MY JUNGLE KITTY AKA MIRACLE CAT IN MEXICO

When we moved to Mexico long ago we took our three-month old cat with us—Max, born on the Fourth of July. We got him from San Francisco SPCA on Union Square where they'd set up a tent to unload kittens. A bevy of little charmers peered at us from the cage—Max was the most bodacious of the bunch. Even when a two-alarm SF fire truck went roaring past, he didn't back away while I petted him through the wire. He was the one.

He's been neutered and had his shots. That was his life story, the SPCA authority told us. So what was ours? Well, we explained, we were leaving for Mexico in a few weeks and wanted to take a cat with us. We were cat lovers and trusted the SPCA when looking for a kitty.

GOIN' SOUTH? MAYBE NOT

Not so fast! we were told. How could they be sure we'd provide a good life for the cat south of the border? In Mexico!

Wait a minute, was this really happening? Were we being questioned about our capacity to provide a risk-free life for our new kitty by the San Francisco SPCA? Apparently so. By this time we'd bonded with newly named Max and just thinking about him not in our lives was almost unbearable. Paul, my husband, did some real fast-talking because within the next half hour we were trotting away with Mr. Max.

In looking back over the years, Ms. SPCA may have had a leg to stand on. Max endured some unbelievable ordeals, many man made. Allow me to elaborate. He didn't get his nickname Miracle Cat, aka Milagro Gato in Spanish from our trusted Cancun vet, por nada.

OFF THE GRID

First off, Quintana Roo in those days was unsettled and downright wild as far as critters go. Much of our pueblo, Puerto Morelos, was literally a jungle and our house sat a mile from the town zocalo. Back then we had very few neighbors and the mangroves across the sascab road were full of, well, varmints: gray foxes, crocodiles, boa constrictors, monkeys, and coatimundi. Also, added to the neighborhood combat list—beach dogs and stray cats. Non-neutered cats.

As life rolled along I came to realize Max was probably the lone neutered cat in all of Quinatana Roo. The strays still had their testosterone. I could tell by the midnight cat fights that woke me. I'd jump out of bed, open the screen door, and clap my hands a few times to curtail the fight. That usually worked and Max would haul his battered buns inside the house to sleep off his late night wake-up call, only to once again realize he was indeed a stranger in a strange land.

 

 

OUT AND ABOUT

By this time he was tri-lingual: English, Spanish and Mayan. But somehow his Fourth of July birthday must have given him away. Every stray seemed to know he was gringo through and through. He'd cat around in those early days, and often when we went back to the US for a visit, I'd hear reports on our return from the neighbors—Max was over, or we saw Max in the mangroves. Once we had to go back to the US for a few months and we left him with caretakers. Basically their only job was to feed him. I received a concerned email from a neighbor that said he'd lost all his hair and was as skinny as the pink panther. Obviously something was amiss.

NEIGHBOR ALERT

She administered to him. We'd assumed the simple task of feeding Max was taking place but on our return home, we saw a raggedy cat with no fur from his mid-section to his tail. The caretaker said he wasn't eating. After checking his food supply—now Whiskas—what happened to the bags of pricey Science Diet?—I discovered it was moldy. We dragged him to the vet. Malnutrition had caused the hair loss and the ungas. Ung-what? It was a fungus, the vet explained, and if we applied a topical cream it would go away.

From then on we asked the neighbor to check in on him if we were gone. Although Max was usually an outdoor cat who used a flapper door for easy in and out privileges, for a while he shrank from any open door. We were flummoxed—he loved being outside. A few days later the gardener found a four-foot boa in the front yard. We assumed that was Max's reasoning for avoiding the great outdoors. We marveled at what he must have seen on those dark jungle nights, and how he managed to stay alive.

INSIDE THE WALLS

But there was no way he'd stay inside full time. Not his style. Early on he'd cavort inside and out of our gated property, throwing caution to the wind as he ran across the street. But a few years later he started avoiding going out of the gate as the road, now paved, got busier and busier. He hung back and restricted himself to a life within the high walls of Casa Maya. His nine lives must have come knocking. Over the years we understood why our vet named him Milagro Gato. When he made his first visit to the vet at the tender age of six, he'd earned that nickname. 

"Why milagro gato? Miracle cat?" I'd asked. 

"Oh," replied our savvy vet. "No cat can live in the jungle that long. He's un milagro."

Truer words were never spoken.

Footnote: Max retired at the age of 17 to the central coast of California.

WHY WRITE ABOUT MEXICO?

Back in the 80s I fell in love with Mexico. When I began traveling to Mexico’s Caribbean coast, first stop was Isla Mujeres, an island just twenty minutes by ferry from Cancun.

In 1983 Cancun hadn’t become the tourist hotspot it is today, and getting there from San Francisco took eighteen hours. My husband and I flew Mexicana Air which was a drama in itself. Though the flight was said to have a lone stop— Mexico City—before we reached our Cancun destination, Guadalajara became a port of call along with another airport we stopped at in the dead of night and never learned the name of.  

With so many starts and stops, we lost time and ended up arriving to Cancun so late we nearly missed the last ferry to our little Mexican island. By sheer luck we reached the dock in time to board the empty boat, enjoying the warm Caribbean breeze as we chugged towards our tropical destination.

This was the beginning of my love affair with Mexico, and years later after we’d moved there from California, I opened a bookshop and began writing travel articles for local newspapers and Mexico websites, eventually writing a travel memoir about my life in a foreign land, Where the Sky is Born. 

After finishing another non-fiction, Maya 2012 Revealed, a journalistic overview of the 2012 calendar phenomenon, I began my research for Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival. I’d lived in Mexico and owned a business there long enough to see the creeping dominance of the cartels and their effect on the daily lives of citizens. I'd kept news clippings and written notes in a journal on various incidents I'd heard about.

Obviously it would have been folly to write non-fiction about the country's overlords. I was well aware of the cartels' swift carriage of justice to any Mexican journalist who dared write about their exploits: 119 assassinated and 30 missing since 2000.  My personal heroes—journalists Anabel Hernández and Lydia Cacho—had both undergone their own dramas by daring to be so bold. Hernández was targeted for writing Narcoland, a scathing exposé of government officials cozying up to the Sinaloa cartel. In a raw display of power to detain her, cartel henchmen dressed as federal agents cordoned off an entire Mexico City block, checking for her door to door. Luckily she was not home. 

Lydia Cacho was not so lucky. After reporting on the sexual peccadilloes of Cancun politicos, she was kidnapped, thrown into the trunk of a car, and driven to Puebla where her attackers planned to stage a kangaroo trial to put her in jail indefinitely. Through luck, friends in Cancun discovered where she was being held and secured her release. Afterwards she went back to reporting at Por Esto in Cancun. When asked about the attack she replied, "I don't scare so easy."

For me, I decided to write cartel fiction that pulled stories straight from Mexico papers. Using current news as prompts for stories is an old ploy. If Dostoyevsky could do it, so could I.

My Mexico notebooks were filled with outlandish, unbelievable tales. Since my love of Mexico goes deep, I wanted to expose cartel corruption and mirror the chaos and destruction they've created. By writing fiction, I felt I could reach a larger audience and make readers aware of the social injustice taking place in my adopted homeland. Thus I began my research for Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival. Four years later it was finished. Tulum Takedown came out in March 2020, book two in the Wheels Up trilogy.

I view the trilogy as historical fiction, an insider's close-up of a disastrous situation. As the quotation by Charles Bowden at the beginning of Tulum Takedown states, "Underneath the cartels lies the disintegration of a nation." 

For more writings about Mexico, the Maya and the Yucatán, check my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Subscribe above for my bi-monthly blog posts.