The first disaster was trying to hide the chickens from our landlord.
We were preparing to drive from our duplex in Texas to our new home – a 21-hour drive that mysteriously stretched itself into a 34-hour drive. (Why we insisted on making the entire trip in one go is a question that I do not quite have the answer to…)
The Army had a team come out and box up our entire house, save the items we reserved as “essentials” for our immediate use. Another team came out to load the boxes onto a big tractor trailer truck to head north. All we had to pack into our own vehicles was our essential items (this included some of my moderately suspicious ferments and my sourdough starter), and of course the chickens.
We did not, strictly speaking, have express permission to keep the chickens at our rental in Texas. However, I will stand by the fact that nothing in the rental agreement directly prohibited the keeping of backyard chickens. The only line in the agreement that mentioned animals was “no animals inside the dwelling.” Other than the first few weeks when they had to be under the heat lamp, those fluffy little balls of poop and dirt were most certainly not inside our dwelling. We checked with both of our immediate neighbors before we got them, and they had no problem with our plans. In fact, one of our neighbors turned out to be quite the chicken expert, having kept a flock of over 100 birds when he lived on his ranch before retiring. He was incredibly helpful in our journey as new chicken owners.
Still, we worried that the rental inspector, coming to document the status of the property on our last day in town, would ask questions about the big squawking box in the backyard. So, with the help of our chicken-expert neighbor, we locked the chickens in the coop, hoisted the entire box of chickens up over the air conditioner unit (quite the feat, I assure you), and then into the bed of the truck. My husband was to then take the truck around to the other side of the block, safely out of view of the landlord.
Then my car didn’t start. My job was to make a last minute run to the dump with our last bags of trash, as the trash cans were supposed to be “empty and clean.” I also needed to go to the post office to turn in our mail-forwarding form for our new address. With my Grandmother’s words in my head that “you will always get caught in a lie,” Ben and I decided to just bring the truck back into the driveway to jump-start my vehicle, and let the rental inspector see the chickens.
When the inspector finally arrived, she didn’t even notice the chickens in the back of the truck. Nary a second glance was given to the large, awkwardly tilted box in the bed. She did, however, see the big bag of chicken feed that we had forgotten to move from the back stoop. She looked surprised and asked if we had chickens. We proceeded to discuss her own, much larger flock, and how easy it would be to increase our current flock from four hens to double or triple the size.
We got “points off” the rental for the tiny smudge on our stove filter, but not for having chickens. I was relieved we didn’t try to hide them.
Then it was off to U-Haul to load my car onto a tow dolly. After some back and forth to get the correct hitch on the truck, we got the car on the dolly, secured it – with some effort – and took off, rather cramped in the stuffed truck and a smidge past our planned departure time.
It wasn’t ten minutes down the road that Ben glanced in his side view mirror and hit his brakes. The coop door was wide open, flapping in the wind, fully exposing the chickens inside. We pulled over and I jumped out to close the coop door. The poor chickens must have been quite shocked. They were huddled in the back of the coop, as far from as they could get the world racing past them outside their open door.
Twenty minutes later, the coop was wide open again. The wind must have been picking up the latch on the door and unlocking it. Ben rummaged around and found some rope, so we tried tying the door closed, looping the rope through the wire on each side of the door and tying it closed.
Then it happened again. It took longer this time, but the rope had somehow become untied and the coop was yet again wide open, it’s door flapping in the wind. After the second time the rope came loose, we decided the chickens must be pecking it and breaking it from the inside – a claim I admittedly cannot prove. I tied the rope much higher, where the chickens hopefully couldn’t reach it, and that did the trick. It was some start to our journey.
Keeping the chickens fed and watered was another feat. Because of how the coop was positioned in the bed of the truck, as we drove it ended up leaning at quite a pronounced angle, causing the small metal automatic-waterer we had shoved into place in the coop to empty. Every time we stopped, we poured water through the coop into the rim of the waterer for the chickens to drink from. We shoved some of whatever we had for food – green beans, stewed cabbage, ground beef, pretzels – into the coop for them to eat. Not ideal, but better than nothing.
Surprisingly, they didn’t appear to be too terribly fazed by the journey, though they weren’t exactly enjoying themselves. When we stopped for something to eat around dusk, they had all perched up on their roost, ready to settle in for the night. I laughed and shook my head, thinking they wouldn’t last long up there bouncing along the highway. But when we stopped for gas several hours later, there they remained, clutching the bar as tightly as they could with their sharp clawed feet.
The chickens became the least of our worries about halfway through the drive. We stopped for gas when we noticed one of the tires on the car was actually up on the front “stopper” of the dolly – the vertical piece of metal that is supposed to stop the car from flying into the back-end of the truck. The strap holding the tire in place on the dolly must have come loose. The car was dead, so we had to carefully maneuver the truck forward and backward and sideways, trying to shift the tire back into the correct place. We managed to reseat the tire on the dolly, but as we were tightening the straps, my husband noticed the strap was beginning to fray. This caused quite a panic (at least on his part). As it was approaching midnight, the stores in the little town we stopped in were all closed. We decided to carefully get back on the highway and search for the nearest truck-stop to find a new strap for the dolly.
The first place we stopped did not have what we needed. We got back on the road and stopped at one more truck stop, where we found something that might help secure the tire, and got to work tying the straps around the tire and to the dolly platform. It was quite the endeavor, and we had to make several more stops throughout the drive to retighten, retie, and rewrap the straps around the tire. I’d say we can assume a direct correlation with this and the additional thirteen hours that were added to the suggested trip time.
We pulled into our new neighborhood at around 9PM the next night, where our landlords very generously agreed to meet us with the key. They showed us around the house, and then went home as we hoisted the chickens down off the truck bed, wheeled them to the backyard, unloaded the truck, and got everything inside. We must have been a bit noisy, as at one point one of the neighbors poked their head out of their front door to see what all the fuss was about. Finally, with my dead car still on the dolly, we completed the journey.
The chickens took a few weeks to get used to their surroundings, and maybe get over the shock of being transported halfway across the country, partly with their door flung wide open. They didn’t lay for some time at first, but soon began providing us with their lovely light brown eggs once again. I would call the trip a success – though, I think there might be some things I would change for next time, namely not trusting the dollies from U-Haul without conducting a thorough check of all straps. The chickens were fine, though, and that was my main concern. The first true test of our “mobile homestead.”