't know that later he tried to come back down, only behind me. Mumbles told me that about ten days after. Only Mumbles was up there on the top drinking. I didn't know that either. And he said he raised up the bottle and told the man "don't even think about hurting the cat woman. Go back to where you came from." Mumbles told me he got in some white delivery type truck or van.

About two weeks after that, I saw the man on the news. He'd killed girls in Portland and dumped their bodies in a park. He'd killed a homeless woman along the river in Eugene, too. He looked for homeless women, the news said, who were drug addicts and would lure them into his delivery truck or van with offer of drugs, so I would not have gone for that, since I never did drugs and besides, I would have just jumped in the river and swam off if he'd become threatening at all, and maybe taken him to the bottom of the river, too, for good measure. But it was slightly scarey, to see him on TV, arrested for killing all those women and having seen him face to face.

The riverfront park in Corvallis was built on the blood of lives. Little lives whose suffering was invisible to every human except the small humans, who don't count either.

I can't walk the riverfront park in Corvallis. I see the ghosts of those killed to create it. They were my family.

Maybe karma did bring Servana home. And Hopi to me.