Giant Metal Chicken

For a couple of years after graduating from PCU, I went home to Hell, a city in the southern part of the country. You may guess from the moniker that I'm not precisely fond of that place, but after all, it is where I grew up, and it has a number of redeeming qualities. Mainly, those 'qualities' are individual people who are pretty awesome and good friends of mine, but there are also some occasional oddities that just come out of nowhere.

The giant metal chicken was certainly among the latter.

I worked at a university that was stuck out in the middle of a not-so-great part of town. There were two reasonable ways to get out of the university campus for me; one took me home to my own apartment, the other to my mother's house where I grew up. On the not too infrequent happenstance that took me straight from work to Mom's house, I would drive past a very odd building, a sort of shed, with an outdoor component that seemed to house all manner of odd things (i.e., a cowboy made out of tire scraps, something that looked like a giant ball of yarn made of wood). They changed from time to time, but one thing that was almost always there was the giant metal chicken.

The chicken seemed to have been built around the frame of an old VW hippie van. The neck and head added at least as much again to the height, and the tail about half again as much length. Each individual feather had been made out of rippled metal and welded onto the structure in a very solid-looking, realistic sculpture. Realistic... except for size and material and the holes in the base (presumably for weight issues).

The first time I saw this thing, I had to pull over and get a closer look. I probably chuckled all the way to Mom's. After a while I got used to seeing it, although the novelty didn't really wear off too much. But it wasn't until I was driving about later in the evening a while later with my friend, Miss Piggy, that I realized just how amazing this contraption was.

We were stopped at a red light, and I looked at the other cars at the intersection, and had to do a double-take. "I didn't know the giant metal chicken was mobile!"

Miss Piggy looked at me, looked at the chicken on the road (with its glowing red eyes), looked at me, and said, "You knew there was a giant metal chicken?!"