Gordon is Dead and Visiting BS

Back in 2007, when I was trying to recover from yet another move, this time from Corvallis to Albany, after I was evicted by a slumlord, I was also trying to solve multiple huge cat situations and doing so alone. Two of those huge cat situations I tried to "fix", were the BS colony and the HTN colony.

It's more than I can do to force myself to recall the horrors sometimes of those years.  This area is not somewhere you want to live if you're an animal.

There were streets so horrible I can barely drive by them now.  It triggers nightmares.

I suppose it's the same now, I just have to shield myself because I can't take it.

I ran into the son of a couple who fed close to a hundred cats beyond Cottonwood at Walmart yesterday.  Memories of that terrible situation flooded me.  I called it the BS colony, for Big Situation, but also there was another obvious connotation to that name.  Bullshit!  He told me his parents would like to see me again.

BS Colony--Field of Cats

BS colony--Four Friends

My friend drove me out.   I figured it might be good for me to try to lay some ghosts to rest.  I still have three BS colony cats here---Shady, Mops and Buffy.   I got about 120 cats fixed along that dead end street and rehomed countless cats and kittens, as many as I possibly could.  My brother has one of Shady's cousins.
It's never easy to tackle such massive problems alone and with no money.

A veterinarian had asked me to solve that huge cat situation and then later he apologized for asking me.

When I first drove out there and saw the garage crawling in cats, my heart beat a little faster and my mind began working on who I would I get in first and where, and I began a mental list of the cats.  The couple would sit in their garage and chain smoke and drink coffee and often play cards.   I call that little wobbly overloaded table with the fold up chairs "Command Central".   A lot of good bullshit passed between us on breaks right there.

Nothing has changed.  When I got out of my friends car yesterday, I yelled "It's me, the cat woman" from outside the garage, because nobody uses the front door there and they are always out in the garage, I heard the usual chorus of dogs barking, then people yelling at them to shut up and somebody saying "get in here" and I knew that was my cue.

Inside old cats hover in piled boxes and make shift beds atop the washer and dryer, just like they did 8 years ago.  They're all fixed with the exception of their son's male.

Their son is back living at trashy Heatherdale trailer park and says someone is "stomping" cats there, trying to break their backs.  One of their girl cats was killed and the male was injured twice, so they brought him out here.  And no, he's not fixed and he's running loose.  His testicles are golf ball size.  I want to clip them myself.

We chatted and chatted, about the old days and the cats and told stories.  L can tell a good story.   She has a friend and had given her my number back then to solve another terrible situation over on a pair of Albany streets, where she lived.  I called that colony HTN, or Hate Thy Neighbor, because they all hated each other and it was like a war zone, with this one kind old man feeding all the caste off cats and there were lots.  The rest of the folks on those streets, well, nobody gave a damn about anything that I could tell.  Lots of junk everywhere.  Drugs. Fighting. Drinking.  Vicious dogs. It was a horror.

I got them all fixed eventually, probably close to 90, at the old man's place and then all along the street, and there were more horrors.  A loose yellow lab came through and over a few nights, killed 20 or more of the now fixed cats, until I sat out nights in my car with a piece of rebar just hoping that vicious dog would come by.  Gordon finally got a gun.

The police would do nothing.  They're cats.  Who cares, is the attitude around here.

Mickey, one of the HTN cats, became my first international adoption and still lives up in Canada with a very kind woman.  Brambles is still here with me from the HTN.

Gordon died a few months ago.   KATA was contacted about his remaining cats is how I found out initially.   They didn't take them, full I guess.  There were supposedly about ten left alive.  Well I saw one of them yesterday, the girl he kept inside at the trailer.  She's now at the BS colony, out there where I visited again yesterday.

The woman friend of the BS woman found homes for all but three of the others and still feeds the three, allegedly.  She didn't like cats back when I got them fixed for Gordon so  I generally distrust that people have changed.  She bought the property off Gordon's two brothers and fenced it in so cats couldn't be on the property, according to her friend from the BS.  Gordon never liked his brothers and his brothers hate cats.

I don't think it did me any good to return yesterday.  Just dredges up very painful times and memories.   But, I would like to get that poor male fixed.   I think how much suffering fixing all those cats at both locations prevented and that does not make me feel much better.  You'd think it would.  I just don't want to think about either place.  I want those memories to fade and leave me in peace.

Brambles from the HTN

Buffy from the BS

Mops from the BS

Shady from the BS