Last Updated on May 29, 2026 by admin
Pelican was missing for eleven days after Hurricane Lee. Now he sleeps on top of the dishwasher in the house Carolyn rebuilt.
Hurricane Lee made landfall the year before last on the morning of September 23, in the slow, grinding way of late-season Atlantic storms. It came ashore as a strong Category 2 near Southport, North Carolina, just south of Wilmington, with sustained winds of one hundred and ten miles per hour and storm surge that pushed water more than nine feet above mean high tide. The eye crossed the Cape Fear River. The eastern wall sat over Carolyn Belzer’s neighborhood in Wilmington for almost five hours.
Carolyn had evacuated the day before. She had loaded her truck with the things you load a truck with when the National Weather Service is telling you, in unambiguous language, that you should leave: a bin of documents, two duffel bags of clothes, the laptop, a cooler. She had loaded Pelican, her three-year-old black-and-white tuxedo, into the carrier on the passenger seat.
The carrier door was not latched correctly. Carolyn has thought about this approximately ten thousand times since.
It was not a faulty carrier. It was not a broken latch. It was that Carolyn, in the small panicked rush of evacuating a Category 4 storm forecast that had only twelve hours earlier been forecast as a Category 1, had clipped the latch through one of the loops of the cardboard inner divider that came with the carrier from the manufacturer. The latch had looked, from the outside, latched. It was not.
Somewhere between Wilmington and the Holiday Inn in Florence, South Carolina — on a stretch of I-95 just south of Lumberton, where Carolyn had to slow down for a fender bender — Pelican pushed the carrier door open and jumped. Carolyn discovered it at the next gas station. She drove back. She walked the shoulder for two hours in the dark, in the leading edge of the storm, with a flashlight and a can of Fancy Feast.
She did not find him.
She did not find him for eleven days.
Carolyn drove back to Wilmington as soon as the roads were clear. The house was a teardown. The first floor had taken six feet of storm surge. The kitchen wall facing the river had peeled off. The contents of the freezer were three blocks away, in a stranger’s yard, partially eaten by something the stranger could not identify.
Carolyn lived in a FEMA trailer for nine months. She made flyers. She posted on every Wilmington-area Facebook page, every Nextdoor, every lost-pet website she could find. She drove back to Lumberton three times. She posted in the Lumberton Facebook groups. She offered a reward. She offered a larger reward. She offered, on day forty, simply to be told if anyone had seen a black-and-white tuxedo cat at any point on or near I-95 south of Wilmington in September.
On day eleven, Pelican was found.
The finder was a contractor named Beau Hardacre. Beau is from Robeson County. He had been hired to clean a flooded restaurant in Whiteville, North Carolina, which is about thirty-five miles inland and west of where Pelican had jumped. Beau had been pulling soaked drywall out of the back kitchen of the restaurant when he heard, from behind the walk-in freezer, the unmistakable sound of a cat in a state of opinions.
Pelican was behind the freezer. He was sitting on a stack of fish-fryer pamphlets. He was, Beau later said, extremely thin and extremely loud.
Beau, who did not have a cat at the time, did the thing that Carolyn had been hoping for eleven days that someone would do. He took a photograph. He posted it to the Whiteville Community Bulletin Board on Facebook. The caption was: found this cat behind a walk-in freezer. anybody missing him.
Within forty-five minutes, three people in the comments had tagged Carolyn.
Carolyn drove the seventy miles from her FEMA trailer to Whiteville in fifty-three minutes. She found Pelican wrapped in a beach towel in the bed of Beau’s pickup truck. She did not say anything for the first minute. She held him. Pelican, who had spent eleven days behind a freezer, weighed five pounds and change — down from his pre-storm eleven. He purred. He did not stop purring for two hours.
Carolyn rebuilt the Wilmington house. It took fourteen months. The new house has a new kitchen, a new bedroom, a new front porch, and a new dishwasher.
The dishwasher is the part that matters.
Pelican, who had spent eleven days behind a walk-in freezer in a flooded restaurant in Whiteville, learned during those eleven days that the back of any major kitchen appliance is warm. Not just warm: protected. Quiet. Vibrating. Safe. He learned it well enough that he never quite let it go.
For the first six months in the FEMA trailer, Pelican slept on top of the trailer’s tiny dishwasher whenever it ran. When it didn’t run, he slept on top of the microwave. When the new house was finished, on a Tuesday afternoon in November of last year, the first thing Pelican did after Carolyn carried him in through the new front door was walk into the new kitchen, examine each of the new appliances in sequence, and select the new dishwasher.
He has slept on top of it ever since. Carolyn runs the dishwasher every night before bed, whether or not it is full, because Pelican prefers it warm. She uses one tablet, the energy-saving setting, and the air-dry mode. She bought a small fleece pad shaped like a kidney that fits perfectly on the dishwasher’s top edge.
Pelican is now seventeen pounds. He is, according to the vet, the picture of health for a five-year-old tuxedo cat with a particular routine. He sleeps on the dishwasher. He eats his breakfast on the kitchen island. He sits, in the late afternoon, on the new front porch and watches the new oak tree they planted to replace the one the storm took.
Carolyn’s evacuation routine, this hurricane season, is different. She has three carriers now. She has a carrier with the cardboard divider removed. She has a backup carrier inside her main carrier. She has, on the inside lid of each carrier, a strip of red electrical tape with the words LATCH CHECK in black Sharpie.
Hurricane season begins this Sunday, June 1.
If you are in a hurricane-prone area, and your evacuation plan includes a cat, check your carrier. Check the latch. Check it again. Check it in good light. Check it before you load. Check it after you load. Check it again at the first gas station.
Carolyn says: do not check it the way you check the back door of your house, casually, on the way out. Check it the way you check the bolt on your seatbelt.
She says she would not, in retrospect, have done anything else differently. But she would have checked the latch.