Old Songs in a New Cafe (4 page)

While the speaker spoke, other DNR personnel dragged several of the cages full of squirming otters down close to the water.
And, of course, the media photographers with their usual, but unwarranted, privileges crowded around with whirring gizmos
and other gear, blocking the view of those who had come to see the otters. It was worth thirty-three seconds on the evening
news, I later noticed.

Braced, feet wide apart, I protected my Nikon from the high school boys on my left who had never seen a camera before and
insisted on standing in front of it. They could be dealt with, though.

The real problem came from the five-year-old boy on my right who discovered that if you stamp your feet hard in the water,
the water flies in all directions. I asked him to stop and pointed at the drops of water on my camera equipment. He ran behind
his father’s pant leg a few feet away.

The DNR speaker shouted something about how the school buses would be organized to pick up the masses after the event. Personally,
I thought the DNR ought to unfurl one of its large river seines, pull it through the crowd, and drag the lot of us all the
way to Tripoli. I loved the image, dwelt on it.

The moment was near, I thought. I couldn’t be sure, since the media photographers were practically riding the cages as they
were moved nearer the water, But, here and there, I got a glimpse of brown fur in the morning sun, and this fur seemed to
be moving toward the quiet water of Sweet’s Marsh,

I crouched behind my tripod and concentrated on focusing the Nikon. Wham! The five-year-old boy I sent away three minutes
ago was back. He had discovered that if you smash the water with a stick, the water flies all over everything. I straightened
up, tapped the short-bladed hunting knife that is a standard part of my outdoor kit, and said in a low baritone, “Swamp devil
die young.”

I wiped the water from my camera, while the kid disappeared toward his father. Ready now, here they come. One of the cages
was opened, and three otters waddled toward the water. After that, it was bedlam.

The otters swam through the water, ran along the banks, and wrestled with one another in grass and sunshine. More otters were
shown the water, and they knew what to do with it. The DNR man with the bullhorn shouted something about “rotating the crowd
so everyone can see the otters.” Nobody paid him any mind. Instead they slithered under the rope barricade and plunged toward
the banks of Sweet’s Marsh.

The program was just getting under way, but I packed my gear and walked to the car. I’ll go back on some cold, rainy day in
autumn, a few months from now. I judge it will take that long to get the ninth-grade boys back in their cages and for the
yellow school buses to get loaded and back to Tripoli.

What can be concluded from this event? First, I’m glad the river otters are back in Iowa, and the people responsible for this
are to be applauded without end. I truly mean that. I am amplified in spirit just knowing the otters are out there giving
it a try.

Second, if I were a political candidate, I’d use my campaign contributions to corner the market on river otters and prodigiously
announce the times and locations of their releases. Then, I’d get a sound system that works; I’d tell everybody how much I love river otters; I’d promise that we will never kill them, especially the babies. Furthermore, I’d promise that we will add more school bus drivers to supplement the existing twelve and that all books dealing with cooperative living will be burned at Sweet’s Marsh as a testament to free speech. I’d be elected president of the galaxy.

Finally, in light of all the fun we had with the otter release at Sweet’s Marsh, I’m rethinking some of my earlier recommendations about Iowa developing a tourist industry.

______________________________________

I
had a friend… and his name was Roadcat. He was young when I was young and old when I was middle-aged. Still, our lives overlapped
for a while, and I am grateful for that.

He was more than a friend, really. Friend and colleague is perhaps a better image. In fact, I sometimes introduced him to
strangers as my research associate. We worked together on cold, gray afternoons, poring over books and papers, while the wood
stove quietly crackled its way through another Iowa winter.

Sometimes he lay upon my lap and served as a round and honest book rest. He purred and occasionally reached out to turn pages
for me, randomly and with a keen appreciation of the virtues surrounding leisurely scholarship. In the spring, as the days
warmed, he moved to the desk, clearing a place for himself by pushing to the floor paper, pens, staplers, and other implements
of a writer’s trade.

He came from a field of long grass behind our house in Columbus, Ohio. Just a few inches in length, he walked along the cement
of one of those smarmy subdivisions that make your teeth curl.

A neighbor’s child abused him. He fought back, as any of us would, and the child’s mother screamed something about rabid cats.
My wife observed that the child deserved something more than he got and brought the kitty home for the customary saucer of
milk.

I set him on my lap and said, “This is going to be a fine-looking cat.” But we were on the move in those times and had already
promised our daughter one of the kittens from a litter down the street. So the migrant was fed and sent along.

I sat down to read the paper, glanced up, and he had reappeared on the opposite side of the house at the patio screen door.
He looked in at me, and I looked back. He coughed continuously and badly, tried to cry, but the effort was soundless. I picked
him up, looked him over with a modest expertise gained from years of living around animals, and said I was taking him to the
veterinarian’s office.

The examination was lengthy, He had worms, ear mites, fleas, and a serious case of bronchitis. I asked the vet, “Is this a
road cat?” The doctor smiled, “This is your genuine road cat.”

We drove home together, he and I and, of course, four kinds of medicine in a brown paper bag. He sat on the car seat, small
and uncomplaining, watching me, bright face hopeful The nursery opened. Roadcat had come to stay.

And it is here, before going on, that I must deal with the issue of sentimentality. If I do not come to grips with that, you
might dismiss the rest of what I have to say as mawkish and lacking sound perspective.

Humans have an arrogant manner of ranking life, as if some squat, three-level hierarchy of existence were fact instead of
intellectual artifice. God by various names is way up there, of course, in the first position. A little further down, just
a little, lies humankind. Below that, and far below, according to common belief, rests a great squishy level of everything
else. Here, we find plants and animals. Maybe even rivers and mountains.

All right, let’s admit that some transcending presence roams above us. Some call it God, some call it science. Others of us
see it as a design so perfect, a great swirling form of truth and beauty and justice and balance, that cosmic ecology might
be our term.

That leaves us and the rest. And if you’re going to attempt rankings, you better have some criteria, some standards of measurement,
to use in making your judgments. The problem is that we humans generate the criteria by which the rankings are made. That’s
letting the fox in with the chickens, or the cat in with the canary, or us in with beauty. Take your choice.

I read the philosophers sometimes. They have criteria, such as consciousness and the ability to use technology, for determining
who and what get to belong to various communities. But I do not trust their judgments, for the reason just mentioned. I prefer
to think of civilizations that are, well, just different—separate, but parallel and equal.

And I don’t spend much time trying to create workable taxonomies either. Others do that sorting rather competently. But taxonomies
always end up looking like hierarchies, and things eventually get a little too classified for my taste.

So I just coast along with the notion of parallel civilizations. It works pretty well for me. Bears and butterflies, trees
and rivers. I try to live alongside rather than above them. Our world is fashioned to make this difficult, but I try.

Those of you who see things differently, as a matter of “better than” or “on a higher plane than,” are to be pitied. I’m sorry
to be so blunt, but I know your view is only one way, and that is down. As such, you miss the grand vistas, the shuddering
sense of wonderment that comes from looking out across all the civilizations riding along together on Eddington’s great arrow
of time.

And so it was with my friend Roadcat. Riding along on the arrow, we turned the days and marked the pages together. We grinned
at each other over sunny afternoons on the deck, and, while he rested in the crook of my folded arm, we tilted our furry heads
and stared high and hard at the lights of space just before dawn. Green eyes looking. Blue eyes looking. Wondering about ourselves
and the others out there looking back.

We did that for twelve years plus a month or so. And we came to care, and care deeply, one for the other. He clearly saw,
as I eventually did, that power and exploitation were not part of the reflections from each other’s eyes. We came to a position
of trust, and, in his wisdom and elegance, that was all he asked.

I violated that trust only once. I must take time to tell you about it, for the event contains the thread of a hard lesson.

Roadcat represented all the classic definitions of beauty and good taste. The long, soft pelage on his back and sides was
predominantly black and gray. His chin was an off-white that flowed into creamy tan along his chest and belly. Symmetrically
perfect were his markings, and he watched his world through green eyes of great immensity and color. His face was expressive,
his conformation perfect.

Given that, it becomes understandable why we fell into the snare of seeing him as an object. When the local cat fanciers association
announced a show limited to animals of something called pet quality, we could not resist.

So Roadcat was put into a wire cage and carried off to the show held as part of the Cattle Congress festivities in Waterloo.
Along with the sheep and horses and cattle and hogs, the pet-quality cats would have their day in the ring. He was terrified
and panting as I carried him through the crowds, past the Ferris wheel and midway barkers, past Willie Nelson’s touring bus.

Roadcat’s world was the forest, the warm place under the wood stove, and a canvas deck chair in the summer. He was content
with himself and required no conspicuous recognition to prove his worth. His colleague apparently did require it. My wife,
my daughter, and I wore blue T-shirts we had made up for the occasion that said “Roadcat” in bold, black letters across the
front.

I watched him closely in the great hall where the judging was held. He was restless in the cage. Finally, he simply lay down
and stared directly at me, straight in the eyes. I could see he was disappointed with me, and I was ashamed at having so ruthlessly
shattered our mutual respect. Since a time when I was quite young, I have been angered by those public adulations of the human
form called beauty contests, and here I was subjecting my friend to exactly that.

Roadcat refused to be an object. Normally temperate and reserved around strangers, he tore at the paper lining his cage on
the judging platform, attempted to push his way through the metal top of his containment, and, when the judge put him on a
table for all to see, he simply slid onto his back and tried to scratch the well-meaning woman who was to measure his worth.

Suddenly, confusion erupted among the various judges and assistants. A huddle formed around Roadcat, and I went forward to
see what was happening. One of the assistant judges had lodged a complaint, contending that Roadcat was a purebred and did
not belong in a pet-quality show. The supreme arbiter was consulted, and her verdict was this: Roadcat was the prototype image
of a breed called Maine coon cats, descendants of random matings between domestic cats who rode the sailing ships from Europe
and wild cats of the New World.

In the American cat shows of the late nineteenth century, the Maine coon cats were the most treasured breed of all. The head
judge explained that if this had been 1900, Roadcat would have been the perfect specimen.

But humans are never satisfied with nature, and the Maine coon cats, for reasons not clear to either Roadcat or me, had been
bred over the decades to have longer noses. Thus Roadcat was held to be something of a relic, slightly out of date, and was
allowed in the show.

He scored high on appearance. The judge said, “He has a wonderful coat, a beautiful face, and the largest, prettiest green
eyes I have ever seen.” But, sliding and fighting and slashing out for the nearest human jugular vein within reach, he received
a failing grade on the personality dimension and was awarded a fourth-place ribbon. Those green eyes brimmed with nasty satisfaction
when the judge said, “I’ll bet he’s not like this at home, is he?”

Back through the midway, past the Ferris wheel, past Willie Nelson’s bus, and home to the woods. He was disinterested in his
remarkable heritage, slept away his terror, and had nothing to do with any of us for sometime. Gradually, he accepted my apologies,
and our friendship warmed. But he made me work on re-crafting our trust as though it were a fine piece of furniture.

Roadcat was good-natured about most things, though, and seemed to enjoy the little inanities we created around his presence.
On pasta nights, his name was changed temporarily to Roadicotta. When my wife, Georgia, held her seasonal pottery sales at
our home, he charmed the customers by finding a large pot in which to sit and look out at the commotion. He became “The Retailer”
on those occasions. He was “The Chief Inspector” for anything new that came into the house or onto the property, including
musical instruments, canoes, and furnaces. In his later years, we called him “The Old Duffer” or “The Big Guy.” But mostly
he went by Roadie.