A Car Wash Chicken

Living in a rural area offers many advantages—unobscured sunrises and sunsets, skies lit only by stars, the sounds of birdsong and breezes wafting through the trees instead of traffic and industry noise. However, this city girl still needs her “city fix,” so I regularly make the 60-mile trip to Katy, a suburb of Houston, to shop, meet friends for lunch, get my hair cut and get my car washed.

On one recent Wednesday, a sunny day occurring in the middle of a spate of rainy ones, after my visit to the hair salon I drove into the nearby car wash, and as I pulled up to the vacuuming center, noticed a chicken walking around the area. I thought it was very unusual so as I stepped from my car I asked the attendant if that was the resident chicken. He obviously didn’t hear me over the noise of the vacuum cleaners because he just shrugged.

When I went inside to pay I asked the cashier the same question and she informed me that the “people behind us have chickens, and sometimes they come over here.” After the car was vacuumed and thoroughly cleaned I got in the car and headed home.

When I pulled in the garage I simply shut the garage door and entered the house, exhausted after a long day. However I realized I needed to retrieve my purse so opened the door to the garage and saw that the hazard lights were flashing. I was sure I hadn’t turned them on and opened the driver’s door to turn them off. The chicken was standing on the front passenger seat.

Stunned, I ran to find my husband to get his help getting the chicken out of the car. Couldn’t find him, so I went back to the car and tried my best to get her out by clucking and talking to her (I’m glad no one was around to hear that.), and I finally got some cheese crackers to bribe her. She wasn’t particularly impressed with those and pranced back and forth from front to back seat on the console. She finally hopped out of the car and I opened the garage door so she could go out.

She ate the crackers, then trotted outside. I found my husband in his shop and when I told him my story he couldn’t believe it. He wanted to see it and when we returned to the front yard where we saw Jack, our lab mix. Figuring he had chased the chicken, we looked around and saw her about 30 feet up in a tree.

I decided then that I should check the car to make sure she hadn’t deposited something so with my flashlight I carefully checked the cargo area, the seats, under both front seats and under the back seats. No deposits except for a pristine egg under the passenger side back seat. Can this story get any more weird?

In retrospect we thought of the scenarios of things that could have happened. How and when did she climb in the car? Why didn’t I hear a “peep” out of her while driving for an hour on the interstate? What if she had decided to fly at me – I could easily have caused major damage on the road.

In the meantime, the hen had flown to the ground. The dog lost interest and since we had no idea what to do next, we laid some bread pieces and a bowl of water on the patio. Later the bread was gone and so was she. For nine days we never saw the chicken and assumed something had killed her or that she had decided to go somewhere else. On Day 10 she showed up in a wooded area near my husband’s shop so we gave her more bread and some ham scraps. She then made her presence known daily and a friend who has chickens came to the house three times with food and a hope that she could catch the chicken to add it to her flock. My friend brought some straw and a box thinking she at least could have a place to sleep and possibly get inside so she could be caught. She wasn’t going to get near enough for that to happen. John and I even attempted to trap her in a crab net. That made her even more skittish. By this time “Soapy Bubbles” had a name and seemed to have claimed her territory.

By the third week we had developed somewhat of a routine. I bought a 25-pound bag of chicken “scratch” from the local feed store and every day I put some in a plastic dish at the edge of the wooded area. I would rattle the cup of corn and call, “Here Soapy, come for your dinner.” Sometimes I made some “chick, chick” noises and after a few days of doing that she would walk up and eat right in front of me. My husband still calls her “Chick Chick.” One day that week John informed me that there was an egg on the trailer in the tractor shed. (I did eat the first egg— Yum.) So we made a nest of the straw on a large tray. I then bought two ceramic eggs and she began laying an egg.

After a month or so she refused to leave her nest for three days and I realized she was brooding. I was concerned about her so I physically removed her. That was traumatic for both of us. However she recovered and found a place on the back of my husband’s truck. She continued to provide an egg every other day.

Soapy was with us for six months, but we had to find her a home as we were leaving for a vacation for two weeks. I had a friend who agreed to take her since she had chickens. It wasn’t an easy transition because that chicken would allow no one to touch her, but we managed to get her in a box.

Soapy lived happily in her new home for a few years and died last summer.

Cindy Slator Lives in Industry.