The day begins well enough. Quite well, in fact: I’m on vacation in Lo De Marcos, Nayarit, a coastal town about an hour north of Puerto Vallarta. 

This is the third morning I’ve set off to find some surf, and the first that my friend and hostess has decided to sleep in and leave me to my own devices. Since I’m alone in the car this time, I find some pop music on the radio – ¡Hola, Harry Styles! – and leave the station on all 40 minutes of the drive to La Lancha even as it fades in and out, occasionally overtaken by static as the road curves along the jungle and through San Pancho and Sayulita, where the speed bumps bounce and rattle the car no matter how slowly I take them.

I park at the surf shop across from the trailhead and cut the engine. That’s when I hear the sound. A mewing. Mew. Mew. Mew. I open the door. No veo un gato. But the mewing is clearly nearby and not stopping. I lean down. The mewing seems to be coming from beneath the car. I get out, crouch down, knees pressing into the asphalt, bits of gravel under my palms, elbows crooked as I peer beneath. Still no sign of the cat, but the mewing is definitely emanating from the bottom of the car. I clamber up, cross to the other side, look from that angle, cannot see where this cat could be.  

I pop the hood, terrified of what I might find when I look inside the engine compartment – I feel sure the cat can’t be in there. I don’t smell anything burning. Indeed, no cat under the hood. 

“Here, kitty kitty,” I call, now fully lying down next to the car. The cat mews in response, but still does not appear. I decide the mewing tone is one of concern, not injury, so the clear best course of action is probably to go surf and give the cat a chance to extricate itself while I’m gone. The day is early yet and with cloud cover, so heat shouldn’t be an issue. Several cats consider the surf shop home, if I remember correctly, so maybe this one, who has survived a 21-mile drive tucked into the bottom of a Honda HRV, will choose to descend from the car, regale the shop cats with his adventure and begin a new life in La Lancha. 

One can hope.

I grab my board and towel, and hike down the trail, past the “Cuidado con los cocodrilos” signs, to the beach. The waves are waist-high at best, mushy, and – despite my pleasure at being in a swimsuit instead of a 5/4 wetsuit – nowhere near fun enough to stave off the guilt over leaving a distressed creature unrescued. The voices of my cat-obsessed friends holler in my head. I catch a gutless right to shore and hustle back up the path to the car. 

The kitty does not answer my calls. Maybe it left! (Please don’t be dead, cat.) I start the car and listen… a mew emanates over the engine noise! I shut the car off, lay down on the ground again and… at last! The cat has not only made himself visible, but is on the ground, his orange-and-white self crouched, alert and staring at me with his one good eye. 

Relief courses through me – followed immediately by the knowledge that this struggle is only half over. You see, I know this one-eye cat. His name is Veintiocho and he is the darling of my friends’ Lo De Marcos block, named for the house number of the woman who rescued him as a kitten. This is a cat beloved. He has been to the vet, received his shots, kept whole despite the loss of his eye. This is a cat who cannot be abandoned to the wilds of a La Lancha surf shop on the edge of a jungle crawling with crocodiles. He will have to return with me.

But he will not come to me and I cannot reach him and, shots or no, I do not want to be clawed in the attempt. An idea strikes. I go into the minimart a few doors down from the surf shop and buy a can of tuna, thinking it will lure him out from under the car and into my arms. Along the way, I notice a box large enough to serve as a cat carrier sitting on the curb as if a sign from San Marcos himself. Thus prepared, I return to the car, set the box into the back and peel open the can. But 28 stays put, uninterested.

I ponder for a moment, then face the fact that this is a two-person job and go into the surf shop. “¡Hola! I have a cat under my car and need help getting him out,” I tell the guy at the register. He grimaces and says he’ll have to get someone else – he, himself, does not like cats. A few minutes later, a very nice guy whose name I immediately forget in the stress of the moment emerges to assist. He brings a push broom, drops to the ground to look under the car and declares the cat “a beautiful guy.” 

He first tries to hook Veintiocho with the broom, but the cat, who seems to be in working order, keeps sliding around the bristles, so our hero changes tactics and pushes el gato to me. Despite the cat’s attempt to dig his claws into the concrete, I manage to pick him up unscathed and pop him into the open box. After flipping the flaps closed, I slide my surfboard over the top and loop my leash around the box for good measure. 

After a too-brief “¡Gracias!,” I drive off, determined to deliver Veintiocho back to his home. Every time he stops mewing, I panic, despite the fact he seemed perfectly fine. This has been traumatic for him! What if he, already unnerved, panics and has a heart attack? What if I arrive back in LDM with a now-dead cat in a box in the back of my car?! We motor alongside the jungle, past Sayulita, past San Pancho, over all the speed bumps, to the cobblestone streets of Lo De Marcos, no Harry Styles this time, just the occasional sad, welcome mew. I park in a shady spot outside the apartment building where Veintiocho’s benefactors live.

Hatch lifted, I open the box. The one-eyed cat looks up at me as if he would like very much to never be in a car again. I call to my friends, “Come here, I must show you something!” They hustle out to see what’s happening. “Look!” I say, pointing into the back of the car. 

“What the heck?!” They are confused as to why the cat is in a box in the car. 

“It’s quite a story!” I say, proceding to tell it as my friend and hostess lifts the cat out. Five minutes later, Veintiocho has polished off a can of tuna, drank his fill of water and stretched out along the floor for a nap as I finish the tale. “And lived happily ever after” is likely too promising for a street cat, even a well-cared for one, but at least this particular adventure for this particular cat landed on a happy ending.