Bonding

I’ve been brooding a bit about brood — the book by Jackie Polzin that was the subject of my blog a few days back.  It is a novel about “everything” says one reviewer — “joy and love and beauty and loss.  Marriage and motherhood and friendship and grief.  All brought to life through the story of a little backyard flock.”

And therein lies the difficulty.  I don’t know a great deal about my own backyard flock or about chickens, in general, but I have done enough research to make me a bit critical when chicken facts are misrepresented.  Or just plain wrong.

East Porch Guard Duty

Take this statement, for instance: While I do not think my mother is prepared for the idiocy of chickens — pigeons being intelligent birds with coachable qualities — caring for the chickens will be just one more arc of food on the skyline as she tosses kibble in every conceivable direction.  That was on page 19 and I very nearly didn’t continue on to the book’s end on page 222.  Idiocy!?!  Clearly Ms. Polzin hasn’t spent much time really observing and learning about her little flock.

Does she know, for instance, that numerous studies have shown that chickens can recognize as many as 100 different individual chickens?  And individual humans, as well?  Clearly chickens are not stupid.  And as for “coachable qualities”… has the author ever availed herself of any of the numerous chicken videos showing the many tricks chickens have been “coached” to do?  If she happens to run across this tirade, I suggest she try watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYyHVNzLtL8 or any number of other YouTube videos showing chicken tricks and how to “coach” your chicken to do them.  There were other examples of the author’s limited knowledge about her brood  and, though I tried not to let it interfere with my enjoyment of the book… I was bothered.

And while I’m still on the fiction and fact rant, I was bothered, too, by a recent ghost story publication by History Press which had a number of untruths in it regarding the history of our area. Worse, perhaps, were the innuendos and half-truths — like the photograph of an old fort,  credited this way:”2018. Courtesy of MikeGoad, Pixabay.”  It appears in the chapter about Long Beach, Washington and clearly implies that a fort once existed there.  I’m not aware that there was ever a fort in Long Beach — only the one north of Oysterville that was never quite finished.

And, in the same chapter, a long and gory description of Merriweather Lewis’s death which took place at Hohenwald, Tennessee, 2,477 miles from Long Beach and four years after his time as co-leader of the Corps of Discovery.   How in the world is that “a ghost story” related to Long Beach, Washington?  The fact is, it isn’t.

Or… if the general category is fiction, does anything go?  I admit I’m a tad old-fashioned when it comes to “truth in storytelling.”  And so, I continue to brood…