The Ride of a Lifetime

I checked the time—11:00 p.m. Time has a way of dragging when you’re sitting on a metal roof with a shotgun in your hand.

Let me back up. Just six hours earlier, I had opened the chicken coop to find two of my birds dead. After some quick research, I concluded it was likely a raccoon. I thought they were safe. I thought I had taken all the proper steps to ensure my hens had a place to rest in quiet comfort. But all of that was shattered.

After burying the two, I counted again. One more was missing. The raccoon must have taken her. But I wasn’t about to let this happen again. Knowing the nature of a raccoon—that it would strike again—I set up watch on the roof, armed and ready.

Which brings us to 11 p.m., where I sat in the dark, eyelids heavy. How long could I stay here? I had work in the morning. And really—was I about to start slinging lead in the dead of night? The whole thing suddenly felt ridiculous. My vigilante ambitions faded, and I climbed down to get some sleep.

Two days passed, and the culprit never returned. Life settled back to normal—minus three hens.

At the time, I was running a job on the highway about thirty minutes from my house. On this particular morning, I was running late. When I pulled into the median, fifteen workers stood waiting for me to give directions. I pulled in fast, reversed to the trailer, grabbed my coffee, and hopped out of the truck.

And that’s when I saw the most curious thing.

In the middle of the crowd of workers stood one single red chicken.

“What the hell?”

There were no houses for a stretch, no reason for a chicken to be in the middle of a four-lane highway. Yet there she was—neck bobbing, feet scratching at the gravel like she belonged there.

“Where did that chicken come from?” I shouted.

Everyone shrugged. Then one guy said, “I think… from your truck.”

I squinted, trying to process. Was this “my” chicken? The one I thought had been carried off by the raccoon days before?

I made the little clicking sound I usually make when I feed them. She perked up.

Holy shit.

I walked over, picked her up, and looked her over. She seemed fine—no missing feathers, no signs of injury, just slightly confused. And then it hit me—she must have been somewhere under the truck, clinging to the frame. I replayed the morning in my head. Thirty minutes of “spirited” driving. Winding country roads. A stretch of dirt road. Multiple intersections. Highway speeds. And she had held on through all of it.

I casually placed her in the front seat of my truck and turned back to find fifteen grown men trying to suppress their laughter.

“Alright,” I said, “let’s get to work.”

It’s funny how, sometimes, the thing we thought was lost comes back in the most unexpected way. In art, in life, we brace for failure. We think we’ve lost our chance, that something has slipped away for good. But maybe, just maybe, it’s still hanging on—out of sight but surviving the ride.

My art practice is often like that. I spend hours wrestling with a painting, convinced I’ve ruined it. I’ve lost the original idea. But if I step back, if I give it time, it sometimes returns to me in a way I never expected—changed, but still there.

Like a chicken in the middle of a highway

I present to you… the chicken.

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In addition to giving chickens truck rides, I also paint. Check out Michaeltsmith.com to see original work from the Finger Lakes Region of New York.

You can also visit me on instagram at _michaeltsmith where I regularly post what I’m working on.

Also… I am giving away some prints from my current exhibit Storms, go to my instagram page, subscribe, and enter for a chance to win a free giclee art print!