Now for a topic that’s been top in the minds of friends and family when I’ve called home lately. “Yes, yes,” they say, “We already read Harmony’s account of your last leg.* How’s the cat?”
Readers may have come to the apprehension that this is the tale of a young couple taking time out of the known world to live in a cabin on the water. This is, to our surprise and perhaps yours, a misapprehension. We have trapped ourselves in a floating tiger’s den.
More accurately, we live in the den of a tabby with delusions of wildness.
Tack is our little boy. He’s not your average child, I grant you, but nonetheless he is our boy. He has claws and sharp teeth, the softest fur, the whitest belly, and the cutest face. If you treat him like the little prince he is, his affection is your reward. If you deny him attention, he will pout by attacking something (usually the cushions, which Harmony cares about very anxiously) or taking a trip to the litter box to bomb the land.
On warm afternoons he lounges outside and suns himself like a little lion, looking idly between us and the birds. While we sleep, he balls himself up in the upper left corner of the v-berth (next to MY head, for those that followed the diagrams). When it’s warm he sits outside the open skylight hatch to watch the night, and when he is satisfied he jumps down on all fours onto the chest of the male caretaker, dodging quickly the swat from the slow and heavy hand. At sunrise he’ll pounce on the bed as soon as he hears us stir. He traditionally puts his butt into one or both of our faces as he turns in circles between us.
He has strict expectations regarding when it is TIME TO BE FED, and he takes whatever steps necessary to ensure that we also know when it is TIME TO BE FED. This ritual is inviolate. Even on occasions when the boat is bucking like it’s caught in the grip of an angry many-tentacled sea monster, if it is TIME TO BE FED, Tack will throw his weight against the barrel-bolted doors of the shoe bin until they fly open with a bang, then slink carefully to stare at his plate and wait for the contract to be fulfilled.
“Look at how I’m not looking at my food bowl.”
So the cat has developed a system. He’s adapted, but that’s not the whole story.
Tack is a wild animal. He has been transported from the neighborhood he knew, where there was plush everything and trees right outside his door, into this small, strange cave that moves much more than it should and seems to be buried within a dirtless island, surrounded by a great nothingness that howls at him. The smells here are different, as are the sounds of living things somewhere out beyond the edge of his den. How will we keep his life supplied with fresh secrets to uncover? How will we keep him from choosing to explore the vast dark plain that lies beyond his small world?
Becoming sailors together means that we have to satisfy his hunter’s thirst in a small space, with help only from fake animals built from sacrificial boat parts. Sometimes you can spend fifteen minutes engineering your best artistic interpretation of a butterfly, only to have him find the prey unworthy and transmit his boredom via imaginative acts of destruction (see above). Sometimes, for no explicable reason, he will throw a forgotten zip tie across the floor for an hour and chase it into dark corners with total focus.
Here was one night’s attempt at a “butterfly”, constructed of twine, kleenex, zip ties, and rubber bands. This particular cat toy will not be making it to market for global adoption.
Best I can figure, the trick to successfully playing with a cat on a small sailboat
is to not just dangle toys over their heads and expect them to be interested for long.
You have to become the butterfly or seabird, in your hand and in your mind, alighting on an innocent bundle of wool sweatshirt like perfectly happy prey. To flutter in your own little world, oblivious to the dangerous predator that lays relaxed on the green soft surface next to you, appraising.
To play with a cat is to seek its attention, and to feel rewarded when it is granted. Maybe that’s what makes cats such reported classic companions on sailing ships. Who on that ship wouldn’t love a beautiful, soft, and fierce animal that ignores you like an unimpressed woman, sometimes stalks you, but loves to cuddle in the morning?
Big softies.
I fear for the seabirds we are likely to encounter as our confidence grows and we venture farther from land. The way I see it, one of two things would happen: 1) Tack will stalk the bird unnoticed while we marvel at its presence and catch it unawares, killing or more likely mortally wounding it; or 2), he’d try to do the above but that bird will be smarter than him, and Tack will just jump straight into the ocean. Neither of these is the kind of memory that would make a good day.
By Harmony and I bringing him on this trip, we are traveling with a barrier against all the birds in the world. This makes me a little sad. Maybe we’ll be found by the kind of birds who will take roost in our mast spreaders, the grizzled sea captains who roam the flat world and pick its bones. Unfortunately those are the kind of guests you generally don’t want, because they are of the culture more inclined to take a shit on your deck. No birds have yet come to visit, but I hope that if they do they’ll be smart enough to figure out that there is a new kind of monster on board, watching them from below, and be undeterred.
Then again, one afternoon in Berkeley we came back to the boat and when I stepped into the cockpit, a rat exploded out of the bag of pretzels I’d left there, leapt onto the dinghy, and escaped down the dock with us, shocked, looking after. I looked over to Tack, who had clearly been sitting
on the cockpit seat next to the bag for some time and who looked back at me with a blasé expression.
“You had one job,” I told him.
He rose up off his haunches, nuzzled our hands, hopped down the stairs, and looked at his plate. I had a job too.
I can’t tell for sure what Tack thinks of his new life so far. There has undoubtedly been a lot to cope with, but I think he might come to find that it is an interesting life, in spurts, with new foods and new prey to spy on. He may even come to find it peaceful at times, as like us he becomes more acclimated to the various discomforts. Just last passage I found him sitting on the stairs as the engine lumbered beneath him, and his flights to the safety of the shoe bin are getting fewer and farther between.
In increasingly less rare moments, I have found him perched on the cockpit arm or up at the bow, looking out motionlessly on the water and the wild, and I no longer feel that I am looking at a cat. His consciousness quieted, thirst stilled, instinct dissipated by the wide absorbing sea, for a moment I see a small, furry vessel containing the whole world.
Figures that the first one to reach spiritual enlightenment would be the cat.
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* Whenever Harmony posts to the blog, I try to give it a couple hours before I read it. You know, to play it cool. I’ve come to suspect that my parents get a small thrill out of calling me during this brief window to talk, as they now have ‘scoop’.