Friday, February 24, 2006

Aspen Ride for the Cure (September 10, 2005)

(aka Ollie goes on walkabout and Judy meets Chris Carmichael)

In addition to the July Bike for the Cure that Mick and I participate in, Aspen is, for the second year, hosting a more prestigious Race for the Cure event in September. This is a Century Ride with fund-raising requirements, and the promise of a celebrity participant: Chris Carmichael, Lance Armstrong’s coach. For the second consecutive year, Mick has decided to volunteer to work an aid station rather than to ride in the event. In fact, Mick is in charge of the second aid station. While I’d really like to ride in this event, I figure that it’s time for me, too, to give back for a change by volunteering.

We (my two cats, Oliver and Boston, and I) arrive in Aspen on Friday night, as usual. My cats are great travelers, and they accompany me on my weekend trips to this little mountain town. Tonight, for reasons that I can’t fathom, Oliver is acting pissed off and snarly from the moment we reach Mick’s house. But this has happened before – with increasing frequency since Boston, the kitten arrived on the scene - so I pay little attention. I know that he’ll calm down and be fine in the morning.

But in the early morning hours, I wake up and notice that Ollie isn’t sleeping with us. Oliver sleeps with me no matter where we are, and even if he wanders in the wee hours of the night, he always curls up next to me in the pre-dawn hours. I call out to him from my semi-consciousness, but fall asleep before he comes to bed.

But he’s still not there when I get up in the early cool morning. I need to do two runs today, and the only way to fit them around volunteering for the bike event is to run the short one now. Mick and I both call for Oliver, but he hasn’t shown up before I head out the door. I’m certain that he’ll show up.

But when I return home 35 minutes later, Mick tells me that he’s nowhere to be found. How can this be? There is no way, as far as we can tell, for him to have gotten outside. So we scour the house, opening doors and closets and cupboards, and looking under, in, over, around, and behind every appliance and piece of furniture. But no Ollie.

I’m starting to get really worried, but Mick has to leave to set up the aid station. I look and look and look, but can’t find Ollie. I check outside tentatively, but just can’t imagine how he would have gotten outside. And the thought of him being outside brings terror to my heart. Too many bears and coyotes in these parts for a cat to be safe outside for long.

Ollie does not materialize, so I force myself to go to the aid station. There’s plenty to be done, and being busy is good for me. We make PB&J sandwiches, and set out boxes of PowerBars and gels, and slice oranges and bananas. A charging pack of riders comes through the aid station without stopping – some guys apparently more interested in racing the day’s ride rather than enjoying the stops along the way – and then the rest of the field starts to trickle in.

And they arrive in dribs and drabs, all kinds of people. Guys by themselves, couples, women riding together, guys riding in pairs, lots and lots of riders. All ages and sizes, in varying shapes. The common theme is that they are all hungry and thirsty, so we’ve got just what they want. I find that the PB&J sandwiches go quicker if we quarter them (even if people take a handful of the smaller pieces), so we get busy cutting up the sandies into smaller chunks. A kid who is helping at the station gets busy pushing the gels. He’s fixated on the fact that the tangerine gel has “2x caffeine”, and he accosts nearly every rider who takes another flavor. “Did you see this gel?” he says, pushing a tangerine gelpack into the rider’s face. “It has double caffeine.” We run out of the tangerine gels first, and he tells me, “better tell the organizers to send more tangerine gels next time. The riders love them, because of the caffeine.” I figure that the kid has a good future as a drug pusher, or at the very least, working as a barrista.

Mick is talking to a guy who arrived a minute ago, riding up on his own. I meander over, and just as I’m thinking, this guy looks familiar, I realize that it’s Chris Carmichael. He and Mick are having a nice chat about the century ride. Mick has, in fact, met Chris earlier and has ridden with him a couple of times on group rides in Aspen, so they chat easily. Mick introduces me to Chris, and I am, for a moment, a bit too awestruck to be able to talk intelligently, so I just listen for a while. The talk turns to Lance and the Discovery Team, and Chris makes a couple of comments about the future of Discovery without Lance (who will be the next leader of the team?), but doesn’t give us any great insights, although he drops hints that he knows much more than he’s letting on. Then he talks again about today’s ride. He started out with the fast guys, but they dropped him in the early climbing miles. Chris acknowledges that he would ride faster if he lost five pounds. I smile and tell him that I know a great book on nutrition by some guy named Carmichael, and he just smiles and shakes his head. “I pity the person who would ever take on the job of trying to coach me,” he says, laughing. Aha. Even the coach of the 7-time TdeF champion has his weaknesses. And with that, he says that it’s time for him to get riding, and he hops on his bike and glides down the road.

After a while, Mick notices that I’m off in a fog, worried about my kitty, so he encourages me to go find Oliver, and I head back home. No Oliver, inside or out. By now, I’m in full panic mode. Where is my boy???

When Mick comes home after shutting down the aid station, we spend the entire afternoon looking for Oliver. Besides panicking in general about Ollie, I’m also worried because he needs his meds. If somebody took him – for whatever reason – they would not know that he needs medication for his heart and lung disease. We look high and low, inside and out. We ask everyone in the neighborhood, but nobody has seen him. We make up flyers and post them around. We call the animal shelter and the county animal control and the vet hospital. We call a local radio station, who starts making public announcements on our behalf. Mick calls his friends at the local papers, and in the morning they run an article with a large headline, “Missing cat needs meds”. But still no Ollie.

In desperation, I call my friend Denise, who is working this weekend in a metaphysical bookstore that is owned by some of her friends. She puts me in touch with a woman who is a pet psychic. I wonder if I’m losing my grip on reality. Denise assures me that this woman is legitimate – the state police use her sometimes to find missing persons, she tells me – and so I make the call.

The psychic tells me that Oliver is alive, but that he is somewhere in an enclosed space, and can’t get out. In fact, she believes that he can’t hear me or call out to me. She says that he may be injured, because she can see that he is trapped. She tells me that my panic is only making him more scared, so I should try to relax and just send him good karma wishes.

In the end, we go out to a movie Saturday night because we can’t think of anywhere else we can look. I’m a mess, and cry myself to sleep. I don’t know which is worse, picturing him as a meal for bears or coyotes, or getting sick and dying from the absence of his meds. The not-knowing is a terrible burden, and I wonder if I will be able to stand it if I have to drive back to Denver without him in the car with me. I’m not at all sure what to think about the psychic’s message. I desperately want to believe, since I desperately want to believe that my kitty is still alive.

Sunday morning is another bright and beautiful day, but it seems dark and miserable without Ollie. I check outside as soon as we get up, hoping that maybe he has found his way home in the night, but there is still no sign of him anywhere.

I skipped my long run yesterday while we searched for Oliver, so today I decide that I’ll do my run and keep an eye out for him. I think of all the time we spent together, the years, the constant presence of this little furball in my life. I eulogize him to myself, since I’m starting to believe that he’s gone, and I have to gulp back a few sobs on the run. But the run helps, as running always does, and I find myself on the road, climbing Independence Pass. I’m running back down into town, and notice two riders approaching on bikes. Chris Carmichael says “Hi, how are you doing?” as I run by, and I wonder if he recognizes me from yesterday. Or is he just a friendly guy?

After my run, I call the psychic again. She tells me that she sees Ollie in some tall grass, and asks if there is anyplace nearby that might have tall grass. Of course, I say. Just behind the townhouses where Mick lives. The vegetation turns wild quickly on the banks of Hunter Creek. But we looked in this direction yesterday, so I don’t think that this “information” is all that helpful. Mick and I go to breakfast, and then we stop at his sister’s house. At my suggestion, we enlist Molly’s entire family to come back to Mick’s to help in one last-ditch effort at finding Ollie before I have to start the long, lonely drive back to Denver.

We all fan out, and I go inside Mick’s to change my shoes before heading out in the direction he has suggested for us to look – back behind the townhomes in his little community. Mick thinks that this might be the area of tall grass. I round the end of a row of buildings and discover a road I didn’t know existed, but it’s eerie: there’s nobody here. I expect to see Mick or Don, but instead just see an empty road. But as I walk along, I think I hear voices. There is a driveway off this road – again, a surprise – I had no idea there were houses back here. I nearly walk straight past the driveway, but I turn my head and see Mick standing there, talking to a woman. And then I notice that he has something in his arms – my Ollie! And I am in heaven.

My boy seems fine: healthy and just a bit bewildered. It turns out that the woman at this house found Oliver wandering in the grass outside her home Saturday afternoon, and recognized that he was not a feral cat. So, she took him in and kept him in an unused dog kennel in her garage overnight, hoping to find his rightful owner. She saw the newspaper article, and had just called and left Mick a message when he arrived at her door.

Coincidence? True psychic ability? I don’t know, and don’t really care. My Ollie is home, safe and sound. But I’ve suddenly developed a new affinity for the show “Medium”. And in future weekends at Mick’s, I double check – no, triple check – the front door to make sure it’s locked and that Ollie is inside, safe and sound, before going to sleep.

And I think that I would have used much less energy riding the century ride on Saturday -but I probably wouldn’t have spent as much time talking with Chris Carmichael. All’s well that end’s well.

No comments: