A Chicken Makes Me Look Stupid

A chicken made me look stupid the other day. I just thought I would share that with everyone.

You see, there is a chicken that lives out at the rest stop near Wiggins or Fort Morgan in Colorado (I’ve never entirely figured out which town it goes with). There is an island that separates incoming and outgoing traffic for the rest stop with some bushes on it and there is a little chicken house there where a chicken lives. This has always amused my wife and I.

However, when we drove that interstate this summer, we didn’t see the chicken. The little house was gone.

Recently, we drove that interstate again and saw as we drove in that the chicken house was back, though we didn’t immediately see the chicken. We had been worried the last time we drove through that something had happened to it. But, the little chicken house was back. Perhaps the chicken couldn’t survive the summers outside, though somehow being okay with winter, and they’d just taken him inside for a while. Perhaps the old chicken had died and they’d gotten a new one. We didn’t know.

Regardless, even seeing the chicken house back, my wife was concerned. After all, we had seen no chicken.

My wife stayed in the car and I strode the long walk to the actual rest stop from the parking lot. For some reason, the rest stop building at this particular rest stop is actually a pretty good distance from the parking lot down a long sidewalk. When I got to the building itself, I happened to notice the chicken in the bushes.  Apparently, he’d gone on walkabout. In any event, I took a picture with my phone so I could show my wife it was okay when I got back to the car:

Then I used the rest stop and walked back to the car.

As I approached the car, I took out my phone and pulled up the picture. I intended to show it to my wife. “Look,” I said, holding out the phone (her car window was down), “the chicken is okay.”

For some reason, she was laughing hysterically. She replied: “I know” and pointed behind me. There was the chicken. He scampered off to his little house, which happened to be near our car.

Apparently, he had wanted to go back to his house, but had been reluctant to cross that long, exposed sidewalk alone. When I passed by the bush he was hiding in on the way back from the rest stop building, he apparently fell in line behind me about a foot or two back. Then, as I walked back to the car, he followed the whole way. It was an unwitting chicken parade.

My wife said it was one of the funniest things she’d ever seen, me being unknowingly tailed by a chicken. It just kept walking, all unconcerned and very pleased with itself, with me. My wife watched the whole walk, and I didn’t know about it until the end. I can’t believe my wife hadn’t thought until afterward to grab a video of that. Video would have been priceless, and that’ll never happen again.

I’ll never trust another chicken.