Kenny Rogers’ Adventure
written by: Dawn DeBraal
My finger hovers over the Maury County Lost Pets and Mule Town Facebook pages, sites that I’ve spent nearly two months clinging to in hopes of finding our cat, Kenny Rogers. I unfollow and delete them and feel a sense of loss because I have been deeply involved in this community while searching for Kenny.
I was walking into a motel halfway home from Florida on our way to Wisconsin. A bolt had come out of the cat carrier, and Kenny Rogers pushed the door out of his crate while he was on the cart. Kenny stood in the parking lot with a twitching tail, mischief-maker stance, amazed he was outside the carrier. I called softly for him, trying to grab him, but I also had Willie, our dog, on a leash.
Kenny stayed five feet in front of me, walking ahead while I tried to catch him. I tied the dog to a bush and went into the woods behind the hotel, calling. He was on an adventure, oblivious to my pleas. I heard my husband come out of the hotel and cried,
“Help me.” Tim waded into the deep, weedy jungle of rocks, a runoff of the parking lot, suffering scratches in the brambles and thick brush. I fell twice, exhausted, when we ended the chase. We were driving Kenny further away from us into the woods. We left his crate under the car with food, praying he would return, and waited fourteen hours, but Kenny never showed up.
With tears and shame, I left Kenny behind after extracting a promise from my husband that if found, we would go back the seven hundred and fifty miles to get him. He agreed, anything to get me in the car.
Such a profound sense of loss and tears of grief; we were his family for thirteen years after he walked up the driveway, not fully grown, loaded with ticks, and two dogs wanting a piece of him. What did that cat do? Lay down in the driveway, disappointing and disarming the falsely vicious dogs, and they walked away from him.
My husband said, “No cat,” and I was sad. We went to do some shopping and lunch, and he saw my sorrow for that homeless cat and said, “Okay,” capitulating to my insistence that we needed to rescue it. We bought a tick collar, some food came home, and the cat was gone.
I was so disappointed sitting outside when I heard a meow. Kenny was in the dog kennel. We were forced to keep him when he followed the dogs into the house through the dog door. There would be no way of keeping him out of the house. Kenny was fixed and de-ticked and came to be part of our family.
Race ahead thirteen years later, losing him in a town outside Nashville. Wasn’t it proper that a cat named Kenny Rogers (named because he is a tuxedo cat and a gambler coming up the driveway where two rat terriers lived) left us behind near Nashville?
All the way home, I searched the internet and found the Lost Pets site, and when I got home, I entered his picture and put in our sad story. The people of Maury County, Tennessee, could not have been nicer. One man went out with his daughter, searching; another responded that she lived nearby and would watch out, and another put out food. For weeks, several people kept watching for him. Every cat found dead on the road, I cringed. Was it Kenny? Then, the wonderful woman who runs the site assured me it was an all-black cat, not Kenny. The motel manager of the Marriott contacted me; she had informed all her employees to be on the lookout for him, showed them his picture, people put up posters where they could, and I sat home helpless, knowing if there were a way to get Kenny back, this would be the way.
I published a poem called “The Stray” about how Kenny walked into our lives and decided to walk out. My first duty every morning was to look at the Lost Pets and Petco Lost Loves sites, where pictures of cats found were displayed, some of them looking a little like Kenny. I’d post something on the Maury Lost Pets site every week because it puts you up on the feed. At six weeks, I had given up; my heart couldn’t properly grieve his loss as long as there was hope.
First, the cat tree feeder went out the door. It was somewhere I didn’t have to look at it every day as a reminder. We offered his leftover food to neighbors with cats, but they used their own brands.
On a day when I decided it would not be my first thing anymore, hunting for Kenny, I waited until four in the afternoon and had to look.
Pictures of Kenny on a message from a total stranger saying I think I found Kenny Rogers! My whole body shook as I recognized his markings on that picture of a much thinner Kenny looking through her screen door.
I shouted to my husband and sent him the pictures. Then I contacted Kimmy, the woman whose family fed him that Father’s Day when they felt sorry for him. Tim asked for a video, and Kimmy responded. There was no doubt it was him.
The following morning, we drove to Maury County, Tennessee, and twelve hours later, we arrived at his rescuer’s home. What lovely people they are. Kenny was in a crate in their garage. We insisted they keep him in because we were not going to drive seven hundred and fifty miles only to have them say he ran away before we got there.
When I took him from the crate, he was lethargic, skin and bones, and smelled of urine. He was also infested with ticks like the first time we met, but Kenny was alive. I put him in the newly repaired carrier (we weren’t taking any chances) and took him to the car. We didn’t stay long. We thanked our rescue crew, who refused a reward for their kindness, and we got back on the road to be north of Nashville when we woke up in the morning.
Kenny got a bath at the hotel. He was still full of ticks and out of it, but he was ravenously hungry. He slept in the motel chair, keeping his distance from everyone, but sometime during the night, he climbed into bed with us. My first thought was all the ticks, but I didn’t care because he knew he was back with his family.
We arrived home. Kenny, an indoor-outdoor cat, was upset that the doggy door had been sealed. We had made a vet appointment on the way down, and there was no way I would miss it. He lost two pounds, twenty-five percent of his body weight—tests and pills for the next month.
It has been three days, and he is returning to being his old self, a little more cautious about the world but slowly progressing toward where he was before his “adventure.” I am still in contact with the people who helped him, and I will send them a picture once he is back up to his “fighting” weight.
In two days, we drove 1500 miles, twenty-three hours, and eight minutes to get him back. I think he is grateful, but who knows? Kenny Rogers is a cat.
Thank you to the people of Maury County, Tennessee, who made his return possible, and a special thank you to Kimmy and her family, who went the extra mile for him.
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