In about a month, I will relocate to Toronto for the season. I’ve scored a sweet sublet complete with DSL and a parking space, and I can’t wait to blow out of Manhattan with my suitcase and my sheets and my computer in the trunk and live a different life in a different city for awhile. But there’s one thing keeping me up nights. No, not the rate of currency exchange. No, not the potential scarcity of good bagels. No, not Canadian TV.

The cats.

Oh, God. The cats.

Me. In a compact car. For nine or ten hours. Across four states and a province. With…the cats.

The cats. The aggrieved howling. The furious wailing. The defiant barfing. The terrified peeing. The claw sharpening. The fighting. The biting. The underneath-the-gas-pedal hiding. The from-the-ceiling dangling. The to-slither-out-the-window attempting. The abandon-hope-all-ye-who-enter-here shedding. The on-the-dashboard-during-sharp-turns walking.

The cats.

Mine is a heart filled with dread.

In the past, Bunting cats have suffered interstate transport with great forbearance. The inaugural family feline, Ding, used to accompany my parents — and, later, a tiny me — on trips to Maine, and she had her little routine for every trip: enter car complaining; roam around car for thirty minutes while glaring at other cars and trampling my father’s groin while he attempted to pilot a motor vehicle at sixty miles per hour; huggering down by my father’s feet and bathing, thus forcing my father to adopt a crane pose in order to reach the pedals; retiring to the rear of the car to take a giant, malodorous crap; spreading herself out on top of the ancient orange cooler for a nap while my parents pressed their faces to the tiny crack of window Ding’s presence in the car would allow and attempted valiantly not to hurl; occasionally opening one eye exactly three millimeters, the better to observe my mother suspended Mission: Impossible-style between the front and back seats, one foot wedged against the ceiling and the other in my father’s armpit, as she frantically flailed litter in the direction of the angry log in the catbox; emerging from the car and hopping straight up onto the warm hood while my father composed yet another photo in the “Exasperated Cat Tolerates Scenery At Lake Damariscotta” series; stomping off in a huff to terrorize the local frog population.

My brother and I often found ourselves roped into service to bring Ding and our other childhood cat, Blecket, to the vet two towns over. We had two cats but just the one carrier, which in any case required copious amounts of twine (and a heavily sedated cat in the second place) in order to do much good. Mr. S and I enjoyed those chaotic outings — “Red alert! Cat in sector one! I repeat, cat in sector one!” “You know, that’s very cute, but the cat is not ‘in sector one,’ the cat is ON MY HEAD, and this intersection is RATHER BUSY, so could whoever is in CHARGE of cat REMOVAL in sector one please GET ON THAT?” — but we thought that car travel with cats belonged to the past, yet another element of our parents’ glamorous and subversive former lives that we would never know, like the college yearbook photo of our father doing the twist on a library table while clad in a suit vest with no shirt underneath and beer-soaked madras shorts. As it turns out, we thought wrong.

One year, the parental brain trust decided to bring Dusty, our new kitten, along with us to Cape Cod for the month of August. The last time a pet had joined us on Cape Cod, said pet — my cousin’s scrappy dachshund Christina — had gotten sprayed from tip to tail by a skunk and then galloped straight into my room to share the wealth, so I had my doubts about the idea even on paper. And in practice…well, no ankle escaped Dusty’s youthful wrath. Or knee. Or hand. Imagine living with a four-pound furry weed-whacker aimed at your legs, all day, every day…a very cute four-pound furry weed-whacker, true, but a humpy weed-whacker with no off button who once sank a fang into the heel of my mother’s hand to the tune of one hundred tetanus-proof dollars in doctor’s fees. I fully expected a bloodbath.

But Dusty must have read the manual, because the drive went off without a hitch. He rocketed around the car; he hid in my father’s nostril; he mewled pathetically; he clawed the suitcases; he took a dump that had its own zip code; he sacked out in my brother’s lap and didn’t move a whisker for seven hours. Plus, once we got there, he would climb trees and get sadly, moronically stuck in them just like he did at home, but because the sandy soil in Cape Cod yields such short trees, we could stroll out onto the deck and pluck him off of the branches with one hand while holding a Popsicle in the other.

Anyway. I wish I could take a bit of hope from the memory of Dusty snoozing it up on my brother’s legs as we tooled over the Bourne Bridge, but I can’t. For one thing, I have a two-door Accord, not a station wagon. For another thing, I have two hellions, not one — full-grown hellions who do not like to have their routines interrupted, altered, or so much as looked askance at. And for a third thing, I drove one of those hellions from New York to New Jersey — a trip that’s about one tenth the length of the one from New York to Toronto — once. One time. It did not go well. At all. The hellion in question, Hobey, is the exact opposite of calm and easygoing; in fact, he’s a nationally-ranked neurotic, and merely opening the door of the closet in which I store the cat carrier occasions a wide-eyed stare of frank horror and an unbecoming scramble underneath the bed. When I brought him home for the holidays, he growled and fussed the whole time; I’d opened the top of the carrier to let him explore if he wished, but he remained inside, trembling angrily and farting like a little orange madman. Hobey suffers from nervous gas, and it once cleared an entire car of the F train, so I imagine he believed that the time-honored assault of tuna-scented flatus would induce me to turn the car around and take him back home posthaste. Indeed, my brother, who had generously agreed to accompany me on the fateful trip, grabbed me by the collar and muttered, “Turn back, foolhardy soul, for The Cat Poot Of Fear answers TO NO MORTAL,” but by that time we’d hit tunnel traffic and I refused to surrender. Hobey responded by shedding even more furiously than he usually does when he’s anxious, to the point where cat hair drifted against the rear windshield and obscured my view. Mr. S donned an asbestos mask against the airborne dander and urged me to reconsider. I pressed on. Hobey climbed out of the carrier, whizzed on the back seat, and climbed back into the carrier. The rest of the drive took place in silence, save for the occasional sob of “I hate you, Sar” from my brother; Hobey greeted our arrival at the ancestral home by hopping out of his carrier, stretching his legs, and throwing up. Three times.

So there’s the Hobe. And then there’s Little Joe, who screams like a fat striped silent-movie heroine whenever he has to get into his carrier, and who doesn’t stop screaming until he’s let out. I bring him to the vet, and he’s wailing and bawling and whining in his tiniest, cutest, please-save-me-because-I-am-so-tiny-and-cute voice, and I have to stand there, cringing, waiting for the light to change and trying to jolly Little Joe into shutting up before a well-meaning member of PETA places me under citizen’s arrest, and little old ladies peek into the carrier at the tiniest cutest cat in the world and baby-talk, “Awww. The tiniest cutest cat in the world is so unhappy,” and on the word “unhappy,” they glare up at me like I just dropped a burning cigarette into a baby stroller, and I have to smile and say something vaguely banal like “oh, he hates the vet, you know how they get,” and they come back all tight-lipped with a judgmental “uhhhh huh,” like, the hell? Do I look like I enjoy the squalling, and the rustling, and the quarrelling? Do I look like I have nothing better to do with my day than trundle a manipulative fifteen-pound proponent of guerrilla theater around the neighborhood? And do I want to spend nine hours in the car with that? No. No, I most certainly do not.

Fortunately, a friend of mine has cat tranquillizers left over from her own two-cat drive, so maybe I can just drug them both to the gills and dash over the border with no problem. But the border is a problem of its own. Allegedly, I only need to furnish a vet’s certificate stating that neither Hobey nor Little Joe has rabies or fleas or American cooties of any kind, but I don’t really know the procedure. I mean, do they have to inspect the cats? Because that’s fine, as long as inspecting the cats doesn’t involve waking the cats, and as long as the inspectors indemnify themselves beforehand against any bloodletting that might occur. I can just see an international fracas erupting because some border hotshot who thinks I’m using my cats as drug mules winds up taking a claw to the earlobe.

The cats. The car. The Canadians interacting with the cats in the car. The alliteration isn’t helping. I can’t think about it anymore. Kill me now.

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