By Kelly Kazek
kelly@athensnews-courier.com
February 01, 2008 10:22 pm
—
The scanner crackled in the newsroom Monday and we were able to make out the words, “chickens,” and “in the middle of the road.”
Like all good reporters, we went immediately on alert.
Dead chickens?
Live ones?
Chickens stranded mid-crossing?
We didn’t know.
Then we heard an officer give the location of the alleged fowl play, a road near the local poultry plant.
That’s when we realized: Some death-row chickens had made a run for it.
Charges of attempting to elude police could be forthcoming. This kind of excitement is what we live for.
I picked up the phone and called our photographer, who was out on assignment.
“Kim,” I said, “I need you to get to Hobbs Street and shoot some chickens in the road.”
Sending paparazzi to take advantage of what could very well be the chickens’ last, desperate moments could seem heartless (What if a despondent chicken attempted to leap to his death down a drainage ditch? What if a crazed hen shaved her head in a bid for attention?), but this is the news business and an incident of chickens crossing the road is no joking matter.
Kim, whose name I promised to mention here after she complained I sent her on a “wild chicken chase,” called me twice from her cell phone.
“I don’t see any chickens,” she said finally. “Are you sure you heard right?” She called the police department and got the coop, er, scoop: A single chicken had managed to escape the confines of a poultry truck and hit the road.
Like poultry in motion, the chicken fled and, though we were without an award-winning photo for the front page, we inwardly cheered the chicken’s bravado and wished him Godspeed.
Then we went home and had chicken cacciatore for dinner.
Hypocritical? Sure.
But people can’t help but root for the underchicken.
In Los Angeles — whose police department, unlike the one in Athens, Ala., probably does not have a radio code for livestock that means “Quick! Send a patrol car! Cows are blocking the road to the Goodtime Jamboree” — residents continue to champion a brood of chickens that took up residence four decades ago along the Hollywood Freeway.
I’m not making this up. I would kid about a lot of things, but not about homeless poultry.
At one time, there was even a video game based on the “Freeway Chickens,” as the colony is known.
According to lore, the chickens were liberated from a poultry farmer during an unfortunate trucking accident and staked out turf under the Vineland Avenue ramp.
Soon the chickens, apparently realizing there was safety in numbers and also that Californians consider eating meat a sin worse than voting Republican, numbered in the thousands.
Years later, city leaders wrangled as many chickens as they could and took them to a farm (at least, that’s the story they told the newspapers, although there reportedly was an abundance of new chicken dishes at area restaurants that week), but the few uncatchable chickens did as chickens are wont to do and multiplied. The chickens are still there today, fat and sassy from the scraps of tofu and bean curd thrown by California motorists.
Soon I was to learn that Athens has the beginnings of its own Chicken Underground.
A local woman, who remains nameless lest she be harassed by authorities or held up to the ridicule that befalls most forward-thinkers, rescues chickens that leap, fall or are pushed by their sacrificing mothers onto the roadside as poultry trucks pass her neighborhood.
Currently, she is caring for two liberated chickens, welcoming them as part of her family.
I like to think these pet chickens cluck urgently as poultry trucks roll past the house, spreading the word to others so that they, too, can taste freedom.
Maybe this liberator managed to hide Monday’s fugitive fowl. Maybe he made it, at long last, to the other side of the road.
I like to think so. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to look at a bucket of extra-crispy wings without shedding a tear.
And that might ruin the taste.
Kelly Kazek can be reached at kelly@athensnews-courier.com.
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