So Many Cats in the Car

art by Mahmoud Elmardi

by Catherine Hensley

Of course it was a Tuesday. It seems obvious in retrospect. Nothing good ever happens on a Tuesday. Mondays always greet you with their big Blank-Check Energy. There’s a whole new week ahead! You are going to accomplish so much! And then Tuesday rolls around, and it’s already gone to shit.

Still, it had been a pretty uneventful day, even by Tuesday standards. The sun was shining. Emails were sent. To-do lists were updated, modified, and procrastinated. A grocery run was squeezed in. It was also very windy. Like wake you up at five in the morning rattling the water heater shed outside windy. A neighbor’s discarded Christmas tree blowing up and down the street windy. Very windy. But a Tuesday nonetheless.

Winds were not uncommon either, those pesky Santa Anas rolling in around this time of year with their warm yet troublesome vibes, ready to knock over a potted plant or purposefully placed garden gnome. All of the potted plants on the porch were knocked over on this particular Tuesday, even the very heavy ones in ceramic homes. And there goes that Christmas tree again, traveling west as a rogue patio umbrella seems poised to become a giant dart at any moment.

The video I took from the backyard in the late afternoon seems I don’t know what now. Silly? Quaint? The palm trees and banana trees were rolling back and forth in the sea of wind—everything was—and what I really wanted to capture was the sound—the whistling, near-hissing through the leaves and branches, even the patio furniture, like it had decided not to just roll into town but to also turn the whole landscape into its own interpretive orchestra. The much-sped-up tones of the back porch wind chime added an interesting element. Oh well. Time to get dinner ready.

This is what a Tuesday can do to you. It’ll lull you into an unmistakable sense of any-other-dayness. There are meals and mail and cute videos to text. And then like a rubber band slapping back into place, you’re no longer mindlessly scrolling through the headlines on your phone. You are immediately aware of your location. A fire has broken out on the other side of Pasadena. Huh. Interesting. Something to keep an eye on. I shared the headline with my husband and cleared the dinner dishes. Time to check the mail.

It was 6:19 p.m., dark already except for the massive, glowing orange spot shining very brightly against the Sierra Madre mountains. During the daytime, our front porch offers a lovely view of this mountain vista that is only a few miles away. On this night, there was a very different view. It was January 7, 2025, in Southern California. A Tuesday.

* * * * *

How do you know when you’ve crossed the thin, porous line from hope into despair? It’s possible that I experienced this moment in real time and that it occurred exactly as I found myself packing skincare products into my “go-bag.” I didn’t pack that many. Certainly not everything I have. Not the LED mask, for goodness sakes. But I got an assortment together, I admit it. I had time to fill a Ziploc baggie’s worth of products. We had a lot of time, which so many didn’t have up the road in Eaton Canyon and down in the Palisades. I debated between the big jar of expensive face cream and the more reasonably sized but cheaper moisturizer. With the increasingly real prospect of my house burning down, clearly I’d unwittingly already taken the quick trip to delusion-ville.

Before I go any further, you must know two things. First, my husband Rob is a largely unflappable person. He is an engineer, and everything, to him, is in some way solvable and capable of having logic applied to it. He is inscrutable. Unmoved. Dispassionate. I am . . . the opposite of that. Second, at the time of the Eaton fire, we had six cats—three indoors and three outdoor ferals. We had three cat carriers. All of these facts were not unknown to me prior to January 7. In mental preps and hypothetical conversations turned anxiety spirals with Rob, I often played around with the wild scenario of “must get out of here in a hurry with all the cats.” I’d speculate about which cats might squish together best into which carriers and be least likely to murder each other in such a circumstance. Rob would offer, “Toss ’em in pillowcases. Done.”

These two unsatisfying options flashed brightly in my head as I weighed the merits of serum versus sheet mask and liquid cleanser versus solid bar. Into the seven, eight, even nine o’clock hours, they were large ideas very present and yet still held at arm’s length. I could’ve run down to Petco in this time and picked up three more carriers. This is crystal clear to me now and did not even occur to me then. Because when is it time to go? When do you know you really must leave? The raging orange glow on the mountainside a few short miles away is not going to send you an emergency notification text that it’s ready to roll on in. The city was supposed to do that. I started to check the local news for updates frequently, and social media too. I also put more pertinent items into bags, like clothes and snacks. Rob reminded me gently and not so gently to not panic. He laid on the couch and alternated between Netflix and Prime Video.

This infuriated me on a cellular level. “We’re signed up for the emergency alerts,” he said. He seemed not very interested in the top ten Netflix shows of the day but intrigued by an obscure-looking Cold War docuseries whose trailer he’d already seen five or six times. Of all the evenings to trailer scroll, of all the supremely annoying partner habits that pepper a marriage, he had to break this one out on a night like this. Doesn’t he see that I’m in the kitchen putting cat food and litter supplies into tote bags? Doesn’t he see that I’m making a list of things we might need? Doesn’t anything bother him ever?

I knew as I made these excellent and reasoned points in my head that this was an argument I would never win. Certainly not tonight. Besides, who could effectively argue with the wind still howling like it was. It was so loud, just relentless whooshing and swirling outside and rattling everything around the house that could possibly be rattled, including the outdoor cats. One by one, they happily, or willingly at least, came inside, something they each did on occasion but eagerly so on this night. 

I continued to pack things I thought we would need for a place I didn’t know where and a timeframe I had no idea of. I settled on the fancy face cream and a few different serums, for variety. This seemed like both a victory and something I should spend some time trying to mentally “unpack” at a later, less windy, less combustible time. The winds and the orange blaze up the road were not subsiding. By 9:30 p.m., I’d gotten a decent assortment of essentials pulled together. Rob got up from the couch and said he was going to bed.

I experienced then what I imagine to be the opposite of conscious uncoupling. Unconscious de-partnering rage perhaps? This man was going to bed. This nonpacking, nonprepping, nonplussed man was relaxed enough to go to bed. Episode one of the Cold War docuseries had put him sufficiently at ease. “We’ll get the text if we have to leave,” he said. This became his refrain that night. Wait for the magical emergency alert text. The emergency text will alert us! Why are you wasting energy panicking? Might as well get some rest. Wait for the emergency text. He went to bed. I knew then that Gwyneth Paltrow never had to evacuate anywhere with Chris Martin.

In the least surprising development of the evening, I girded myself for staying up all night. The nasty winds and the bright flames in the distance were not letting up. Neither was my mind. The fire appeared to be moving leftward along the mountainside. Eastward? Westward? The local news on TV had begun to deliver updates in directional terms. “If you’re north of this street and west of that street, this area is now under a mandatory evacuation order” and so on. I realized that despite geography being one of my favorite subjects in school, I had retained nothing and was now paying the price for my genuinely lousy sense of direction. I didn’t even know what way was “fire in those mountains I’m looking at from my window.”

As Channel 4 continued to educate me about my physical location, the emergency texts started rolling in. First was for Sylmar, near the 11:00 p.m. hour, a town I knew was nearby and that Google Maps was telling me is about twenty miles away. This was concerning. I couldn’t have said east or west, but I knew that Sylmar was to the left of us, and the fires we’d been seeing all evening had been coming from the right of us. It was getting on toward midnight, and the fires looked to be coming from both directions. From the bedroom, I heard Rob snoring.

Even the cats, even the outdoor ones now in, seemed equally unconcerned, some startles at wind gusts notwithstanding. I was the only one in the household struggling to keep it together. I don’t think I’d passed fully into the throes of despair yet but I’d been living so long in delusion that an actual emergency stripped away every pretense I’d been holding on to—that I’m a strong, independent woman; that everything works out for the best; that what I believe for myself, what I hope and pray and wish for, will find me. Delusions, you see?

As the hours dragged by, I sat frozen on the couch, honing my map-reading skills as the orange inferno continued moving left across the mountain faces. The lights inside our house flickered a couple times. By 1:00 or 1:30 a.m, the smell of smoke creeping inside grew to the cover-your-face-with-a-blanket level. The strong, independent woman in me wanted to leave right then, had wanted to leave five hours ago, yet there I was on the sofa, breathing through a fleece throw and waiting on my husband. What else have I been lying to myself about? What else have I deluded myself into believing?

In an attempt to do something, anything, of my own volition, I decided to load my ramshackle go-bags into the car. Yes, I thought, this will be an efficient and effective use of my time. The short, hundred-foot walk to our Subaru Outback featured weather I had never experienced before and hope never to again. The loudness and stinkyness inside the house was nothing compared to the unrelenting tempest swirling outside. The hurricane-force winds blew and whipped things around with a fervor that caused me to have to lean down and push my way to the car. The smell of burning was inescapable. I wondered how far that rogue Christmas tree had been blown to. It might be in Orange County at this point.

Back inside, the tempest remained internal. I returned to the couch. Rob continued sleeping. I became an expert in a heretofore unknown-to-me app called Watch Duty, a real-time wildfire-monitoring platform. The lights flickered again. I debated possibly a million times the pros and cons of grabbing the cats, heading out in our one car, and leaving the sleeping man lie. I knew we’d have to leave, had known for hours. I knew. That was about as much gumption as I mustered that night.

Sometime in the 4:00 a.m. hour, neighbors started texting that they were preparing to leave. Rob, who’d rebuffed my few earlier attempts to rouse him with increasingly ominous news, actually took note of this development with those around us. The seemingly imminent reality of having to pick up and go brought the evening’s most material lack once again into sharp focus: the low number of cat carriers and high number of cats. I texted one neighbor who has one cat and asked if she had any extra carriers. She didn’t. But she did have an idea.

Between Rob actually getting up and getting dressed and asking me half a dozen times if leaving was something I was sure I really “wanted” to do, our neighbor ran over and dropped off several large, multiple-cat-sized storage bins. “Desperate times” and all that. My fantastical plan to grab the six cats and leave sans husband became a possibility. But he was up and pulling together our important papers. He’s so good about knowing what to do in any situation. His stability counters my inquietude. I’m fourteen levels deep into magical thinking, and he knows exactly where our Social Security cards and birth certificates are.

Once in their carriers, the cats were surprisingly quiet, shock no doubt. The three we thought would be the most troublesome—Reese, Barney, and Black Beauty—each got a real carrier. Gary and Leroy, our twenty-four-pounder, each got a quite roomy storage bin with the top not totally snapped on for air flow until we got inside the car. Dude, our most friendly, our cat-dog, our baby, got a big duffle bag slung over my shoulder from which he promptly pushed out of once in the front seat with me.

There was a short pocket of time, five or ten minutes, right before we left where we found ourselves milling around the house, looking at everything we were leaving behind. That’s when I realized I hadn’t even thought to grab the box of old photos I’d neglected to put in an album for decades. And my mom’s original paintings on the walls. The birthday cards Rob has handmade for me over the years. There’s so much, I kept thinking, but now no time. Where had I been?

Glowy little red embers swirled every which way as at last all eight of us were inside the car. An also-leaving neighbor waved goodbye as he passed, and his parting “I think we’re going to lose our houses” floated around as hotly as what was outside. Our neighborhood fell under mandatory evacuation orders, but we never got the emergency alert text. Not that evening, not the next day. Every area around us beeped, but not us. Rob turned on the ignition and started driving.

* * * * *

“That’ll be fine,” I said, my cell phone pressed against my ear. “And what is your pet policy?” The serviceably friendly customer service agent for the La Quinta Inn—Costa Mesa/Newport Beach went into the weeds about incidentals but eventually shared the magic number: two. I panic-pivoted and in the most trying-to-be-oh-so-charming voice I asked if a couple more would be OK. We’ve had to evacuate. The fires. We don’t know where to go. “How many more?” “Six,” I answered, my penchant for panic revealing one of its many weaknesses: an inability to lie on the spot.

Laughter peeled through wherever the reps were housed. I must’ve been on speakerphone. The echoing giggles really sealed it in, our lack of deep connections, lack of family anywhere nearby, though that certainly didn’t need highlighting after what was now going on six hours of driving around with six cats. We just drove around. That’s what we did. First, almost instinctively, south to Long Beach, the waters of the Pacific very appealing compared to the inferno raging around our home in the Rose City. The initial drive out was nothing—no deadlocked traffic, no pileups, nothing. Within minutes, the smoke had lifted, and day was starting to break, and this day, minutes away, had none of the features we were fleeing. It was like it wasn’t even happening there.

We needed gas, so we got gas. Rob wanted coffee, so we found a Starbucks near a park, and we watched people doing normal park things on a slow morning in Long Beach. Further down in Orange County, we found a Petco, where I bought actual cat carriers and also treats to slip to our still largely stunned car buddies. They were so good. Nobody was howling. Nobody had any accidents. Cats move quickly from angry hysteria to abject shock.

The drive to Costa Mesa was pleasant enough, the sun sparkling down like any other Wednesday in Southern California. Rob drove like it was any other Wednesday. He likes to drive, especially long distances. I used to think it quieted his mind, but probably he does math problems in his head. Anything that moves me does not move him. Movies that make me cry do not make him cry. News proclamations that ring alarm bells for me do not do the same for him. Nor do even orange fireballs rolling along the mountains up the road. But he does listen to me, the equations bouncing around in his brain notwithstanding.

What is there to say about the La Quinta Inn—Costa Mesa/Newport Beach? It was the kind of place that would take in two wandering people with six still largely comatose cats on a Wednesday afternoon. But it took us in, and so for me, it might as well have been The Beverly Hills Hotel. The neverending hum of the San Diego Freeway across the street and the trash can overflowing to the ground outside our door said otherwise. It was home for what ended up being three days.

Those three days were a blur of storage bin litter boxes, Target runs, Chipotle runs, relatives and friends checking in from afar, and TV news coverage, the fires a national point of interest. Our backyard security camera showed smoke so thick it looked like fog. On the second day, Rob drove back to Pasadena to check on our house and the neighborhood. We’d heard some other neighbors were doing the same, that containment efforts were working. I think he probably had more equations he wanted to tumble over in his head.

I didn’t want to go back there, certainly not now. I started to turn over in my own head what thoughts of “Ever?” might be signaling. Dude paced around the one-room space, just like he paces at home. Barney discovered a hole in the bathroom vanity that both fit her and gave her the advantage of surprise when jumping out of it. Gary and Black Beauty wrestled on the bed, but it was too high for Leroy to jump up onto. He would need steps. Reese, the most “outdoor” of the outdoor bunch, the spookiest, didn’t hide the whole time.

Surely I didn’t want to permanently move us into the La Quinta—Costa Mesa/Newport Beach. At a minimum, their trash collection was dismal. Still, the delusion wafted around me in an all-too-familiar way. You are a capable, independent woman. You are going to have a large circle of friends and host grand gatherings at your uncluttered, elegantly decorated home. You are going to get pregnant after ten years of your body clearly telling you, “Honey, no.” You are not a cat lady.

On one of our evenings at the La Quinta, we laid in bed and did about all you could do there: watch Anderson Cooper on TV cosplaying a firefighter. Five of the six cats joined us. It was Reese’s first time on a bed. She seemed to like it. Home seemed anchored both everywhere and nowhere. So did my mind.

* * * * *

The Eaton and Palisades wildfires in January 2025 burned through more than 35,000 acres of Los Angeles County. Over 16,000 structures were destroyed. Wildlife displacement was hard to estimate, though Pasadena Humane took in around 700 animals, including wild creatures like bobcats and peacocks. Thirty-one people lost their lives. Thousands more lost everything else.

We returned to our still-standing house on January 11. There were some trees down on the streets around us. In our yard, we found the charred pages of a book and a burned shingle here, another there. Later, we learned that the fires had come within a half mile of us. On the day we got home—the day we piled all six cats back into the car and Gary clawed his way out of his brand-new soft-top carrier just so he could climb into Rob’s lap and ride there the whole way—not much on our street would’ve hinted at the chaos and confusion of the past ninety-six hours.

I had many bins and carriers and bags to clean out. Three more cats to integrate into our home. I wondered, too, if maybe I had a little more clarity with which to see myself. Or, at least, to try to. Rob laid on the couch and turned on a rerun he’s seen twenty times.

It was sunny out. It wasn’t a Tuesday.

---

Mahmoud Elmardi is a Sudanese novelist and award-winning visual artist based in Cairo. His multidisciplinary work explores themes of memory, migration, and human conflict, bridging the gap between narrative fiction and abstract expressionism. A graduate of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the Sudan University of Science and Technology and winner of the prestigious Katara Prize for Fine Art, Elmardi is the author of acclaimed novels, including The Secret of the Chisel and Lost in the Mango Orchards. His visual and literary work has been featured in several prestigious academic and literary journals, including RipRap Journal (California State University, Long Beach), Ignatian Literary Magazine (University of San Francisco), Hellbender Magazine (West Virginia University), and Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature. He is currently developing a large-scale narrative project titled The Walls of Guernica.