Casey and Ramonea
It's not every day that you pull into a rest stop and see a chicken pecking around in the grass.
“We’ve got a hell of a story. It might not be PG. There’s love. There’s tragedy,” Casey begins. I’m not using his full name because, he says, everyone just knows him as Casey. “It’s one word,” he says, “like Cher.” He’s from Boston originally and you can still hear it in his voice. He’s been in Florida since 2004 and his skin has the tan of someone who’s spent a lot of time at the beach.
I’m traveling through Florida when I pull over for a quick break at a rest stop. I’ve spent so many hours driving over the last two weeks that my feet have started tingling after just a few hours behind the wheel. I figure I’ll get out, use the bathroom, and stretch my legs a bit. I’m scanning for a place to park when I spot a black truck with stuff crammed into the open bed. That wasn’t notable on its own; plenty of people travel with full cars. But I immediately notice a small blue chicken coop in the back. I slow down to peer inside and see a tan colored chicken moving around behind the door. This is how I meet Casey, a man in his fifties wearing jeans and a teal work shirt. He immediately lit a cigarette when we started talking. The chicken was his. The truck was his too, in a manner of speaking. This is their story.
He’d never had chickens before until he moved into a place on the beach. The previous owner left six hens and a coop behind in the backyard and Casey started taking care of them. “I don’t know if he named them but I named them all. I took care of those chickens for over a year.” There was Laverne and Shirley, two Buff Orpingtons named Meghan and Kate after the British royalty, and Sally and Lucy from Peanuts. “One day I’m getting feed and they had a batch of mixed chicks. I bought four and the first one I picked was hiding in the corner all by herself,” Casey recalls. Six months later, three of them turned out to be roosters and had to be rehomed. “Ramonea became a misfit toy,” Casey says. (Initially I spell her name “Ramona” but he gently corrects me, noting that she was named after the punk band The Ramones because of the tiny mohawk she grew on the top of her head.)
His mystery chick, it turns out, was a Buff Polish with tan and white laced feathers and a pom-pom on top of her head. The rest of the flock never took to Ramonea. She was the last in the coop every night and crossing the yard during the daytime was like “going through a bad neighborhood” for the bird, Casey says. He bought her a small chicken condo and fenced off a small portion of the yard so the rest of the flock couldn’t bother her when he was away at work. “The beach changed the rules so multi-unit apartments couldn’t have chickens. I had to get rid of the other six,” Casey says. “I wasn’t going to get rid of Ramonea.” The hen had house privileges and could go between the yard and his apartment when he was home to leave the door open. “We’d become too close. ‘Try and catch me’ I said to the city.”
This, Casey says, is where the love story becomes a tragedy. He left his job—which paid though not particularly well—for one with bigger promises. “It was all smoke and mirrors,” he says, but now the old job was gone too. So he lost his housing and moved himself and Ramonea into a friend’s truck. “I built her travel coop into the Jeep.” That’s where they were living when I met them, staying put at the rest stop to avoid spending money on gas. He’d been filling out job applications while sitting down at the picnic tables when he had the idea to get a job at the rest area. “Thirty years ago I was a custodian at a school with 400 kids. They haven’t changed cleaning toilets since the outhouse,” Casey jokes. When I drove through it was his second day on the job. Things were looking up again. Then the insurance on the borrowed truck got cancelled and without his first paycheck to pay it, he had to take it back. “Every time you take a step forward there’s somebody to shove you back one,” Casey says.
Casey, who can’t drive to the grocery store anymore, is eating out of the vending machines. Ramonea’s little blue coop is hidden in the bushes and when she’s let out she follows on his heels like a dog from one end of the rest area to another. “This would make a great book,” Casey says, “As bad as things got, the guy didn’t give up on his chicken.”
“They pay biweekly so we’re sitting here starving,” he says, then adds that Ramonea is doing okay since she has an all-you-can-eat grass and bug buffet. So far the dogs out for walks haven’t bothered her and neither human nor chicken seem worried about the sign warning people to “beware of poisonous snakes.” People, like me, stop and ask about her. They take photos. This isn’t anything new. When he still had his apartment, people walking their dogs would ask about Ramonea. “They don’t care if I have shingles but they ask about Ramonea,” Casey says and laughs though he doesn’t sound bitter about it. It’s simply the way of the world for Ramonea, who is now two-years-old, to come first.
He recounts his story matter of factly, saving all his emotion to talk about Ramonea. It had just rained before I met them and the front of her poof had matted with dirt. This is common with Polish chickens. He apologized that she wasn’t looking her best then turned to her and said, “I’ll try to get you to the beauty parlor as soon as I can.”
“She boogies around here and everybody loves her,” Casey says. “Ramonea’s going with me no matter what,” he says. One day a man asked him whether Ramonea was his chicken and told him that she’d have to leave the rest stop. But no one’s come back to check that Casey and the chicken have moved on. A number of other people are at the rest stop long term. “There are more people here than the Holiday Inn. It’s common. I don’t know if it’s legal but I don’t care.”
At a rest stop, a family with an RV or an overfull van could just as easily be on their way to Disney or enjoying an extended roadtrip as houseless. Many cities won’t allow people to sleep in their cars and police will tell people to move along. But rest stops are meant for resting and with a mostly transient population of people stopping by for a quick bathroom break or a picnic, it’s hard to tell how long anyone’s been there for. Many stops have amenities like security lights, bathrooms, vending machines, and even the internet on occasion. I couldn’t find data on the number of people staying at rest stops for extended periods but there are plenty of stories of people doing just that. Some states try to discourage it by posting signs that only allow resting for a few hours at a time while others are more relaxed.
Casey doesn’t want this to be permanent. He hasn’t even told his mother about his situation because he doesn’t want to worry her. I ask if he’s made friends with the other overnighters at the rest stop and he quickly says no, he doesn’t want to know them more than he already does. “This ain’t where I want to be. When I leave they’re still going to be here.” He’s hoping that his first big paycheck will be enough to get him and Ramonea a new truck and a proper place to live again. But if in the meantime someone complains about the chicken, so be it. “If they get rid of the chicken, they’re getting rid of me too,” Casey says. “I’ll say ‘give me the money you owe me and I’ll go.” I ask him how he and Ramonea got so close and he pauses and says that he thinks it’s more that she got close to him. The day that it hit him that he was out of work and living in a car he says it was like Ramonea sensed he was having a bad day. She jumped up and sat right beside him. Sometimes she flies up on his shoulder while he’s scribbling in his journal, almost like she’s trying to peek at what he’s writing about. She’s never far away. “I can’t get rid of her now,” Casey says.
When he gets his first big paycheck, he tells me, he’s going to get a big steak dinner and Ramonea’s getting new dishes that will keep her from getting so dirty while eating and drinking as well as bags of Purina food again. “We’re going to go down together or rise together,” Casey says, though from the moment I met them it was clear they were a team.
(Rest area icon courtesy of Arizona DOT.)
News from the Coop
I just got back from two weeks on the road doing research for Under the Henfluence the book. Somehow I’ve written over 60,000 words about chickens and still have more to say. It’s slowly starting to feel closer to the day when I can print out a giant copy of the first full draft of the book with my workhorse of a laser printer…and then cover it in pen scribbles while I work on edits.
Back at home the chickens are enjoying late summer garden treats like gobbling up plums that have fallen to the ground and eating grapes that aren’t even ripe yet. I’m glad it’s not 115 degrees but it’s still hot and dry and I spend more of my time watering crispy plants than I’d like. It’s strange to have a fire burning in Oregon and not be getting any of the smoke though that could easily change. My birthday is in September which is usually a delightful month but last year I spent it stuck inside because of the nearby fires and hazardous air quality and I’m too worried to go out of town given how dry the entire West is.
Meanwhile, it’s the most wonderful time of the year over on the chicken instagram. A few years ago I started doing chicken beauty contests (Miss Henhouse and Mister Henhouse) twice a year. Submissions just opened for #MisterHenhouse2021 on Saturday and it’s always fun reading about and looking at the beautiful roosters out there.
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-Tove