An Ode to the Outdoor Cat

Capitol Hill says goodbye to Lord Byron, Cricket says goodbye to the outside

Lord Byron is dead. Capitol Hill has lost its king. His death extinguished a spark of spontaneous joy from the neighborhood.

Lord Byron spent his days traversing the hill on his four paws. A tracker mapped his movements, clogging the display with pawprint icons. Lord Byron was prolific.

I first saw Lord Byron in the yard of the Yellow House, where Harry and I lived with our two friends for nearly two years, on East Capitol Hill. I summoned him with a “pspsps” and read the name on his tag and clocked the tile tracker on his collar. I assumed he lived nearby.

As I talked with more neighbors and further-flung Capitol Hill dwellers, I realized the expanse of Lord Byron’s territory.

“You met Lord Byron?” JB and Sydney, our neighbors in the cottage behind our house, gasped as if I’d met a celebrity. “Us too.” They regaled me with their own Lord Byron tales.

An urbanist I follow on Twitter often says seeing cats out and about is a sign of a livable city. They signify a place is walkable and safe. Fewer cars mean more neighborhood cats and more room for life, for spontaneity (for the sake of this argument, let’s forget about how outdoor cats decimate bird populations).

Happening upon a neighborhood cat is one of life’s greatest joys. The appear as if out of thin air like a spirit guide. Successfully summoning one toward you and having them rub up against your leg is akin to wrangling the wind.

I feared letting my own cat outside. Would he navigate the outdoors alright? Would he get lost?

Lord Byron and his prolificness proved that a cat could always find his way home. He gave me confidence to let Cricket into the world.

Harry and I ordered a tracker for Cricket. Thick and oblong, this tracker didn’t fit onto a collar. We stuck it on the back strap of a harness. We clipped Cricket into the harness each morning as he pawed at the front door. As he left, the harness tracker getup looked like a backpack.

“He has important meetings to get to,” Dom, our roommate, said.

For the nearly two years we lived there, Cricket lived his best life. He spent his days in the green spaces on the downslope to Madison Valley. He befriended the neighbor’s cat, Turbo. I learned from another neighbor that he often came to her window and she fed him pieces of salmon. Often, as I walked back home, I happened upon Cricket on the sidewalk. He bounded alongside me up the steps to the front door. Sometimes, we spotted him sunbathing on the roof of the neighboring mother-in-law unit. Harry’s dad, Anthony, who lived in that cottage, said Cricket walked right into his house whenever the door stood open.

When dusk fell, we whistled for Cricket. On occasion, he came running. We followed the dot on his tracker and he beelined from the houses behind us, through the alley, across the backyard, and up the steps. More often than not, he stayed put, not done with his dose of outside for today. We grabbed bags of treats and followed the GPS to his location. We—well, really Harry since I was too nervous to trespass—snuck into neighbors’ yards to scoop him up and take him home.

No matter how savvy he seemed, we worried about him outside. Flyers for missing pets covered the telephone poles in the neighborhood. People warned us of coyote sightings. Down in Portland, a car ran over my brother’s cat. He and I had stolen that cat, Nimitz, off a Greek island, so I rationalized maybe the car incident was a product of culture shock. But every cat owner I talked to about Cricket and his indoor-outdoor lifestyle warned about cars.

My mom worried openly. “I wish you would keep him inside,” she said whenever I mentioned his adventures.

So, as we debated moving back in together alone from our shared living situation, Harry and I rationalized that an apartment would be good for Cricket. His world would be smaller, but at least he would be safe.

In the first few weeks, I fretted about his smaller life, about how his motivation switched from play to food, something he’d never been that interested in. Then, walking along our block, I stumbled across the eviscerated carcass of a cat in the grass strip along the sidewalk. I balked. My stomach dropped. It felt like a sign that we had made the right decision.

Lord Byron’s passing feels much the same. As a neighborhood legend, Lord Byron seemed invincible, like a cat who had figured out how to have it all in the city. Yet, his death at only eight years old means that clearly he was not. Neither was Cricket.

Still, he meant a lot to the neighborhood. Lord Byron joined people on their nighttime walks as if making sure they made safe passage. He poked his head into people’s windows and trespassed in local shops. One day he even tried jiu jitsu.

Lord Byron’s appearances were a break in routine like a sunblush in the depths of winter. Every walk on the hill contained a chance at running into him and a chance at whimsy.

In the Facebook tribute group to LB, people are discussing funding an autopsy to determine his true cause of death. They’re painting portraits of him, brainstorming a place to plant a tree in his honor, creating LB stickers and dropping piles of them at local cafes. Some are trying to find a sculptor to make a neighborhood statue similar to the memorial in Istanbul for stray-cat-of-note Tombili.