The "Not-A-Hick's" Guide to Chickens: Part III

Now that your “baby chicks” are beginning to be able to flap around, refuse to stay in the cardboard box and have trashed your bathroom, it might be time to consider moving the chickens to a more appropriate out-of-doors enclosure.  Chickens are not house pets, and it is likely that you no longer need me to explain why.

Preparing for the move is important.  Throughout the course of your “baby chicks” short lives you will have begun (at the 3 to 4 week mark) to slowly reduce the heat available to them under the heat lamp, thus ensuring that by the time they are fully feathered they are used to living without it’s warm and faux-nurturing presence.  Fully, or mostly, feathered birds can manage their own internal temperatures, food consumption, etc.  By this stage of development your ‘adorable baby chicks’ will have also started behaving like little assholes to each other and the beginning of a life-long pecking order will have been established, with some birds on ‘top,’ happy, loved and in charge, and other birds on the bottom.  Unhappy, constantly under physical duress, and forever trying to be with the flock that doesn’t want them.    Do not feel sorry for the bottom chicken on this rung.  It doesn’t do anybody any good and that chicken is there for a good reason.  It may have been smaller as a chick, experienced an injury or just be the slow un-wanted one.  Either way, somebody has to hang out a the edges as an early warning system that a predator is nearby.

Chickens have approximately zero ability to engage in moral reasoning and although it applies to them to some extent, no appreciation for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  They certainly have no propensity to care for a creature that is smaller and weaker than they are.  In Chicken-Social-Strata, someone has to be that bottom rung.  No ifs ands or buts about it.  Chickens, like people, are generally only nice to other critters that can give them what they want.  If you don’t believe me, turn on the news.

As you prepare to move the birds outside remember that whatever enclosure you create for them it has to be sturdy enough to withstand the explorations of local predatory type animals.  Your chickens have just made your backyard the magnet for coyotes, raccoons, foxes, dogs and the neighbors big tomcat.  If you don’t believe that these sorts of animals exist in your neighborhood because you live in the “city” just leave your chickens outside for a night without a sturdy enclosure.  

Then start over with a new batch of baby chicks.  

Now that you’ve got your second batch going back in the bathroom,  it’s time to construct a home for them.  Your chickens may be able to live in your fenced in backyard during the day, but having a pen large enough to leave them in for a few days or a week at a time can be very conducive to your being able to go on vacation and have someone else tend them.  An ideal home for a chicken will have both indoor and outdoor space, elevated food and water dispensers and varying heights of perches and nest boxes.  Your birds should have more outdoor space than indoor space, and for their safety you should either have a “floored” indoor space that they can be closed into at night, or you should sink chicken wire down below the level of the ground on each wall to keep diggers from being successful at getting midnight snacks.  I recommend the former solution, it’s easier and it can help you manage cold weather, brooding hens and the need to continually catch the chickens for your four year-olds edification.  

On day one of their new living space do not let the chickens into the yard, giving them a week or two of simply being in the pen will imprint onto their tiny impressionable brains the idea that the pen is where they live. Without this impression getting your chickens to return to the coop as night falls will be virtually impossible.  Unable to find either the bathroom, or their cardboard box in the tub, your chickens will conclude that they are lost, and attempt to sleep as far off the ground as they can propel their little chicken bodies.  Chicken memories are very short.  “Home” will become the coop in less than a fortnight.

If they’re nearing that 8-10 week mark as they are adjusting to living outside of the bathtub, you might even get an early layer who learns that the nest boxes (always stocked with clean straw) are a good and safe place to lay eggs.  This will be an invaluable lesson, but unfortunately it’s not one that you can control.  Your chickens will at first lay eggs wherever they please.  It will only be age, luck or a lazy streak that will compel them to lay eggs in the coop where they are easy to find.   You can remedy this by placing the eggs you will find under your porch, in the dog house, behind the hose and on your neighbor’s lawn chair in the nest boxes until the hens figure things out.

At this point, the 10--14 week mark, your chickens should be living outside, mostly feathered, losing their short-lived and limited ability to even do anything that vaguely resembled flying.  This is also the point at which any “pretty chickens” you’ve somehow landed yourself with, will begin to crow..

40 Days of Gratitude: Day 38

            During my visit home, my mother's new next door neighbor started the process of clear-cut logging the land next to her house.  The land I grew up on.  By the time I go back again, it'll be bare, empty and utterly destroyed.  The trees will have been razed, and there will be machinery tracks cut like scars into a suddenly empty hillside.  The road will have been torn up by the trucks lumbering up and down, and whatever was there before will simply be gone.  Forever irreperable.
          It cut into my 40 days of gratitude for Lent pretty damn hard.  
          40 days that I thought would be really easy to catalogue.  40 days of how damn lucky I am.  Lucky to have opportunities.  Lucky to have friends.  Lucky to have health.  Lucky to have life.  Lucky to take shot of Whiskey each of the nights that they are howling, to rock my demons to sleep.  Demons that a person as lucky as me doesn't really have any business grappling with.  Because I lead a charmed life.  A life full of adventure, of travel, of good times spent with good people, and a life of opportunities seized by the horns.
          After all, I'm busy studying at a world class university, busy performing standup and keeping fit.  I have no one to visit in any hospitals, and no graveyards where I leave flowers.  I have never been mugged, attacked or spat at.  Never not recognized how very charmed my little life seems to be, how I have (and have had for years) a Golden Ticket to opportunity and adventure, as long as I work hard to keep it.
          And yet the trees are falling.  Stripping away the protection they once offered the hillside.  Laying bare it's secrets, and emptying it's soul.  Peeling back the layers to stare at what was below the forest canopy.  Painfully, unwillingly, and without mercy.
            The clear-cutting, although totally unrelated, slashes pretty deep because it seems symbolic of a process that my famiy is going through.
         One I'm too afriad to tell anyone about, because I'm somehow convinced that what I think, what I say, and what I do, will be used to hurt people I love.  
          One I'm too afriad to talk about openly because I've been told point blank by more than one person, that what I believe, how I think and what I feel, matters in a very real way.  
           One that may very well define not only what the next four months will look like for me, but the next forty years.  
          I hold my Golden Ticket, clenched as tight as I can get it in my fist, and am reminded as the trees fall, that it's not mine.  I did nothing to earn it.  Every advantage I am given is because of a disadvantage someone else is forced into, every step forward for me, is a step backwards for someone else.  And on top of it all, I get to hold that Golden Ticket knowing all the while that people I love dearly are being destroyed and destroying.  That my choice is between stepping forward and away, to pretend I don't see/can't see what's happenning, or open my fist and turn around.  Saying goodbye to an opportunity that seems less and less like it's mine, in lieu of taking on a responsibility that I've known my whole life I'd one day have to shoulder.  Who knows, maybe something will shift or change for the better.  But I doubt it.  I've learned to be smarter than to expect that.  And when this all plays out, I'll write something with actual details.  From where-ever it is I end up needing to be, doing whatever it is I end up needing to do.
           Because sometimes you can't take the opportunities you are offered, because you are needed elsewhere.  Sometimes you can't have adventure, because it's someone else's turn.  Sometimes you can't be whole, because for someone else to heal, another person has to carry the burden of being broken.  Sometimes we all draw the short straw.  And sometimes we have to choose to draw the short straw, because the person who has held it for so long, can't carry it anymore, and they are breaking those around them with their pain.
         Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote, "What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it," and this is no different.  Someday I'll be able to write about it in detail, laugh about the ironies over beers with friends, and those demons won't need more than a cup of tea to quiet them even on the worst nights.
           Someday, however, is not now.  Now I get to grapple with being the Girl With A Golden Ticket.  Standing on a train platform, knowing I can never leave.  Because while the Golden Ticket buys my way out of this mess, it's not just me I need to think about, and I know no one else strong enough to step in and help.
           And despite all, it's still 40 days of Gratitude, and the rules are that I come up with something I am grateful for every day of Lent.  All freaking 40 of them.  Even the ones where I'd rather crawl into a hole and hide.  The days I wish I could pretend weren't.
        So 40 Days of Gratitude: Day 38: For being able to remember dark days in the lightest of all possible ways.  Because someday, that's how I'll get to remember today.

Between Home and Where I Live: Flying

           There's a moment, when a plane is barrelling down a runway, and the engines rev.  A second of energy diverted before the nose lifts up and there's no going back.  When I fly, I like to count the seconds between the flight attendants sealing the door and the roar of the engines increasing, just that little bit, to lift us off the ground and launch us into the sky at 600 miles an hour.  Somehow in my brain I have the idea that up until that second, I haven't committed to flying.  To hurtling through the air in an aluminum and steel tube from one place to another.  That there is a magic "escape" button that I could still push while the wheels are on the ground that would get me off the plane.

          I technically know better.  The last actual moment to chicken out and bail is the second before they close that door at the end of the loading ramp.  Sealing us and our pressurized air into the tube.  Minutes, and sometimes even an hour (depending on the airport and the day) before the plane is actually in the air.  With each of those seconds that I count, I remind myself how lucky I am.  I bought  plane ticket.  I can live in one place and visit another that is half way across the country or the world.  Continents and oceans are no barriers to what I can see and where I can travel.  i have the extraordinary privelege of strapping myself to a plastic seat, and quite literally flying through the sky.  
           And yet.  The act of clicking "purchase" when buying a plane ticket is quite literally terrifying.  Because flying means a handful of things every time it happens.  Flying means that I need to leave a place that I usually like being.  Whether it's home or somewhere else.  Flying means that I need to again face my own irrational fear of literally falling out of the sky.  Flying means re-evaluating the way that I live my life, as I see it again in another light.  The light of perspective added by a new place, or an old place revisited.  Flying means embracing the unknown of the future.  The reality of not knowing what the next second or the next hour or the next week, or month or year will bring.  I know that that unknown exists in each and every second.  Waking up in an unfamiliear bed doesn't make the day less predictable than it already wasn't.
          Being alone in a new place doesn't mean that the unexpected is more likely to occur.  It just means that I am more aware of the tenous nature of our experience.  The unexpected quality of life.  The subtle balance we play between responsibility for the future, and total blindness as to what it holds is one we all hold each and every day when we get out of bed in the morning, brush our teeth and go to work, planning our next vacation day or the weekend yet to come.  
          Every time I fly, I am reminded how short the days are that I get to count as they slowly pass by.  And that is compounded whenever I fly between the city I call home, Portland OR, and wheve-ever it is that I happen to live.