Daniel Adams
Dec 5, 2004

The Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society Collaboration Project

Finding Places

The beauty of this project is the discovery of the way in which the people who we met were united with other people and with their place through work with the cats. In my own work I have been personally interested to discover how people understand their context and how the contexts become revealed to people. I believe that the relationship we developed with Patte Grimes traveling through the city and her place in it, was a chance to see how even such a specific and eccentric activity as feeding feral cats forms a beautiful place in a community.

I am simultaneously amazed and baffled by this group's work with the cats, and I am largely left wandering what motivates them. I am not at all cynical or in-doubt of any of the generosity of what they do, but at first glance the actual activities of this group seem miserable. Each week Patte travels around in the cold or dark, behind dumpsters and landfills, to the most forgotten places trying to catch or feed animals that try to avoid her. The places she goes are reflections of the feral cats, the places are the back, isolated and uninhabited landscapes which attract the independence of the feral cat. Yet she persists, and really believes in what she does, while also seeing humor in it. I think that is honorable. Patte has been feeding the same cats and watching the same colonies diminish for over 12 years.

Talking to Patte has made it clear that she is not doing this to fulfill some moral obligation, but she really is attached to this as part of her life. This is a second activity or a second identity that has really become a passion of hers. There is something about going out alone at sunset and driving around to all of these places that she loves. As we followed her to all the different and strange sites around Newburyport one of the most interesting things I noticed was how she would always whisper while we were at any of the places. There was no one around, and she did this whether or not she thought cats were lurking. I came to interpret her whispering as a response to the quietness and emptiness of all the places we went, as if she did not want to disturb the places she had grown to be part of.

It is my own reading and self-projection, but I believe that she had most come to appreciate the way this work pulled her into the community and provided her with time and reason to go out into the quiet world and just take a break by driving around and experiencing these ignored landscapes. I am sure she often curses and doesn't feel like going out when it is pouring rain or really cold, but I am certain that if one day she had to stop she would miss this activity terribly. Through the cats Patte gained a new ownership of her landscape, she knows the comings and goings of the boat yards and the former city dump, she knew the types of plants in all the local marshes, her place had become known by committing to it and to the cats.

As she talked it was clear that through this activity and work with the cats she had made some of her greatest friends. First introduced by the shared condition of a soft spot in the heart for cats, the cat feeders had become a close group of friends who would spend their time together. They of course would talk about the cats and related stories, but the cats had led to deeper relationships in the community. The objects we made as a group tried to reflect this bond and unity and so I was especially happy to give the objects to Patte and hear her speak excitedly about giving the objects to friends at the Christmas Party.

This commitment to a cause, to a community of friends and to a place seems so beautiful. Personally I know of so many places that have come to have so much more meaning and value to me because of my use of them. Around my home I always remember the route between my house and my elementary school that I used to walk everyday with my best friend. A route that was only about a mile long that could easily last well over a couple of hours. I know every inch of those streets, yards, and paths. I still see that one friend and we still talk about old times, dumb things, and weird traditions we developed to simply pass the time after school. We remember one day discovering a dead mouse on the sidewalk, finding a chewing tobacco tin not far away and burying the mouse in the tin near some roots. For months everyday we would unearth the tin and look at the mouse, hoping to eventually see the mouse completely decayed to a skeleton. Before that day came the tin was gone, and my friend and I are still left wondering what took it. (We both deeply suspect Emily Eshelman a girl who lived across the street from me and who we had recently shown the mouse to before getting into a fight of some sort with, we think she sabotaged the mouse, but there will never be any proof) This event and tradition had come to mean a lot to us and it still does. This place and the whole route is locked into my mind as a definition of my place and my relationship with my friend. Now when I pass this route I am jarred with memories of my past traditions with the place. I hope I always remember this place and all the strange things we did there.

I think these realizations about the project are most enlivening to me and my conception of people's relationship to communities. The cats are important and influential in the formation of this group and this community, but in the end the beautiful thing is the association and commitment that the individuals formed. I think the cats mean a lot to these people but I believe that the genuineness of what these people do is in forming their own community and interacting with their place. I kind of imagine that when Patte no longer travels around to feed the cats she will have very fond memories of the cats which she came to know but also of the places and people with which she became united and which she came to know so well.