Pregled posta

Marketing

The Chicken Store opened in February 2000 in a former tanning salon at 1229 Duval, just north of the Southernmost Hotel. The storefront shop is a home for relocated roosters and injured and orphaned chickens. When I visited the Chicken Store in October, owner-founder Katha Sheehan had an inventory of nearly 40 chicks.

The Chicken Store has been a bone of contention for some residents because of early morning territorial cock-a-doodle-doos. The noise doesn't bother Babich and it's only bothered me on my last-call walk home from the Green Parrot. (In true Key West style, the Chicken Store is next door to the Scrub Club, which offers erotic modeling, fantasy role playing and other extreme pastimes for men at 1221 Duval.)

"If you have problems with them crowing at night [chickens, not Scrub Club customers], we offer free ear plugs," Sheehan said. "One thing that gets them going are people retiring from the bars driving by with the boom box going in their car. That wakes them up. This is one of the noisiest towns I've ever lived in and chickens are the least of it. We don't have large features to break up sound and since Hurricane George we lost a lot of our big ficus trees. They're not likely to be replanted since they're yard hogs."

Sheehan was lugging around a big bag of chicken scratch when I just dropped in to see what condition her chickens were in. "This started when I was a volunteer at the local animal shelter," she said. "I was working with dogs but I noticed they received calls about nuisance chickens, orphaned chicks, injured chickens. And it always was, 'We don't do chickens.' But to me chickens seemed a very significant part of wild-domestic animals here."

The Key West "gypsy chicken" is a descendent of the first fighting gamecocks brought to the Florida Keys (first pegged "Isle of Bones") by the original Spanish who arrived by galleon with tools and livestock on board as well as Bahamian settlers who became the first Conchs. These fowl later interbred with a stream of bantam chickens brought to Key West from Cuba (occasionally on homemade rafts). And the feisty Cuban cockfighting chicken El Gallo Blanco was so famous, local lore has it that Key West residents met his boat when it arrived from Havana. Today there are an estimated 2,000 chickens on the tiny 2-by-4-mile island.

"Chickens do us a great favor," Sheehan said. "There's a lot of bugs in the tropics and chickens eat their fair share of bugs. You can't have a better friend than one that's out there eating cockroaches and termites almost day and night. Chickens are omnivores. They'll eat anything from rocks to beef. They eat rocks for their gizzards. It helps their digestion. They don't paint themselves into any evolutionary corner. They always keep their options open. They'll try anything once."

Sheehan knows her chickens. When she was 18, she worked in the chicken section of a kibbutz (communal farm) during a six-month stay in Israel. In 1999 she was certified by the state of Florida as an animal control officer for the Florida Keys SPCA (Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals.) While working at the shelter, she specialized in Key West gypsy chickens. In 2000 she opened the store to finance the effort to take care of the chickens.

"At one point I had seven roosters," she said. "Every night I would put in [pet carriers inside her van] my roosters so they wouldn't disturb my neighbors. I finally said, 'This is getting to be a chore. If I had a store, I could have a place to keep the roosters at night and afford to have people help me with the chickens.' "

Sheehan is from Honolulu. She first visited Key West in 1970 before embarking on an extreme car trip from the Southernmost city in America to Seattle. Sheehan met her husband, Roy Stone, in Austin, Texas, in 1982. His family had property in Key West. Sheehan and Stone were married July 1, 1983, and moved to Key West the day after their marriage. Sheehan loves her city as much as her chickens. Key West is the type of place where natives and animals always put their best foot forward. Sheehan smiled as her chickens scampered around snarfing up her chicken scratch.

"Most of these chicks are rescued," she said over a chorus of cackles. "But we do have a few permanent chickens that are blind or disabled. They really are not adoptable. [There's no charge to adopt chickens, but applicants are carefully screened.] We did find a home for one blind one as an artist's model. Blind ones can be beautiful, but they don't move around a lot so they're good for modeling.

"They're all individuals. The most wonderful revelation for me is that there's as many different chicken personalities as human personalities. There are chickens that are intelligent and responsible and there are chickens that are reckless and hell-bent on self-destruction. There's all kinds o

I went to maui because I knew it was paradise and I'd dreamed of it for so long, knowing with my whole heart that it was where I belonged—and there'd be zen on the beach and I'd wash my spirit in the wavy blues and I'd heard something about everyone being beautiful, too. I'd go with my rucksack and write my poems and meditate on the calm of the ocean waves and take in my solitude. I was, then, really interested in opening my mind, as if it could really blossom like a flower if only I could get the right amount of sunlight. because one day i do want to be a buddha! even though i've been a buddha my whole life! we're all buddha! and you can say all that but at the end of the day you're still suffering and getting annoyed and still very much reacting to things from in your small self and not really seeing how we're all one, how the fabric of creation is love, that all we are here to do is love, love, love—just live from your heart and look on at all the strangers passing by and feel your heart beat for even one of them and you've done something profound. I really do believe that. But you understand, I couldn't get into it. I was just me. I couldn't see how it all was, though I had the intellectual idea of it and, in my life, only these momentary glimpses, flashes of real vision. really i was just a kid with fantasies about everything that was possible in this world, in this universe, etc.

but maui, maui, maui—the only real and tangible plan i made for maui was to get off the plane and head straight to the ocean—only a half mile from the airport and I'd dive right in the water, immerse myself, let the island tak me. It was this great long seventeen hour flight to get out there. a layover in dallas for a couple hours and i'd been up since four am east coast time. i arrived in maui mid afternoon, which is to say the sun had already set in NYC, and all the children were in bed, the day was gone back home and imagine flying into the sunrise all morning, just one long perpetual sunrise that day. But I'd made it to maui and I was in paradise except the wind was monstrous. It could have blown me away. And in my chest, in my heart, I'm beginning to feel that everything is wrong. But i pushed through it. I got to the waters, I got to the beach. These white sands. Crystal clear blues crashing in so slowly and so far in between, shhhhhhhhh.... a year....... shhhhhhhhhhhhh....... a short life....... shhhhhhhhhhhhh and I saw how these white puffy clouds stretched out in an ordered matrix of tufts in the measureless blue sky, going and going and going four thousand miles every direction and it was so impossibly quiet and serene that i knew any second, then, that it could shatter me. i was gonna die there and I couldn't figure out what I'd done to deserve it or how i got so crazy i convinced myself i needed to be there and for what. i was so far from all my friends like derick and anna and alex and jen and lucas, everyone i knew and loved. i dropped my rucksack in the sand and pulled off my shirt and i screamed out to my best friend, whose dead, by the way—which is only to say, he found eternity and all souls go to paradise when they do that—for the ocean, for the pure sweet breeze. we're all in the waves. I ran into the water.