The unofficial mayor of White Salmon, Washington, strolled in at 5:30 p.m. as the World Cup match between the U.S. and Belgium got underway. The Tarwater Tavern was filling up.

He wove through the crowd, all poise and nonchalance, sporting a tan coat streaked with dark brown.

“Huxleyyyyyyyyy!” one man yelled out, ungluing his eyes from the television screen. “Hello Mayor! What’s up, Mr. Mayor?” said another, leaning over for a closer look.

His Honor dispensed with greetings. He was preoccupied: his usual seat, fitted with a rectangular white pillow, was taken by a soccer fan. He looked from side to side, then approached an empty leather bench. He jumped up, circled a few times, then dropped into a ball and fell asleep.

It was just another night on the town for White Salmon’s most famous dignitary, a 15-year-old tabby cat.

Huxley spends his days and nights sitting, reposing, sleeping and exploring in and around the businesses along the city’s three-block main street.

He carries himself with a confident charisma. The thick tail on his long, lean frame is striped with alternating rings of color much like a raccoon’s. His eyes, the shape of almonds, give nothing away. He likes pets to be limited to his head and upper shoulders because his back and legs are still sensitive from an old injury. He’s sociable but not a big cuddler.

But Huxley, for all his aloofness, is more than a soft coat to pet. In a rapidly gentrifying city of 2,600, once defined by fruit packing and lumber, he’s the glue connecting White Salmon’s past to its present.

In the span of his 15 years, the scenic Columbia River Gorge has been reimagined by tourists and well-to-do buyers with high-tech jobs, ready for their second or third home. Local residents are being pushed out. Tensions over affordable housing, wealth and traffic have crept in. But Huxley — a feline celebrity with a spot on the tourist-circuit map and a city-sponsored Instagram account — binds the community together in shared adoration.

“He is definitely a big part of the character of the town,” said Marla Keethler, the city’s actual mayor, who first met Huxley “like everyone else does — I ran into him downtown.”

On most days he ambles down Jewett Avenue, stopping to socialize at bars, clothing and coffee shops, the local inn and City Hall. Inside are beds and water set aside for a creature whose life outside might have turned another cat feral had he not grown up around so many humans.

Huxley moseys seamlessly from the beloved watering hole known as the TarBar to the Soča wine bar serving smoked trout dip and $50 bottles of Gewürztraminer.

“He shows us that there’s room for everyone here, even a cat who’s brought us countless inside jokes,” Keethler said. Her desk at City Hall is one of Huxley’s favorite resting spots. His mayoral title is one of these inside jokes, except that no one can seem to remember whose idea it was.

He can cast a spell, slinking inside a shop when a front door opens, then rubbing against customers’ legs as they sip wine or peruse used books. He might follow someone into the lobby of a hotel.

Ask the baristas and waitresses and local residents downtown, “Have you seen Huxley?” and the answer is usually, “He was just here,” or “You gotta go to the TarBar in the evening and wait for him,” or “Have you tried the bookstore? You know Joyce has a bed for him in there.”

In other words, do not try to pin down Huxley. He’s no stray, though. His loving human parents, who live downtown above their guitar restoration shop, leave his food bowl in the backroom wood shop beside a black leather chair with a black-and-yellow striped blanket folded on the seat.

Huxley sleeps there — sometimes. His parents say they knew from the moment they brought him home from a local animal shelter as a tiny 2-month-old that he was destined for the outdoors.

“We tried walking him on a leash,” recalled Autumn Quigley, a local artist who’s Huxley’s mom. He did not cooperate. His life of freedom on the street began early on with a jump from a second-story window from Quigley’s apartment with partner Craig Wilson above what’s now the TarBar.

At 15, there have been some concessions to age. Huxley is on a special diet for a medical condition. His parents put a purple collar on him with a tag that reads, “I’m not lost. Do not feed.”

“We need him to come home to eat,” Quigley said.

People text Quigley when they find Huxley on the street. Or Wilson will get a phone call from someone who tells him, “Your cat followed me home!” They tell them not to worry. “If I see him in town, I ask him, ‘Do you want to come home and eat something?’” Quigley said. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

A long time ago, Huxley went missing for a week, and the couple worried. Someone found him in a local park.

“I could keep him in, but he’d be miserable,” Quigley said. So he negotiates through growing traffic. “I’ve seen him use the crosswalk,” she said with pride.

His fans have developed what Quigley calls “a whole mythology about him,” and she’s touched.

“People have ideas I know nothing about,” she said. One apocryphal story insists that Huxley actually ran for mayor one year. The real mayor, Keethler, combed through City Hall records to try and verify this, but came up empty-handed. The real story of his political influence played out in a 2019 runoff election when his parents made pins with Huxley’s picture to raise money for a human candidate they backed. The pins’ motto was “Bringing us together.”

Most people who have encountered him have a story to tell. There are his tableside asks for salmon at Henni’s, the city’s upscale restaurant. There’s the time he stared down a deer who had ventured downtown. And the dead bird he deposited in front of a group of women dining at a local winery, Le Doubblé Troubblé.

“I have little kids come into my shop, they’re like, ‘Is Huxley here?’” said James Chapman, owner of Gorge Ink print shop and Huxley’s unofficial archivist. “They want to know if the mayor is in.”

Chapman carries T-shirts with the cat’s photo posing on the steps of the White Salmon Police Department. The caption is “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content.”

“He belongs to the town,” Chapman said. “ We’re his caretakers. It’s his whole life.”

At The Book Peddler next door, owner Joyce FitzSimmons hangs a sign in the front window whenever Huxley is in, relaxing in his small wicker basket.

The store is often his first stop in the morning. “I’ve had him meet me at the door and say, ‘Why are you so late?” FitzSimmons said.

She has mistakenly locked up the store for the night with Huxley inside — twice — and returned the next morning to find he’d expressed his displeasure with a pool of urine on the wood floor.

At night he’s drawn to the TarBar, a habit that may be explained by his kittenhood spent living above it. There he has many friends, but one very special relationship with a rare person whose lap he will sit in. That’s Kat Betz, who most days drives with her husband Mike McLaughlin from their home up the mountain for a late-afternoon beer. “If Huxley misses them it ruins his whole day,” said Jen Buck, a bartender.

As Belgium pummeled the U.S. soccer team this summer, the couple, both in their 80s, took in the crowd at a table on the sidewalk outside. “We go back about 10 years,” Betz said of Huxley. “He’s real special to us.”

Huxley was still inside, asleep. Once the game ended he was able to reclaim his rightful seat, where the words on the pillow say, “Reserved for the Cat.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/09/09/white-salmon-washington-cat-mayor-huxley/