Jackson the Cat apparently has the cool and bold travel skills of a furry, fuzzy, train-hopping hobo.
He arrived in Chattanooga last June and folks figure he probably hopped a ride from Knoxville, where he jumped out of a car that was heading north.
Jackson’s actual home is in Delaware and how he got to Chattanooga involves quite a journey.
Once here, he was lucky enough to find a Chattanooga family who have cared for him since last June.
“He was screeching and crying and screaming and very thin and very weak,” says Donna Blair of East Brainerd, who first found Jackson. “I wasn’t sure if he was feral or not. He didn’t have a collar on. I put a dish of food on the grass and he ran up and ate every bit like he was starving.”
Eventually, the Blairs were able to track down his former owner, who loved him enough to drive 700 miles from Wilmington, Del., and pick him up on Saturday, the day before Valentine’s.
Jackson’s travels began long before June, though. They began after his owner, 27-year-old Sara Platt of Delaware, discovered that she couldn’t keep him in her room at grad school.
“I asked a friend in Florida to take care of him for awhile,” she says.
Unknown to Platt, the friend had an emergency that required her to drive to Canada with five pet animals, including Jackson, in her car. She pulled into a Knoxville rest stop to stretch her legs and that’s when Jackson escaped.
Luckily, Platt, who adopted him six years ago from an animal shelter in Delaware, had a microchip implanted in him in 2014 – just in case he wandered off. Once she knew he was gone, she filed a missing cat report with the company that implanted the microchip, but no Jackson sightings ever came back.
“I called all the shelters in Knoxville and posted missing pet notices on my Facebook page but never got a lead,” Platt says, her voice trembling as she remembers how frantic she was.
If someone had spotted him, Jackson would be easy to remember. His white face looks as if a bottle of black ink splashed across his nose. He also has six toes on each paw, an anomaly shared by author Ernest Hemingway’s famous, beloved cats whose descendents still roam around his Key West mansion.
Blair saw him walking down a hill in her Chattanooga neighborhood. Children in the neighborhood told her they had seen him hiding under the Blairs’ truck.
Blair, her husband, their daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend continued to feed the strange new cat every day. They already owned three rescued pets, two cats and a dog named Cowboy who became close friends with the cat the Blairs renamed Roscoe.
“They play together and eat together. When I take Cowboy for a walk, Roscoe trots along with us,” Blair says.
With his new family, Roscoe/Jackson got healthier and more trusting. He’d hopped on the Blairs’ laps and loved being cuddled. As winter weather rolled in, they decided it was time for Roscoe to come indoors, so they took him to a vet to get his shots and a checkup. To their astonishment, the vet told them that Roscoe had a microchip implanted under his skin. The microchip directed them to Platt in Delaware, who was both shocked and thrilled when the Blairs phoned her in January.
“I hoped he was alive but I didn’t know,” says Platt, who now has a job with a medical society – and a home that allows her to have pets.
Losing Roscoe won’t be easy for the Blairs. Their daughter is 17 and will be sad to see the cat she knew as Roscoe leave, her mother says, but she realized that he might have had an owner somewhere, so she is prepared.
No one knows if Cowboy will have an easy time adjusting to the loss of his feline buddy. Blair says she is going to do her best to console him.
But this ending feels to her as if it were meant to be.
“I’ll miss him but I know he will be happy to be with Sara and that she will make him feel finally at home,” Blair says.
Contact Lynda Edwards at ledwards@timespress.com or 423-757-6391.