Chicken sacrifice?

July 14 we went boondocking—essentially, free camping by the roadside with no services. We need no services. If fully stocked (water, food, empty ports-potty and vino—in that order) we can be self-contained—rain, shine or mosquitoes—for several days! We enjoyed wildlife on our trip out of the Arctic:a bobcat,several pika and bunnies and multiple black foxes. When we were wired at one campsite, I was able to fact check the difference between crows and ravens. I think the majority of the large black loud birds have been ravens. Ravens punctuate all the totem poles and many regional fabrics ( clothes, scarves, even leggings) with Pacific Northwest stylized birds.

Excitement on the trip to Chicken, Alaska: Just past the Canadian border, 43 miles to go to the next anything, another dashboard alert sounds. Wha?!!? We had broken every rule seasoned travelers told us before we left: “carry two spares,” (oops) “fill up with gas at every town.” We couldn’t believe we were looking at a LOW FUEL light. Judd’s elaborate car computer could cipher how many kilometers we could go on current fuel.(We had changed all the dashboard readings to metric while in Canada. Judd was even educated on litres per kilometer vs. miles per gallon and kilo Pascals vs PSI. We had to do long division before Judd got the numbers re-converted-to the Imperisl System, the calculations said our gas should last 41 miles. Okay—43 miles to go. Exciting, I figured I could walk two miles to town and find a gas containers. Happily, most of the trip to town was downhill as we had already created the Top of the World Highway. Judd worked on his fuel-economy driving skills and we coasted into the first gas station. Our Alaskan Milepost ( the travel Bible) said gas was cheaper at the airport, but not knowing how far that was, we opted to pay the premium as s lesson learned. Dang! I’m getting tired of lessons learned. When does the relaxing, sit in the sun and read s book, relaxing vacation start?

Chicken isn’t a town so much as a community: population 23 in the summer; 7 in the winter.initially, they wanted to name themselves after the plentiful bird, Ptarmigan, but no one could spell it right consistently, one Post Master just gave up and named it Chicken. all of the (4) establishments use chicken (and gold) in all of their decorating. The community holds 2 RV parks ( only one with flush toilets.) the one restaurant is attached, by the same proprietress, Susan the Pie Lady, to her one saloon, to the one liquor store and the one “mercantile emporium.” Susan also offers free camping in the parking lot out back. The community sits on Chicken Creek, a place which hoards all the paraphernalia of gold mining heyday. To Judd’s delight, tons and tonnage of rusted metal dredging equipment abounds. We did some gold panning with my retirement gift from the VA—areal metal pan. We panned some really shiny dirt. I put it carefully in my $1 vial I had ambitiously purchased in Whitehorse.

When we arrived at the saloon about 6pm (thinking it was 7pm—which it was in Yukon, or 8pm in NW Territories, Canada) we were greeted by the bartender and waitress, all in the middle of decorating and costume-making for the night’s events. They had, apparently spontaneously, decided to have a theme night and the theme was sacrificial chicken. One woman was forging a Dothraki scythe out of cardboard; the bartender who was to be the sacrificial chicken we learned later, was the ADD son of Susan the Proprietress. A man had purchased a Daniel Boone hat from the emporium and our waitress was offering all the patrons s dot of black paint on their forehead—Luke an Ash Wednesday ritusl(or something more satanic?) but messier. By dinner, my dot had melted into a poop emoji so I washed it off, Judd’s Had started to trickle into his forehead crease, but he wore it as a badge of youth. We excused ourselves to the chicken pot pie at the restaurant and went out back to camp