The days are getting longer, the temperature is hovering above zero more. For Ray and myself, this means we are getting ready for our first Chicken Run of the year. In honor of this event, I’ll be sharing some of my previous posts about our cabin in Chicken and what we do out there.
But as promised from my last blog post. I am going to tell a little story about the time I sexually harassed the ptarmigan one spring. Many of you are probably asking, wait, what? I assure you, it was completely accidental.
But let me set the stage first.
For those of you who do not follow me on a regular basis, my husband and I have a cabin in the interior of Alaska, six miles outside of a little town called Chicken, Alaska. It’s about a seven-hour drive from Anchorage. When we turn off at Tetlin Junction onto the Taylor Highway, we lose all cell phone connection. We carry a sat phone for emergencies, but even that is not much of guarantee of safety. Our cabin is pretty rustic. We have no running water or electricity. We have a small generator for when we need to run power tools but that’s about it.
We really like the solitude. It’s nice to get away from everything and really disconnect. At night, it’s so quiet, we can hear the river flowing four miles away.
Meanwhile, there is the cabin itself. I often post pictures of it. We started the earthwork for the cabin about three years in advance of actually building. Why? Permafrost. Chicken, along with most of the interior of Alaska has what is known as discontinuous permafrost. You don’t want to build on permafrost. If you do, you will get subsidence. There are many pictures throughout Alaska of cabins sunk up to their eaves from building on permafrost. So we dug down into the peat and the gravel and disturbed the permafrost as much as we could before construction. Then we built the cabin on jacks so that if we needed to, we could level the cabin if it started to subside.
Sometimes, with the freeze thaw cycles and the settling of the buildings, windows crack. After the cabin was built, we waited 2 years to install windows. So instead, we just had plywood over the openings. This is why in my story I am about to tell, we couldn’t see out of the cabin at the time.
Early May of 2013 (the year after we built the cabin) Ray and I took a trip out to the cabin by ourselves. This time of year, there can be anywhere from patches of snow to a couple of feet out at the cabin. The Taylor Highway is officially open on April 30th, but we can go hours without seeing a car. It’s still getting dark at night, and though we have an outhouse, it’s not wise to go wandering around in the dark. We have moose and bear that wander up to the cabin regularly. We typically keep a “honey bucket” close to the cabin for convenience and safety for use at night.
We also have ravens out in Chicken. These birds love to pick at things. In particular, they love to pick at the wipes that I leave out with the honey bucket on the porch. They will carry off a whole package and tear it to shreds. Our first morning out in Chicken on this trip, I awoke to strange sounds on the porch and roof. I sleep with earplugs in my ears (my husband snores like a Husqvarna chainsaw), so I can’t quite make out exactly what they are. In my half-awake state, I become absolutely sure that it’s ravens tearing up the wipes on the porch again.
I leapt out of bed swearing, “Assholes!”
Ray rolls over, “What?”
“Those asshole Ravens are tearing up the wipes on the porch again,” I shouted, yanking the ear plugs out of my ears and stomping toward the front door, determined to give these pesky birds a piece of my mind. In hindsight, I really should have used more caution, it totally could have been a bear or a moose.
But nope, I fling open the door and rush out onto the porch completely naked, shouting, “Assholes!” Then I freeze at the sight before me.
It wasn’t ravens at all. It was ptarmigan. And not just one or two. There must have been somewhere between 50 to 70 ptarmigan on the porch, the deck, the bbq, the roof of the outhouse, the picnic table and the paths around the cabin.
They were mating. It was a full-blown ptarmigan orgy. The few on the porch scattered at my emergence from the cabin, but then immediately went right back to their activities after giving me a dirty look for disturbing their good time.
So of course, I start laughing and shouting, “Ray, come here! You have to see this!”
He comes stumbling out of the cabin (completely naked too), “What the hell?” Then he starts laughing. We stood there just staring at the strange scene until the cold air drove us back inside. Believe it or not, ptarmigan even sound like people when they are getting it on. I have never witnessed so many birds copulating at one time. It was about three in the morning when they started, they continued until about six, then melted back into the brush as if they had never been.
The four days we were out there, this happened every morning at exactly the same time. The first morning it was hilarious, the second it was funny. The third I wanted to scream, “Shut up already!” The fourth morning I was ready to find out if ptarmigan really do taste like chicken.
We have never seen it happen again. Maybe we were out there at just the right time.
Is it weird that I wish in hindsight that I had taken pictures? (pervert!)
Thanks for reading. Our first Chicken Run of 2019 is set for the end of March. Stay tuned, I will be posting more Chicken stories this month.