Why did the Chicken...

...take a boat ride? (Huh?)


Silkie the Boat Riding Chicken

In the truth is stranger than fiction category - this Saturday I went down to the houseboat in Chestertown to get away from it all. Around noontime, the couple that have the boat in the next slip at the dock arrived and I thought I saw a spray of white feathers but thought nothing of it. The boat 'next door' is an old wooden classic and belongs to a one-legged lady with a bionic leg, and an older gentleman (who is indeed a gentleman) named Lisa and Ted. Their boat is named "Poly and Finn" - so you can imagine the confusion at times stemming from that.

Anyway, they soon got settled and decided to take a ride out to a place along the river bank for a picnic and off they went. When they returned, I helped them dock by tossing them a couple lines and that is when I saw Silkie up on the "dashboard" eyeing the contents of Lisa's wine goblet. Lisa told me she had sampled a "nice white wine" from New York for lunch, and I asked her if the chicken was old enough to drink (she hadn't noticed it with its head in the glass, LOL) and she turned to see what I was talking about. "Silkie! no! that's mine!," she said.

So then she tells me, as I am tying on the remaining ropes, that the chicken was a "her" and still a chick, and that she had brought it along because it was new and the other chickens (they have a dozen or so) back home in the chicken coop where picking on it... it had been her father's but it had not not got along with the chickens at her father's coop. So, as Lisa put it, "Silkie is a 'rescue chicken'".

I then smiled, and asked, "So, why did the chicken go on a boat ride?" and she and Captain Ted both replied without a moments hesitation and in unison, "Because it was tired of crossing the street!" I laughed, and was opening my mouth to say more, when Lisa, who seems to know how my mind works, preempted me by saying, "And NO! Silkie doesn't have lips."

So that's the highlight of the weekend. :)