I wasn’t there to see it. I think it must have happened when I was really young, maybe two or three years old. But I sure heard the story of what happened told over and over again.

It isn’t hard to carry a live chicken. If you tuck their heads under their wings, they become quite calm and you can easily tuck one under your arm and carry it leaving the other hand and arm free to do other tasks. Still, carrying a live chicken all the way to the peak of the roof of the barn is another matter entirely. That’s why I think that the story was exaggerated. I suspect that the two brothers, Cliff and Ned, didn’t really carry a live chicken all the way to the peak of the roof of the barn. It is hard enough just to climb all the way up there. And it would be very scary to do so. It is high! My theory is that they carried a live chicken up into the hay mow. From there they proceeded to throw the chicken out of the window, or perhaps out of the big door where the bale conveyer went when they were pitching and stacking bales up there.

What I do know is that their experiment didn’t stop the argument. I also know that the chicken survived - at least that particular experiment. And I know that the two kept arguing a long time afterwards.

I knew Cliff a bit better than Ned, though I can’t say that I knew either of them very well. Cliff worked seasonally for my father, flying a spray plane treating crops for a variety of pests, mostly spraying to help control weeds, but sometimes spraying to help control alfalfa weevils. Cliff was a reliable worker, showing up at the cafe at 4:30 in the morning in order to be in the air by 5:30. He was methodical as he checked his airplane before flying. He also talked out loud to himself. I learned the steps of preflighting an airplane in part from Cliff talking through the process as he did it. I worked as part of the ground crew in my younger teen years. Cliff was single. He never married. He lived alone. And I think he might have been his own best friend from the way he talked to himself. But that doesn’t have anything to do with the story. Except that he was a pilot.

Ned was gregarious. He was married and he was one of those guys who would always come up to me and talk to me in the grocery store, the post office, or just walking down the street. Ned talked to everyone. I think Ned had a lot of best friends. Even after I was an adult and had moved away from my home town, Ned would come up to me when I came back to our home town to visit and start a conversation about the weather, politics, my life, or whatever other topic was on the top of his head at the time.

It was from Ned that I gathered part of the back story. It appears that he and Cliff had one day had an argument about whether or not a chicken could fly. Ned argued that of course a chicken can fly. A chicken is a bird and birds can fly. Maybe chickens aren’t the best flyers in the world of birds, but they can fly a little bit. Have you ever seen one running from the dog? It will get going fast enough to make it to the top of a fence post. And it got there by flying. Before the trip up in the barn they had experimented by throwing a chicken up into the air. It didn’t resolve the argument.

Cliff, argued that while chickens can glide, they can’t fly. If you watch a chicken descend from a height, they will stretch out their wings and make a controlled descent. However, they can’t gain altitude. If you watch a dog chasing a chicken, all you see is frantic activity. They flap their wings and they lose a lot of feathers and if they get running fast enough there is somehow just enough aerodynamic ability in those wings to get 3 or 4 feet off of the ground, but they couldn’t go any higher than that because as soon as they lost the speed gained from running their wings don’t propel them fast enough to actually fly.

Tossing a chicken out of the hay mow, or even from the peak of the roof of the barn didn’t solve the argument. The chicken glided to the ground and survived and Ned claims it flapped its wings and flew. Cliff says is merely glided.

The next part of the story was one that my father loved to tell. I’ll spare you the details of my father’s story, partly because he loved to stretch out the story with lots of details, some of which I’m pretty sure are imagined. Also he could be a bit graphic in his descriptions which are not necessary for this journal entry. The basic gist of the story is that Ned and Cliff tried their experiment with a Piper Super Cub airplane. Cliff flew. Ned held the chicken in the back seat. You can fly a Super Cup with the doors open. The clamshell arrangement on the right side of the plane works by the windows going up and clipping to the underside of the wing and the bottom of the door going down to clip to the side of the fuselage. Most of the time when a pilot wants more air they just open the top half of the door. That would be enough space to throw a chicken out. Ned says it flew, briefly. Cliff disagrees. The result was a whole lot of chicken feathers and, unfortunately there was a casualty. My father said that they failed to consider prop blast. While a Super Cub will fly at very slow speeds, as slowly as 38 mph. However, at that speed the air going past the cabin and over the tail surfaces is going much faster because of the propellor at the front of the plane. At least we know that chickens aren’t designed to fly at high speed.

As far as I know the two brothers never resolved their argument. Neither is alive today. Neither succumbed to a flying accident. Both lived to see years of retirement. I think they got together on occasion - two old men sitting on the porch and talking. I suspect that more than just talking they were arguing. That’s what they did best. And they didn’t have access to the Internet, which sides with Ned. The world record for a chicken is a flight that lasted 13 seconds and covered just over 300 feet while reaching an altitude of nearly 10 feet.