Natural History

I can’t remember who gave me this line, but I’ve tucked it away in my phrase bank just for a chance to use it. However, chance has not yet arrived, so I’ll force the issue and give it its own post.

I remember that this line came from someone looking for a remote area somewhere in West Virginia, and he got lost on one of those country roads where the road is nothing more than a solid black ribbon of blacktop coursing its way over the hills and along the creeks.

When he pulled alongside a man who was walking along the road,  he asked the man for directions.

Now, asking people walking along the road for directions is often a risky undertaking. They will give you all sorts of weird and esoteric directions– usually in some reference where Mr. Brown’s barn used to be before it burned down.

Which would be nice if you knew who Mr. Brown was or where he had a barn.

But this man gave different set of directions– directions that cannot be imitated in their:

“Son, you keep driving until the black-top turns to gravel. Then you turn right down the road with the big mud holes at the fork. The mud holes will so deep that the bullfrogs will be jumping as you drive through them. Keep driving on that until you see a white farm house. Then turn left and keep driving until you reach the point where hoot-owls [screw] the chickens.”

He didn’t use the word screw.

I wish I could remember who told me this story, because that last line is classic.

I know the Australians use a term called “beyond the black stump” to denote some extremely remote place.

I think “where the hoot-owls [screw] the chickens” is a pretty good phrase for West Virginia.

A hoot-owl is a barred owl. Barred owls actually eat chickens, but I suppose if you were in a remote enough area, the male owls couldn’t find their mates and would have to mate with anything feathered. This still requires a bit more imagination and poetic license than maybe I am willing to give it.

I hear the barred owls call just before it rains or snows. I don’t know why they do this, but if you hear a barred owl call in the middle of the day, you know that it is going to rain or snow. Their call is quite distinctive:

Source.

Most North Americans will know that sound. However, I don’t think many have heard the noises these birds make during the mating season.  They sound something absolutely demonic:

I had a dog that would go nuts when the barred owls would start making those noises. I think she thought the gremlins were coming to get her.

I don’t think a chicken would respond to such calls very well, although a hooting barred owl is a sound that that will make a wild turkey tom gobble.

So despite its nonsense, I still like the phrase. I think it is as near perfection as anything I have yet heard.

You know, I still imagine that there is a place in West Virginia so remote that the hoot owls are so lonely that they must pair off with the lowly barnyard fowl.

Now that I think about it, maybe the mothman is actually a misidentified chicken-owl hybrid.

I don’t know, but we have lots of remote areas here, where just about anything can happen.