I mentioned previously that I’m chatting to two women who have the crazy hobby of rescuing pets in disaster zones and want me to do a book on their unusual lives.
The core story would be the terrifying time they spent rescuing pets during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when the city of New Orleans took a plunge beneath a massive tidal surge.
Most humans were saved; but no one took into account the hundreds of thousands of dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, parrots and other more exotic creatures left behind.
Anyway, the pet rescuers had read ‘Babylon’s Ark’, which I wrote with conservationist Lawrence Anthony about saving the Baghdad Zoo during the invasion of Iraq, and asked if I would do something similar for them.
At first I was sceptical as it was 10 years since Hurricane Katrina and they live in the States, while I live in England. So logistics were a problem, to put it blandly.
But my curiosity was piqued, so I asked them to send me a rough draft and I would consider hammering it into shape.
That’s what happened – except the draft was about 30 000 words too short and had little ‘feel’ of what was undoubtedly an extraordinary adventure.
Also, the fact that one rescuer was an ex-Playboy Bunny girl and the other a Miss Michigan body builder did, at the very least, make an interesting backdrop. It was barely mentioned in the draft.
They emailed back saying they had paid someone to write their story and had no more money. They were hoping I could salvage the project.
I felt their pain, but as I am currently supporting three households with the brats at university, I don’t have the funds to take on projects without some hard stuff up front.
But yet, but yet … in the manuscript they sent, one paragraph had caught my eye and it kept re-occurring.
It was a description of a man on the roof of his house with the flood waters swirling below, holding his dog in a death grip. A helicopter hovers above; a rope snakes down. The pilot is shouting above the shrieking wind: ‘Ditch the damn dog’.
The anguish… the anguish
The man looks around desperately. This is his best friend. You can see the anguish on his face.
The pilot is by now screaming that he will fly off unless the man leaves the dog.
Weeping with torment, the man grabs the rope and is winched up. As the helicopter flies off the dog scrambles along the ridge of the roof, baying in panic. The flood waters rise.
The woman who described that is called Joanne. For her it was a defining moment. She had to go to New Orleans and find that dog.
What sort of people do this type of work? Why do they go out in the aftermath of a storm of nuclear proportions to save a bedraggled cat? And who can doubt that life is a rich journey when you hear of a Bunny Girl or a champion body builder becoming a pet rescuer?
So next month I’m off to Chicago to meet Joanne and Penny, the body builder. We’ll do some work there and then fly to New Orleans where they’ll show me where they coaxed out dogs so traumatised that they snapped at any human; where they pulled down starving cats from trees that the terrified felines had clung to for days.
The only problem is that Penny and Joanne erroneously believe I’m a famous author and nothing will change their minds.
They’ve put me up in a posh Chicago business club as well as a swanky hotel in the New Orleans French quarter. I had to persuade them not to book me business class – especially as I am paying.
So the bottom line is this book has to sell a gazillion copies just to cover my costs in going over to write it, even though I will live like a celeb for a week.
And maybe I’ll find out what happened to that dog on the roof. They haven’t told me the ending of that story yet.
