July 13, 2017

Ro told me about Miracle Mike, the headless chicken, while we were stuck in traffic on the 405.  He said a farmer planned to have chicken for dinner, went into his yard with an axe, and beheaded a chicken. The chicken, separated from his head but undaunted, lived a relatively good life for 18 months after the unfortunate incident. I assumed Ro was pulling my leg, but it turns out this story is all, delightfully, true. Here is Miracle Mike, majestically posed with his head, like the Headless Horsemen but less ominous because he’s just a Wyandotte chicken.

The farmer was Lloyd Olsen from Fruita, Colorado, and the year was 1945. Olsen did indeed take off Mike’s head, or at least a good chunk of it. He missed one ear, most of the brain stem, and the jugular vein. Olsen took Mike to the University of Utah to establish the chicken’s credentials, then took him on road so the public could check him out at 25 cents a pop. Mike made Olsen about $48,300 a month in today’s dollars.

Sans head, Mike could still walk around and would try to crow, preen, and peck for food, but Olsen had to feed him with an eyedropper. I wonder if he tried to mate, too. Wikipedia is silent on the subject.

Tragically, Mike choked to death on a kernel of corn that got stuck in his throat one night in a Phoenix motel.  His spirit lives on in his home town with “Mike the Headless Chicken Festival” held each June.

Evidently Mike didn’t bleed out at the time of the decapitation because of a blood clot, and it turns out that his chicken reflexes were fine because the brain stem was still mostly there-hard to believe based on the picture, but OK. My neighbor raises chickens and says she feels less bad about eating them now that she has lived with them.  I wonder about chicken biology and how many other creatures can get along fine without heads. I asked my friend Elaine who has a PhD in a neuroscience-y field to weigh in on the subject. Shockingly, she hasn’t gotten back to me yet.

The Miracle Mike story marked the beginning of summer, because Ro told it to me during his last week of school. Summer in Seattle can be an unsettling time. The days are so long, sometimes even sunny, and as result, people get a little manic. Oliver can’t sleep past 4:30 am despite blackout blinds and the birds wake me up sometimes as early as 5. I had planned to take an inorganic chemistry class summer quarter, but all the available instructors got less than stellar reviews on Rate My Professor. I learned my lesson last summer and decided to do an on-line course in Python programming instead, which is going meh because I try to watch horror movies while listening to lectures and programming.

Summer continued as strangely as it began when Patrick and I went to Las Vegas at the end of June for a dance competition. We moved slowly in the 107-degree heat and doused ourselves in sunblock.  We shared our hotel room with two other tap dancers, one 18 (like Patrick) and one 19. We watched South Park and complained about the eerie interior world of the casinos, with their windowless restaurants and bored-eyed, scantily-clad gogo dancers who would appear after midnight on various gambling tables.

The tap dancers were fun and optimistic roommates, not unlike a pile of adorable puppies-most of the time. But occasionally their antics would wear thin and I wanted escape even from that air-conditioned refuge. The noise really got to me –  Vegas tries to stun you into submission with noise. It was everywhere from the clangs and bells of the slot machines to the thumping beat of pop music blaring in the elevators. Oliver said the last time he was in Vegas he hid out in the library (!) just off the Strip.

My college roommate, Liz, came to the rescue and we went to Red Rock Canyon for a blissfully quiet couple of hours (that’s a picture of Red Rock above).  We saw the “Hands Across Time” pictographs made about 2,000 years ago by Native Americans who lived in the gorgeous Willow Springs Canyon part of Red Rock. They painted their hands red, possibly with minerals, eggs, and saliva, and jumped up or stood on each other’s shoulders or something to slap the rock.

Below you can see where the handprints are located on the rock, then a close-up of the hands themselves. Visitors aren’t allowed to get too close to the fragile pictographs, and unfortunately the photo doesn’t do them justice. They are beautiful and somehow cheerful to me. Perhaps they were left to indicate a good hunting site or something equally pleasant.

Now we’re halfway into July and the 4 Vegas roommates are going down to LA for a week and a half of dancing at two different tap festivals. My science classes don’t rev up again until the end of September. Until then, I have to keep the brain oiled and intend to read I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life (or, as Patrick says, I Contain Multiple Dudes) by Ed Yong, watch the 25-part Virology lecture series by Vincent Racaniello, a scientist at the Medical Center of Columbia who deeply loves viruses, and do some volunteer research for Komera, a “small but mighty” non-profit that helps girls attend secondary school and beyond in Rwanda. That’s the plan for the rest of the summer.