Long Road Home for Tramp, from the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“Slow down a minute, Ralph,” Jan said as she was watching the old cat on the edge of Pleasant Valley Bridge in Sweet Home. 

“Turn here,” Jan said, pointing at the bridge.

Ralph turned and headed across the old bridge.

“Stop, stop right here. That cat needs some help.”

Jan almost jumped out of the car before it came to a stop. She crouched down and called softly to the cat. “Here, kitty, kitty,” Jan said as she stretched out her hand and made a couple of short, shuffled steps toward the dusty old tabby cat.

The cat hesitated for a moment as if trying to decide if he should run or not. But something was inviting in this lady’s voice. He eased forward and sniffed at her fingertips. She patted him on the top of his head.

A couple of cars had stopped behind their vehicle, and Ralph was getting a little impatient.

“Hurry it up, Jan. We are holding up traffic.”

A lady started to get out of a car that was a couple of cars back in the line. Jan motioned for her to stay back. 

The old tabby cat moved up to Jan’s knees and pushed against her.  

Jan could feel a stifled purr. She took a deep breath, leaned over, and scooped the old guy up.

Jan slid into the car with the cat and pulled the door shut. The cat leaned into her and purred as Jan stroked his back and sides.

Ralph swallowed and put the car in gear. “I hope this isn’t a mistake,” he said as the car moved forward.

“This is a nice cat,” Jan said. “And he has a collar and a tag.”

“We don’t have time to deal with a stray cat today,” Ralph said.

“We need to find the vet’s office in town,” Jan said.

Ralph pulled over as soon as they were across the bridge. The car with the lady who wanted to help pulled up behind them, and the lady came up to Jan’s window. The cat was now wholly under Jan’s spell as she continued to stroke him with long slow strokes from the top of his head to his tail.

Jan rolled her window down a bit. “Where can we find a vet in town?” she asked.

“There is a clinic in the Safeway shopping center in the middle of town,” the lady said. “Is the kitty okay?”

“I think he is okay, maybe lost, but okay,” Jan said. “He looks a little rough like he has been traveling a bit. He has a tag. We will drop him at the vet’s office. We are headed for Bend and don’t have a lot of time.”

***

Jan was breathless as she came through the clinic door and perched the cat on the counter in front of Judy.

“We found this cat on the bridge coming into town,” Jan said. “It looks like he needs some help, and we are on our way to Bend.”

“It looks like he has a tag on that collar,” Judy said. “Is he nice?”

“He is the sweetest old thing,” Jan said. “I think he must be lost.”

Judy looked at the tag. “It says Tramp,” Judy read. “I guess that fits. Let me check with the doctor.”

I came out and looked at the cat. He was thin but okay otherwise, and it had a collar and a tag. The tag gave the cat’s name, Tramp. It also had an owner’s name and local phone number. I agreed to keep the cat.

“Thanks a lot, Doc,” Ralph said. “We have to hurry now. We have a meeting in Bend that we will be late for if we don’t get on the road.”

These foundlings were always a problem. Occasionally, the finder would offer to be responsible for the bill if the owner was not found. But most of the time, that expense, whatever it happened to be, fell on the clinic. At least Tramp came with an owner’s name and phone number.

Judy was given the task of calling the owner on the tag. 

“Yes, this is Robert Wilson,” the man said to Judy. “What can I do for you.”

“This is Judy from Sweet Home Veterinary Clinic,” Judy said. “We had a couple find an old cat on Pleasant Valley Bridge this morning. The cat has a tag on its collar with your name and number on the tag.”

“I don’t know what to tell you about that,” Mr. Wilson said. “We don’t own a cat.”

That was great news. We were stuck with finding someone to adopt this cat, not an unusual event for such situations.

  About 30 minutes later, we were still discussing how we would find someone to take the cat, and the phone rang. It was Mr. Wilson, the guy Judy had called about the cat.

  “What does that cat look like?” He asked.

  “It is a brownish tabby cat, neutered male, friendly. He looks a little thin and has sort of a rough hair coat, but otherwise, he is in good shape.” Judy replied.

  “We had a cat about 5 years ago. We had to move to San Francisco for a couple of years. We lost him on the trip down, somewhere in Northern California. His name was Tramp, but I don’t remember a collar. You don’t think that could be him, do you?” 

  “How else do you suppose this cat had Tramp’s collar?” Judy asked.

  “We will come right down and get a look at him.”

  It was not long, and a car pulled up in front of the clinic. Robert and his wife came through the door first, but Susie, their teenage daughter, was right on their heels.  

One look at Tramp, and it became a happy reunion. The daughter opened the cage, and Tramp was instantly on her shoulder and purring, rubbing his face on her neck and face. She was in tears.  

“Susie has suffered for years. We had stopped at a rest stop south of Crescent City, and Tramp got out of the car. The next thing we knew, he was scared by another car and ran into the woods. We looked for him for an hour, but we couldn’t stay there. We had to go on. Susie cried for days.”

“Do you think he has been traveling all these years? That is remarkable,” Judy said.

“It is pretty hard to believe, you saw the immediate recognition by both of them. Pretty remarkable, it will be a happy evening in our house,” Mr. Wilson said. “Do I owe you guys anything?”

“No, we are just happy we didn’t have to find a family to adopt him,” I said.

  The stories Tramp could tell. This was something right out of a Disney movie.

Photo by Gabriel Gheorghe on Unsplash

The Burrito

 D. E. Larsen, DVM

The rain stopped as I turned off the highway onto Wiley Creek Road. I was disappointed that the twilight was fading fast. I would cross the creek at the falls where the old Wiley mill had been located.

A short distance up the road, I turned onto the side road that crossed the creek just above the old mill site. The bridge was narrow and had no guardrail, and I drove across slowly.

I pulled up to the barn that had lights on. There, in a small pen, I could see a Hereford heifer, standing up and straining, with a couple of feet visible at her vulva.

Angie was there, clutching her small pup to her chest.

“Hi, Angie, this must be the heifer you called about,” I said as I stepped out of the truck.

“Yes, she has been like this for a couple of hours now,” Angie said. “Nobody else was home, and I didn’t know what to do, but it just didn’t look right to me. So I gave you a call.”

Calving difficulties in heifers were as close to routine for me as anything I did. But to these hobby farmers, with only a few cows, calving problems might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“Well, it looks like you did the right thing in calling me,” I said. “If she has been at this for two hours, it is time to give her a little help.”

I poured a bucket of warm water, grabbed my rope, and crawled over the fence into the calving pen. This was a tame heifer, and my presence distracted her enough that she turned around, licked at my arm, and sniffed the bucket of water. Her contractions relaxed for a moment.

I slipped the rope over her head and fashioned a halter with a loop over her nose. Then I walked her over to the fence and tied her to a rail. I left enough rope that she could fall down with no problems. That was something that usually happened if they were not already on the ground.

I tied her tail out of the way with a piece of twine and scrubbed her rear end and my arms. I inserted my left hand into her birth canal and bumped into the calf’s nose. With two feet out and a nose close to the vulva, this will be an easy delivery. I stuck a finger in his mouth, and he sucked on it. He was alive.

“This should be an easy delivery,” I said as I climbed back over the fence to get my OB bag and the calf puller. 

“What’s wrong?” Angie asked.

“Not much, just a young, first-time delivery and a calf that is a little too big for her,” I said. “If we left her through the night, I would guess she would deliver this calf on her own. But sometimes, that takes five or six hours of labor, and the calf may or may not survive. It is better this way. Give them two hours, then give them a little help.”

I put a nylon OB strap on the calf’s feet and positioned the calf puller. I hooked the strap to the puller and started cranking. The vulva stretched as the nose appeared. Then the head popped out. A couple more cranks on the puller and the chest of the calf was in the birth canal. The heifer strained, stiffened, and fell onto her right side.

I pulled the calf puller down toward her hocks and cranked fast. The chest cleared the vulva, and then the rest of the calf followed with a gush. The calf raised his head and shook it. 

“It’s alive!” Angie said.

“He is doing fine,” I said. “A little bull, he will be up before mom.”

I treated his navel with iodine and gave him an injection of BoSe to prevent white muscle disease. He was struggling to stand by the time I was done with him.

Since Angie was home alone, I stripped a few swallows of milk from the heifer and gave it to the calf with an esophageal feeder. Then I untied the twine on the heifer’s tail and removed the rope from her neck. 

After I picked my stuff up and got it over the fence, I swatted mom on the butt with my rope. She jumped up in a flash. She was slow to look at the calf but finally sniffed him as he stalked her on wobbly legs.

“What do I have to do with her now?” Angie asked. 

“I would leave her in here until you are sure she is getting along with the calf and he is nursing,” I said. “Sometimes these heifers take some time to figure out just what is going on, but they do fine most of the time, after a day or so.”

“Well, it’s a relief to see him on the ground,” Angie said.

“What going on that you are here by yourself?” I asked.

“We were on a mission, helping build a church in Mexico,” Angie said. “I had to come home early because everyone down there was calling this little pup of mine Burrito. Everyone said they were teasing me but just had to come home.”

Angie tightened her grip on the pup as she told me the story.

“They were teasing you, I’m sure,” I said. “But when I was in the Army in Korea, I am sure that dog meat found its way to the dinner table. If you read the Lewis and Clark Journals, they ate a lot of dog meat on their trip across the country.”

“I know. I just felt better when we got home,” Angie said. “And I’m glad I was here to get help for this little heifer.”

“Yes, and I think she will be fine,” I said. “But if you have any questions about how things are going, you give me a call.”

Photo by WKN on Pexels.

The Grand Tour, July – August 1956, Part 3

D. E. Larsen, DVM

We left Delaware and crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Robert had to stop early because he had a headache from driving the mountain roads. That is saying something for someone from the Oregon coast in the 1950s. We stopped at Mundy’s Motel, just out of Elkton, Virginia. We had two adjoining cabins for twelve dollars.

Fireflies were all over the lawns each night we stayed in Virginia. Phillip and I chased them with a jar, and we filled the jar in no time. An interesting bug that I had never heard of before.

We had breakfast in Harrisonburg for three dollars for the six of us and lunch at Radford for eighty cents each. I don’t remember too many restaurants, but when we ate breakfast out, I always had my fill of pancakes.

Grandma noted seeing all the “real southern homes.” That says something, as their house was a pretty good Oregon home.

I think we skirted into West Virginia just to say that we had been there. Because the days were getting hot, Aunt Lila took Phillip and me into a shoe store and bought each pair of sandals.

I had never had two pairs of good shoes to wear at a time in my life before this point. And the only thing I ever had that was close to a pair of sandals was when we cut down an old pair of barn boots. Cutting the toes out, leaving just a rubber strap across our foot, and cutting the top of the boot off at the ankle. Leather sandals were a luxury that I had never dreamed of before.

After West Virginia, we drove through Pound, Virginia. We had a lot of families in Myrtle Point who were from Pound. It was not much of a town. It seemed to be built on a hillside, and I remember a fog which I wonder now if it was coal dust.

We crossed into Kentucky through the Pound Gap. Daniel Boone called the gap, Sounding Gap. We spent the night in Whitesburg, Kentucky. We had a cool morning following an electric storm but the heat returned in the afternoon.

From Whitesburg, we drove down the eastern edge of Kentucky, crossed Tennessee, and just the corner of Georgia, stopping in Trussville, Alabama, just outside Birmingham.

We had an air-conditioned cabin with two beds for eight dollars. Phillip and I slept on the floor, as usual. But this was my first experience with an air-conditioned house.

The plan was to get up early, so we could miss the heat. I distinctly remember Robert closing the suitcase and handing it to me.

“Take this to the car,” Robert said. “Then come back, and I will have another one ready for you.”
I stepped out the door at 5:00 A.M. It was like stepping into an oven. It was nearly eighty degrees at five in the morning. What was it going to be like by noon?

We had a quick breakfast at a nearby restaurant. Robert tried some grits and was not impressed, and he had almost had me tempted to try some, but I stuck with pancakes.

We stopped at a country store for gas when heading for Columbus, Mississippi. When we went to the restroom, the owner was working on the toilet in the men’s room.

“You guys can use the lady’s room as soon as your women folk are done,” the man said.

“What about that one?” Robert asked, pointing to the restroom in the back labeled “Colored Men and Women.”

“That one is colored,” the man said.

“I don’t care about that,” Robert said. “Is it clean?”

“Oh, yes,” the man said. “It’s clean, but it’s colored.”

“We will use that one,” Robert said as he turned and headed for the restroom in the back.

This restroom was in what looked like a lean-to, added to the back of the store. It had a concrete floor that was poorly finished. A long urinal made of tin hung along the back wall with a slope so the small child could use the far end. There were five commodes along the other wall. No stalls or partitions, just open commodes.

We used the urinal and headed back to the car. Lila and Grandma were already back in the car. The man finished filling the gas tank and took our money, but he had nothing to say to us.

“I guess we must have bruised his feelings a bit,” Robert said as he pulled out onto the highway.

We drove through Columbus, Mississippi, and discussed trying to find the Shooks, my sister’s new in-laws, but Robert wanted to get as close to Texas as he could. We drove on through Mississippi and Arkansas, stopping in Texarkana. We had a nice room with two beds, six blocks from Texas. The room was nine dollars.

Our first stop in Texas was at a ranch in Quinlan. Robert wanted to look at their English shepherd dogs. An old man sitting on the porch of the old ranch house in a rocking chair didn’t offer to move when Robert and I got out of the car to talk with him. My memory says it was 106°, but Grandma’s notes say it was 102° on the store’s porch in Quinlan.

“We haven’t had rain in over six months,” the old man said. “John is over by the barn. He can show you some of the dogs. If you are from Oregon, you might want to watch out for those rattlesnakes. They are just about everywhere in this heat.”

Robert looked at the barn. It was probably over a quarter of a mile away.

“I think I’ll pass for now,” Robert said. “That’s way too far to walk in this heat.”

We got back to Quinlan and just got settled into our motel room when the rain came pounding down.

“That old guy will be happy that we brought him some Oregon rain,” Robert said.

The following morning, when we went through Dallas at 10:45 A.M., it was 94°. We stayed in Abilene. The motel had two beds and a sleeper sofa, so Phillip and I didn’t have to sleep on the floor. It also had a swimming pool. We hit the pool first thing and then again just before bedtime.

Driving across Texas was pretty boring. From Abilene, we went to El Paso. The only thing of interest was a tornado thirty or forty miles north of us. I was amazed when Robert said the distance, and there was no way one could see thirty miles in western Oregon.

At El Paso, we stopped at looked at the bridge to Mexico. Still, nobody was interested in going across the bridge. We stayed that night in Las Cruces. It was hot when we stopped and didn’t cool off much at night. The good thing was it rained most of the night.

Our last night in motels was in Wickenburg, Arizona. Grandma’s notes say they could only sleep with a sheet, but there was a swimming pool. We had breakfast at Quartzsite and then drove up to visit Hoover Dam. Since we were headed to South Gate to stay with Lois and Elton, Hoover Dam was a major detour. We arrived at South Gate at one in the morning, and Robert had trouble finding the address, but we finally arrived.

The rest of the trip was all with family and was a relaxing twelve days.

Elton took us for a ride in his airplane. I was amazed at the number of houses with swimming pools in their backyards. We even flew over Disneyland. I think it had just opened the year before.

We had a whirlwind visit, hitting all the hot spots, Marineland, Disneyland, Knots Berry Farm, and a large Arboretum. I am unsure how many days we were there, and Grandma’s notes mostly come to a close when we are back with family.

At Disneyland, I wanted to drive on their little race car track, but I was an inch too short. Robert told the attendant that I drove tractors and trucks all over the farm I wouldn’t have any trouble with those little cars. The guy let me drive.

We went to San Francisco from Lois’ place to visit another aunt. Audrey and Bev lived on the north side of San Francisco. Visiting with cousins Jim, Phyllis, and Beverly was a welcome break. We took a long ferry ride on San Francisco bay.

Then it was on to Fortuna to visit another family. Aunt Mary and her husband Des with Lorrene, Harold, and Ardyce. I think I was just about traveled out by then. We drove through the redwoods, but I don’t remember much else.

We departed Mary’s on August 14 with a speedometer reading of 70,946. We drove across the mountains to visit Uncle Vern’s widow in Shasta City, which would have added about 460 miles to the trip.

Total mileage was a little over 9,100 miles in thirty-seven days. A grand tour indeed.