Playing Chicken
As the seasons change and cooler weather is starting to get interspersed with the normally warm days, my back hillside work is grinding to a halt. It is leaving a definite gap in my daily activities which I am not so ready to abandon just yet. Well, that led to my buying an eight-foot tall chicken. Sounds logical, right? It did to me anyway and I ordered up this huge metal sculpture for a spot on the back hillside that suddenly looked bare with everything else going on out there. Yesterday I got an email from a shipping company announcing their plan to deliver something to me. I have also bought some other smaller metal sculpture pieces so I didn’t initially know what was due to be delivered. I called the company and they gave me the name of the vendor and the weight of the item, at which point I knew I had a chicken on its way to me.
To begin with, let’s be more accurate and explain that this is actually a rooster rather than a chicken. It has a big red crown and a bright yellow beak and chest. It is a very colorful piece shaped exactly like a chicken down to the rebar talons on the back side of its feet. It looks like a cross between a stylish French poulet and a fun Mexican (probably Otomi) pollo loco. At 96” in height and 64” wide, this was sure to make a statement on the back hillside.
I got a call from the delivery guy telling me to expect him between 2pm and 3pm. He informed me that this was curbside delivery only and there was no way he was bringing the chicken up the driveway. So, I got out my leather gloves and my all-purpose 4-in-1 handcart (I could have used my soon-to-be-delivered power wheelbarrow, but no such luck) and waited patiently at the base of the driveway, listening for the sound of a struggling truck coming up the hill. When it got to 3pm I began thinking of calling when I suddenly got an email saying they had delivered the item to me. They also said my name was Richard Scherer and that I lived at 10147 Maple Hill Drive rather than 10133 Quail View Drive.
First, I called the driver back and we went through the confusing discussion that he had been given the wrong address and name and that he needed to check in with his dispatcher right away. He did that and told me I was right that I was who I was and lived where I lived and that, yes, this was still my package. He thought he would not be able to deliver the package that day and told me to call the office. When I called, they were under the impression that the delivery had already occurred. When I went through the wrong name/address issue they finally agreed that the delivery had gone awry but not to worry, it would get to me today at some time or another. That is when I called the driver back and said he was, indeed, supposed to deliver it today. He grumbled and said he had to discuss it with the dispatcher.
In the meantime, I had called Handy Brad and lined him up to come and help me with this supposed 195 pound monster that was going to get deposited at the foot of my driveway, a good 500 yards up and down a hillside from where it needed to go. I texted Handy Brad and said to hold off until I had confirmation that the eagle had, indeed, landed. He was flexible and willing to be available. I went through two more iterations with the driver wherein he was to be here in forty-five and then (after an hour had passed) only thirty minutes more. By this time it was closing in on 6pm and darkness had fallen.
As the bewitching hour approached, I went again down to the base of the driveway to wait with my handcart and gloves. When I heard a big truck laboring over the knoll towards our street, I was not entirely surprised to hear it stop at our street and my phone ring. The driver didn’t think he could come down the street. His truck was large, but not anything like a semi-trailer and I have seen plenty of semis come down this street, so I told him he could make it just fine. I stood in the street waving my lighted cellphone like I was at a Billy Joel concert and he finally found the ability to inch down this otherwise wide street. I told him the driveway was wide enough for him to back into so that he could drop the package off more easily (for me) and also get turned around. He was risk averse and wanted no part of my driveway.
He opened the back of his truck and I wondered what he had been up to all day since it was full to the brim with pallets of boxes. There at the end was a pallet with an odd-shaped (one might even say, chicken-shaped) taped-up box on top. I could tell from the scrawny metal legs sticking out of the bottom of the box and wired tight to the pallet that this was my chicken in a plain brown wrapper. I asked if he had a lift gate and he said he did, but that he thought the package was light enough for us two to get it off the truck without the lift. I was dubious of 195 pounds, but when he tilted it towards me I realized that it weighed nowhere near that amount and was, as he had suggested, light enough to handle ourselves. In fact, I was convinced that the bulky pallet was probably the heaviest part of the whole thing.
I got the beast on my extended hand truck, gave the grumpy and recalcitrant driver a tip…less because he had earned it and more to improve his mood for the next guy. He drove off quickly leaving me in the dark of the street with my eight-foot bucket of chicken. I called Handy Brad and got no answer. Then I called Kim, thinking she would help steady the thing while I pushed the handcart up the driveway…but she didn’t answer either. So, I put my shoulder to it and pushed the damn thing up the driveway myself and unloaded it pallet side down in front of the house. It was then that Handy Brad called and asked why I hadn’t called him rather than struggling with it alone. Kim also came out and clucked over the chicken, determined to document my efforts by photographing me both before and after unwrapping it.
All it took to unwrap it was a razor knife to cut through the makeshift box and three tons of plastic wrap that encased it. I could see that the wrapping had bent in and tightened some of the colorful feather, but it was nothing that couldn’t be easily bent back out into shape. I contemplated leaving the crown flopped over making the bird look like a French street tough who had just won a cock fight, but I ended up making all the feathers stand at attention instead. Handy Brad agreed to come in the morning and help me move it down the hillside. I knew Joventino would also be here, so I figured the rooster could spend the night in the driveway. I left him wired to the pallet just in case there were any chicken rustlers on the prowl.
In the morning I untethered Rosie the Trans-gender Rooster from her pallet (I guess that would make it a poulet pallet) and gussied up her metal feathers a bit more to show her off to Joventino and Handy Brad. I knew Handy Brad would enjoy the spectacle, but wondered what Joventino must think (Crazy Gringo! Probably). The three of us wrestled Rosie down the hill in my Gorilla Cart. We dug her in to level her off and used the rebar J-stakes I had ordered to secure her tightly to ground.
When I came back up to the house to see how Rosie looked, I was pleased, but also noted that an eight-foot chicken never looks as big at a distance as you think it will.