BATH, SOMERSET, ENGLAND - Cats always look serene and a little supercilious, as if they are privy to the accumulated wisdom of the world since the pharaohs.
Anecdotal evidence of this comes to us by way of the borough of Bath, which was partly shut down on Sunday afternoon because of the misadventures of a certain calico.
“We thought it was on the neighbor’s porch,” said borough resident Jane Molchany, recalling the pitiful mewling her companion Paul Meckes, heard late Saturday when he went out to shovel a path to the generator as the storm came to an end.
In the morning, he heard the cries again, and that’s when one of the neighbors told him that a cat was up a tree near the Monacacy Creek across the street.
Now, you’ve probably heard this story before. A cat is stuck in a tree so a firetruck comes and someone goes up after it and returns it to a grateful little boy or girl.
This time, it wasn’t that easy. Bath had been buried under 30 inches of snow by Jonas, which is exactly what the Weather Channel called the storm. Green Street, where Molchany and Meckes live, was no more accessible than anyone else’s street.
Neighborhood newcomers Max and Allison Balliet knew the cat to be a stray.who is female They had been keeping an eye on her lately, leaving the garage door partly open and a dish of food just inside so she could have shelter and something to eat.
Max Balliet said he suspects a neighbor’s dog might have scared the cat up into the tree. In any case, there she was, hungry and cold and trapped high above the world.
She might have actually been doomed.had no one noticed her. But Allison Balliet started making phone calls and word of the cat’s plight did finally reached the mayor of Bath, Fiorella Reginelli-Mirabito, who goes by “Fi” and is accustomed to getting things done.
“I’m an Italian woman,” she said. “We just take over.”
She said this with a merry laugh, and laughed many times more as she recounted the rescue which could have been called “Operation Calico,” for lack of a better term.
“I guess [the neighbors] called 911, then the police, then finally got the Borough Council president,” the mayor said. “He was in the middle of an issue with the snowplow, so he said, ‘Can you handle this?’ ”
“Sure,” she said.
By her own admission, Reginelli-Mirabito is not much a cat lover. But she arrived at the scene and in no time melted into a puddle of emotion.
“The cat was meowing like crazy,” she said. “And my heart was breaking with each meow. So I called everyone I knew.”
First came Michael Dalcin of Michael Dalcin Electric, who drove over in his bucket truck. The bucket went up 40 feet, which would have been fine had the cat not scooted another 20 feet higher.
The mayor called the fire department, and one of the assistant chiefs, Paul Connolly, told her there was no way he could bring the ladder truck out, because it would surely sink into the ground.
That would have gone over poorly with the fire chief, Emilio DeNisi, but again, Reginelli-Mirabito is persistent.
“I’m not going to sleep until somebody comes,” she told Connolly.
“I’ll do it for you, Fi,” he said.
And so finally, the firetruck came. So did the Colonial Regional police, and also Borough Manager Brad Flynn. A bunch of neighbors also gathered to watch. Someone brought pizza and coffee.
The police closed the road so the ladder truck could be backed in, and a firefighter named Sean Faraldo climbed up and successfully retrieved the cat.
At 7:30 p.m., four hours after it began, Operation Calico ended peacefully.
Max and Allison Balliet have decided to adopt the cat. So far, she’s been getting on well with their other cats named Phantom and Luna, and their pug, Callie.
They gave her name but a boy’s name, but a very fitting one … “Jonas.”