Poultry in the Hood

We were driving up busy High Street the other morning when I glimpsed a colorful little commotion to my right, low to the ground, moving fast among the cars and blight and discarded drink cups.

It was a chicken -- a beautiful chicken, running in the scattered, hectic way of chickens. Its feathers glistened bronze, green, rust, red and gold in the morning sun, burnished and fluttering in the wind of its run, red comb flopping, hellbent on getting somewhere.

The chicken slalomed between parked cars, leaving astonished pedestrians in its wake. We drove by, amazed and delighted by the surprise and good fortune of the visitation of such a gorgeous chicken on our regular commute to school and work.

I tried to imagine why it was running. From where? Where would it end up? At Los Petates, down at the corner of 42nd and Foothill? I hope not. It's the home of "the best chicken in town", and any chicken headed there was going to its doom.

Maybe it'd escaped some awful fighting chicken training camp. Or maybe it was a prized show chicken. Or a racing chicken. Are there racing chickens?

But it did make me think of other poultry I've known during my time in the hood.
Our next-door neighbors kept a small flock for a while. They existed in a pestilential chicken run at the side of their house, and strutted around their backyard, which at the time we could see through the chainlink fence that divides our properties. (I covered it with bamboo after a few too many glimpses of familial fistfights. I think they needed their privacy, too.)

Every once in a while, a hen or rooster would escape and somehow make it over the fence, where it would cause huge excitement at our house. We would run around after it, not quite sure what we'd do if we caught it. How do you grab a chicken?

The abuela from next door would stolidly waddle over and retrieve the flustered bird, picking it up in a no-nonsense, this-is-not-a-pet fashion.

The vecinos finally got rid of their brood after too many neighbors complained about the manly rooster's early-morning crowing.

The big Asian family down the block has a duck, which honks regularly on no particular schedule. Or maybe it's more than one duck, and those honks are the last words of serial ducks going off to become dinner.

And of course, there's the previously mentioned Los Petates, the restaurant that serves "the best chicken in town." Their outdoor grills smoke into the evening hours. You can order chicken with beans, rice, and tortillas to go. It is very, very good, even if it isn't the best in town.

For a while, I thought of getting some chickens myself. I even bought a book called "Keeping Chickens in the City." I thought of fresh eggs, slug and snail pest control, an affectionate chicken pet for my daughter. Then I got to the paragraph about rats and their liking for random grains of chicken feed, and that plan abruptly ended.

Then a couple of days ago, we saw something wonderful, if not exactly poultry.

I pulled up our long driveway and saw a huge, large-headed bird perched on the grapevine above our trellis. It was nearly 2 feet tall. I couldn't identify it, but I knew that this was something special. "It's a golden-shouldered hawk, Mama!" said my daughter, who is studying birds in her 3rd grade class. And it was, the polar opposite of the flightless, escaping chicken we had seen.

The hawk ignored us. Then it spread its wide wings, and flew away.

Danger in the Hood

Lately the drumbeats of car stereos have increased on my street, and some especially shady-looking characters have been hanging around, passing through in their slick cars or just lingering on the sidewalks. They toss their cans and bottles onto lawns (not mine, so I'm not bitter about that.)

They talk loudly about what prison was like -- I mean, I think that's what they're talking about. Maybe they're just sharing memories of their childhood homes. They line up their shining chariots, double parked, rims a-spinning, and just drink with all the gleeful, guffawing abandon of young men.

It looks like the most monotonous life in the world to me. And they'd probably think mine's deadly boring.

But there's something about a couple of them that really spooks me. They seem a little harder, like career do-no-gooders.

We walked out of the house the other day, and two guys were talking loudly across the street. One was shirt-free, his buxom upper body well-inked with tattoos. He was crowing proudly about something, bragging about some fight he was in or had witnessed. I told my child to get into the car in a very shrill tone.

So now I'm working with our beat police officer. By email, no less. I feel like an undercover agent. If you live in Oakland, you can email your police officer and tell him or her of your troubles. And ours answered!

He told me that they'd just "done a bust" in a house that I told him about. I know it's wrong, but I felt a little thrill of satisfaction. They house in question is the worst, the central magnet for tricked-out cars and their owners, seemingly unemployed young men. It's also the best house on the block, a shabby, two-story Craftsman beauty that would cost about $2 mil in Rockridge.

So I continue my important work with the Oakland Police, in hopes that the block will quiet down a little. I'm also praying for rain, cuz that always calms the situation.