Welcome to the Chicken House
Some animal shit smells worse than others. The scat of herbivores is not too bad; that of omnivores and carnivores is pretty bad. Chicken shit, which smells like ammonia, is pretty bad.
We’d reserved what was described as a “barn dorm” in a rural region of coastal Maine. Based on the photos, it looked like a simple room attached to a barn on what was described as a “working farm.”
We live on a small farm in Kansas. Not a working farm, since the vegetables and animals we’ve raised over the years have been in small quantities that can be counted on our fingers (three pigs, two sheep, a dozen chickens, a row of potatoes, a cluster of tomato plants) and are strictly supplemental, as in nothing we could live on. But we understand what “working farm” means; that is, the sounds and smells, the dirt and shit.
We were not prepared, however, for the proximity of this barn dorm’s shit. The dorm wasn’t a separate room but instead a corner partitioned off of a very full and dusty barn. The chicken coop, also part of the barn, was less than twenty feet from our beds, separated by a chicken wire wall.
The pungency of sound swerved outside the boundaries of expectation as well when at 3:45 a.m. the rooster began crowing, and the hens then answered with their cackling—an excruciating hour-long call-and-response, repeated each of our three mornings there.
The Road To It
My older son, Cedar, decided to spend the summer after his first year of college working for an organic farm in Maine. Cedar was attending college in Vermont, 1,500 miles—a 24-hour drive—east of our home. For over twenty years I’ve been teaching college students, some of whom are 1,500 miles from home, some more, and because I like to think of these young adults as being in good hands and learning to be in a place different from their homes—and, in fact, they are sometimes hindered in their transition if too close to both the comforts and entanglements of home—I did well enough when Cedar made his big move. But I had a harder time with his decision to be even farther from home the first summer he might have returned.
He anticipated as much and told me, “Make a trip, Mom. Come see me. Stay awhile.” So my younger son, Luke, and I hit the road.
The road, it turns out, was a chicken house of mirrors.
Where There Are Chicken Doppelgängers
The second place we stayed in Maine was not in the original plan. When the post–Barn Dorm reservation had fallen through, Cedar’s boss offered her parents’ oceanside cottage home, unoccupied during the time of our stay. The sea, and the path leading to it, was visible from the kitchen window. We were grateful for the generous offer and charmed by the location.
The cottage itself consisted of thirteen itty bitty rooms pieced together in curious off-kilter ways, like the house had been added onto thirteen separate times, each time with less than five minutes’ forethought and planning. To move through the house was to enter a labyrinth.
The cottage was also full of chickens.
The cottage owners were clearly fond of chicken art. But this art was not cute Kansas Farm Chicken Kitsch punctuating the kitchen tile and potholders. This was the art of serious collectors with a taste for hardcore. Paintings and photos and sculptures on every wall and in every room. All thirteen of them.
As we wound our way from, say, the kitchen to the bathroom to the bedroom, we were surrounded by chickens—Rhode Island Reds, Plymouth Rocks, Leghorns, Brown Layers, Sussexes, Wyandottes. Their beady eyes followed us. There was a chicken, and another, and another. Yet again. Chickens.
Not yelling call-and-response, just silent, watching.
The Notion of “The Uncanny” Introduced
Of the particular discomfort and dread named “the uncanny,” Sigmund Freud explains it as something simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar in a way that unsettles.
The word Freud chooses to explain the concept at some length is the German unheimlich—which translates most literally as “un-home.” Hence, the word “home” is embedded in the negation of it. We feel at home with a place or experience, but we also don’t.
One example he offers is the automaton, which looks human and moves like a human, sort of.
It’s the sort of that creeps us out.
When Luke was a young child, maybe five, we went to the new permanent indoor exhibit at the area zoo. Designed much like a natural history museum, this zoo exhibit included taxidermied animals (of the African Savannah, the Amazon, the North American Plains, the Arctic) along with mechanized human figures illustrating prehistoric life. When we arrived at the first exhibit, we approached the entrance scene: a life-size family preparing dinner in jerky movements, passing bison meat to one another across the small fire.
Luke stopped dead in his tracks, rigid. Slowly and without speaking, without turning, he stepped backward once, twice—and then sidestepped behind me.
Luke’s five-year-old self had just encountered the uncanny. And he didn’t like it.
According to Freud, repetition makes the uncanny worse. Repetition knocks the familiar off balance not once—which might be an accident, after all—but more than once. He explains repetition makes an otherwise “innocent enough” strangeness into something “fateful and unescapable where otherwise we should have spoken of ‘chance’ only.”
Beady-eyed chickens hanging on a wall don’t become uncanny until they are multiplied by thirteen and arrive on the heels of three wee-morning close-quarter wake-up calls in a location we didn’t expect.
My point here is the repetition of the unfamiliar familiarity transported chickens into the realm of the uncanny.
There’s More to Maine’s Animal Kingdom
Replicating chickens that triggered our instinctive uncanny creep-out were not the only animal weirdnesses we encountered in the Northeast.
If you manage to make your way past the Portland, Maine, Amtrak Station and into the bowels of the warehouse district, you’ll find, with some luck and bewildered redirecting from your Apple Maps phone app, a little nook of a museum with a doorway that makes you think franchise coffee shop and a surprisingly chipper greeter welcoming you to the Cryptozoological Museum of Magical and Unverified Creatures.
Hence, the confusing but nevertheless cheerful portal into the magical and unverified creates a somewhat jolting segue when you discover the gritty, hyper-realistic nature of the specimens. Consider the mermaid exhibit. One mermaid appears to have a hybrid female-octopus head, with long tentacles for hair; another looks like an elderly female Gollum with a fish tail. If you’re looking for Ariel, you won’t find her.
But the museum’s feature creature is Big Foot, and he’s exhibited in multiple styles and poses, all conveniently accessible for selfies and group shots. Aside from his full-bodied furry version, there are his individual parts as well: forest footprints saved in plaster; skulls partly recreated and displayed alongside hobbit skulls for contrast; scat piles of various sizes, demonstrating the Big Foot intestinal growth cycle.
The U.S. Monster map, posted on the way out, within reach of the doorway’s bright natural light, identifies sightings across the nation. The labels and monsterly icons include lake and sea monsters (named Cassie, Chessie, Tessie, and Bessie), dragons, swamp creatures, Moth Man, Lizard Man, Thunderbirds, Frogmen, a chupacabra, and a wolf-like animal called a Shunka Warakin. The map suggests the creatures clearly favor the upper eastern regions of the nation, like Maine, for instance, though Texas, Montana, and California each house more than one species of unverified creatures.
Like I said, we come from Kansas, where there’s lots of sun, wind, and open sky. Come winter, all brush and foliage is swept clean, spare trees stand as sharp sentries in the distance. In short, it’s harder to hide on the Central Plains. The Cryptozoological Museum’s Monster map confirms the challenge magical or unverified creatures face in such climate and topography: None have been sighted in Kansas.
The Chicken Redux
I tell my sons the horrific and tragic story of Horatio Quiroga’s “La gallina dellogada.”
The story wanders across my consciousness because I’ve been in close and extended contact with chickens and I’ve entered a realm where the assumptions of the standard Kansan don’t apply.
In Cedar’s shared organic summer farm intern kitchen I see on the dining room table Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. I see the book, read the bio quickly, note Galeano is Uruguayan, and I think, hey, I know this guy.
“He wrote ‘La gallina dellogada,’” I say aloud.
In reality I’m mistaken. I’d read “La gallina dellogada” (“The Decapitated Hen”) in Spanish, which I’ve been studying as an adult and which I read slowly and sometimes badly. Maybe in my thinking-fast-but-wrong English brain, “Galeano” sounds enough like “gallina” to exchange the correct Uruguayan author, Quiroga, of a fictional story, for the incorrect Uruguayan author, Galeano, of a nonfictional story.
But never mind. It still fits.
The short story by Quiroga, whose work has been compared to Edgar Allen Poe’s, is about a couple whose four sons each consecutively suffers illness around the age of eighteen months resulting in brain damage. The couple has one mentally healthy child, a daughter, their youngest, who is the light and solace of their sad and difficult lives. The neglected sons spend most of their days gazing at the patio wall, drooling. One day the sons wander into the kitchen when the maid is butchering a chicken. The parents return from an outing later in the day with the daughter, leave her playing in the yard briefly in order to greet a neighbor, and return shortly thereafter to discover the sons have captured and butchered the daughter like a chicken.
My boys agree the story is horrific.
The same day I recount this story, we drive to Acadia National Park for hiking, stopping by a vigorously advertised shop called Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies.
As we pull in, we see two preteens hammering the ground in an almost robotic cadence. It’s odd. Luke asks, with genuine alarm, “What are they doing? Who are they?” Cedar replies solemnly and without pause, “They’re the brothers.”
Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies, we discover, not only sells jams and jellies but also displays bizarre artwork constructed of junk (old cars and farm and fishing equipment). While we are impressed with the ingenuity of these creations, they are also unsettling. The junk art, scattered through the dark and damp woods, feels like something left behind, a medieval village annihilated by pillage or plague.
The boys, a little ahead of me, enter an enclosed wooden fence. Half a minute later, Cedar says in a grim voice, “Mom, you better come in here.”
I step inside. There before me is a human-shape and -size figure constructed of wood, metal, and screws. Its nose is large, its wide pink mouth lopsided. The eyes are off kilter, topped with a single bulging brow. It holds a machete, positioned on the chopping block between the body and severed head of a wooden chicken.
Another Disturbing Latin American Story Inserted as Illustration, Differently
In “Aura,” by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, an underemployed historian, Felipe, runs across a want ad for a well-paying position which seems to fit him perfectly. He shows up at the listed address, and an elderly widow hires him on the spot to continue reconstructing and polishing the historical journals her husband left incomplete upon his death.
There are downsides to the job, including the work conditions. Felipe must live in the ancient, dimly lit house, working by the light of a single candle.
There are upsides as well—primarily the gorgeous niece, Aura, with striking green eyes, who lives in the house as a caretaker to the widow. Aura doesn’t say much, but with increasing regularity she does show up in Felipe’s room at night, to slip into his bed. This compensates for the poor lighting.
With time, however, even the dusky environs cannot veil the reason for Felipe’s growing unease.
He wakes, not once, but again, and once more, to find in his arms not Aura but the aged widow. And then it’s Aura back in his arms. And then it’s not.
He thinks.
It’s unsettling for both Felipe and readers—the thereness and not thereness, the return to an encounter which feels familiar but wrongly so. It’s Freud’s description of the uncanny, the “effacing” of “the distinction between imagination and reality.”
On the Road Back Home, the Uncanny Continues, Minus the Freaking Chickens, Though Chickens Have Prepared the Way
It is Luke’s idea to visit Niagara Falls during our return cross-country drive from Maine to Kansas because it’s sort of on the way. We do zero research in advance. We just plug “Niagara Falls” into Apple Maps and click “route.”
About twenty miles before we hit the Falls, we stop at a rest area that is a cross between a fast food court and a waterfall theme park, a circus of garish commodification we interpret as a harbinger of what is to come. But by this point we’ve committed to our earlier impulse; we vow to make the best of it.
We will soon confirm there is selling at the actual Niagara Falls State Park, the standard $7 soft drinks and $23 key chains, the typical options to “buy this place and take it home with you.” But it isn’t slick at all, and the whole shebang has a shabby, wistful sense of loss, somehow.
Partly, this sense is the result of our wrong turn. We see a big road sign off the interstate that says Niagara Falls Boulevard, and we take it, ignoring the squawks and remonstrances of Apple Maps. Niagara Falls Boulevard turns out to be a long, long, long road through the town of Niagara Falls, which is not in shambles, precisely, but definitely has the dusty feel of a place folks evacuated in a hurry and some time ago.
The long boulevard is riddled with evidence of a once booming tourism industry. Block after block there are 1950s-style motels with names like Niagara Rainbow Motel, but they seem mostly deserted, or populated by the folks who now live in 1950s-style motels: the poor leaning hard against the border of unhoused. We drive for what seems like miles through this ghost city.
The park itself reflects a similar state of decrepitude. Trash is wedged in the fences running along the Falls and river. All the grass dead, the flower beds full of weeds. It is like people stopped taking care of things.
There are lots of tourists—lots of East Indians and Chinese, in particular. Luke is approached repeatedly to take group photos for couples and families. So people are still visiting the Falls, but, in contrast to what I’d assumed at the theme park rest stop, it seems to be despite the care and upkeep and accommodations, rather than because of them.
Luke and I peer into the Niagara Falls gorge. It’s a mirror of sorts, a doubling. There are large “Maid of the Mist” boats full of soaked tourists wearing life jackets. Apparently, the company serves both nations hemming the falls. The U.S. boats are blue with big American flags flapping in the windy spray; the Canadian boats are red with equally big maple leaves wagging in the same wind. The boats fight against the force of the falls, chugging in parallel up and down the gorge.
But to look up is to see a Canadian side across the river that delivers the promise of the garish roadside rest stop. We gaze at Canada’s Skylon Tower and wave-shaped mirrored hotels flashing atop the cliffside. From our distance, the lines look clean, sharp, snappy. It’s like home! It’s the Ourselves we imagine, celebrated markers of our taken-for-granted expansive wow. The ones we know, advertise.
But is it, really? Across the span of water spray and space, the similarity shifts, slides into mist.
The Welcome Home
What we know, remember, recall, imagine? What we leave, where we arrive? Our encounters in there and now? They are undulating water creatures whose rippling scales throw flashes of light through the murk. Or they are full-throated, feathered, shouting across the morning dark, only to turn quiet by day, watching in the hallway or waiting among the trees. We squint as we turn to look, to clarify, verify. Record our sightings: Here and here but not here. Or we back away from what we see—once, twice, then slip to the side.
They are the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we know inside out, until we don’t. We narrowly escape them. We hold them in our arms.
