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Follow the Dirt Road In Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

When Chickens Fall From the Sky

By Carol Mell, 1-16-07

No matter how much the headlines squawk about winter storms, it can’t be as cold as that night in my childhood when chickens fell from the sky.

We lived in a canyon that swept down to the Columbia River. My father, a truck driver, dreamed of farming and kept chickens in a shed by the driveway.

One Sunday in late fall, Dad and his buddies drank beer in the yard all afternoon. I don’t know, but beer might have been the reason no one noticed the chill after sunset as the party moved to house. My older brothers and I were already in our footie pajamas.

I remember how Dad’s chair abruptly scraped the floor as he shot back from the table saying, “Damn, the chickens.” The other men at the table were startled and muttered, “What the Hell?” and “Where you going, Bill?”

In a jumbled frenzy we followed him outside, the wooden screen door slapping shut with a crack behind each one. The sharp driveway gravel tore my jammies. I remember the men swaying, like big pines in the wind, trying to focus.

As sometimes happens on a clear night, the temperature fell like a meteor. The air bit our lungs and our breath steamed out of our tea kettle heads. The light bulb had burned out in the hen house so, accompanied by cursing, the men ran back in, the clamor of the door echoing like rifle shots down the canyon then back again with flashlights.

The men poked their thin beams of light into the nesting boxes. Empty. Next, they searched under the hibiscus but our red banties had vanished. With no trace of blood or feathers, Dad figured the coyotes made off with them.

As we turned to go in, the first feathered bundle fell with a thud, already frozen hard. Then came another, dead as a dumbbell, landing on a man who shrieked and jumped back. Training their weak beams into the branches of the big oak, we made out the round, shadowy forms of our birds.

With more cursing, the men ran to the house again, the screen door doing its bit, and returned with rakes, shovels, and brooms. My mother zipped me into my blue coat and tied the hood. The men were shouting and poking up into the tree. Through the hullabaloo, my father, who had a more patient disposition, spread corn on the ground calling “here, chickie, chickie.”

But the brain of a chicken, alas, is about the size and consistency of one steamed pea. The moon rose over our driveway dance. The stars glowed through the branches. The cold got colder. Slowly, at first, then gathering speed like a stampeding herd, the dead bundles fell from their perches. Thump. Thump. Kerthump. Under a final hopeless cloud of cursing, the rescue party returned to the house, the screen door more listless now - all, that is, except my father who stayed behind to count his losses. I think I started to cry.

"Go to bed," my father commanded before he went back to muttering the word, "stupid," over and over again under his breath, picking their accursed corpses up by their stiff legs and tossing them into the hen house.

I never again played in the hen house and for months afterward I would stare up into those branches to see if some stray chicken might still be there.

The next year we moved into town and ate store-bought eggs. I don't know what the temperature actually was that night but I remember it as the coldest in history and one of the first in the tumbling cascade of fallen dreams that was to dog our family for years after.

Well, you know on Humbug Mountain you’re danged if you do and danged if you don’t so you might just as well.

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