Stories: the Wanderlust of Kauai Chickens…
We all like chicken
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
They’re everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Like a feathered occupying army that won the war and now they’re just rubbing it in. Parking lots. Golf courses. The tarmac at the goddamn airport. These aren’t your industrialized, factory-farmed abominations pumped full of antibiotics and regret. These are feral. These are the descendants of birds that said “fuck you” to Hurricane Iniki and every subsequent attempt at containment, and they won.
And then there’s me. Lying face-down in a Safeway parking lot at 2 PM, camera pointed at a rooster who couldn’t care less about my creative vision. Hot asphalt burning through my shirt. Some tourist family stepping around me, wondering if you’re having a medical emergency or just another mainlander who’s lost the plot.
I’m both, probably.
But I need that shot. That perfect angle. Ground-level. Eye-to-eye with a creature that has more dignity in its ridiculous comb than you do sprawled out like a crime scene outline between a Corolla and a shopping cart return.
They crow at 3 AM. They crow at noon. They crow when they feel like it, which is always, because they know something I don’t: this is their island now. Everyone else is just visiting. And apparently, I’m visiting while prostrate in the street, trying to capture their magnificence.
The tourists photograph them standing up, like cowards. Tik-Tok them from a safe distance. Think it’s charming. Give it a day. Maybe two. That charm wears off right around the time you’re trying to sleep off your jet lag and some rooster with a Napoleon complex and a voice like a car alarm decides it’s time to announce the dawn. At 4:15 in the morning.
But here’s the thing, and you knew there’d be a thing, they’re kind of magnificent in their refusal to give a shit. They’ve achieved what we all dream about: total freedom from the system, complete autonomy, and unlimited range. They are literally free-range, in the most literal sense possible.
Maybe that’s why I’m down there on the pavement, looking ridiculous, trying to get their portrait. Because deep down, I recognize something. A kinship with anything that refuses to be domesticated, that persists despite every logical reason not to, that announces itself loudly and without apology to a world that mostly wishes it would shut the fuck up.
They’re a reminder that nature doesn’t ask permission. That wildness persists. That sometimes the chickens actually do come home to roost, everywhere, perpetually, and without apology.
I respect that. Even at 4:15 in the morning. Even from the pavement of the Safeway parking lot.