Happy Chickens

Once again Dian and I spent some time at Winlaw, B.C.. For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with what Dian and I have been up to, here’s an update. As we are both coming of retirement age, me considerably closer than Dian, and have decided to buy a small plot of land in the Slocan Valley. Winlaw is at the south end of the valley, about 45 km. from Nelson. We were there for about a week. As Dian’s mom lives in Trail, which is just a few more clicks down the road, we spent a few days with her as well. We had originally gone down to winterize the place as it has two small homes on it. After our visit with Mom, we decided to spend some time at the place. We borrowed some bedding from my nephew Ben and his wife Muriel, who live across the road from our new place. We put a few logs in the woodstove to warm the place up and left for Ben and Muriel’s. Instead of making supper at home, we all decided to go into Winlaw, (pop. a hand full of souls plus a few dogs and cats) and have a bite to eat in the local restaurant. You have to understand that Slocan is the place where a lot of the U.S. draft dodgers and hippies ended up after the sixties. You can almost smell the grass grow, if you get my drift. But all that aside, it’s a great place, very laid back, extremely friendly folks, but just a bit more on the earthy side than what we are used to here in this part of the country. Anyway, we walked into the restaurant and lo and behold, there was a three piece blue grass group playing some real good down home stuff that I haven’t heard for years and years. To my surprise and probably his, a friend who I hadn’t seen for years was on guitar. He looked up and saw Dian and I walk in and he stopped playing, introduced us to the small crowd, told them who we were and the fact that he had known me for forty years. How time flies when you're having fun. As the whole area is very organic, the menu tends to have a lot of organically grown features including veggie burgers, veggie lasagna and pizza. I personally make a real lousy vegetarian. If it doesn’t have some big chunk of meat on it or in it, I don’t feel like I've been fed. As I scanned the menu for something dead, my eye fell on an item that kind of suited my fancy, Happy Chicken. The waitress, dressed in the style of the area, which consisted of a hand knit dress, leg warmers, knitted cap and some kind of home made muckluks, came over to take our order. Ben and Muriel both ordered the soup de jour, some kind of veggie thing that was actually very tasty. Dian ordered a BLT and a side salad. I went for the “Happy Chicken.” I asked the waitress, “what the heck is a happy chicken?” She replied that the chicken was organically grown in an environment that was not only free of chemicals but it was also a free range chicken, meaning that it had never been fenced in, free to roam so to speak. I pointed out to the waitress that I found it a bit odd that so happy a bird would find it’s way onto my plate, nicely quartered, done a light golden brown and sprinkled with paprika. I suggested that while it was quite a tasty morsel, it didn’t appear to be all that happy. Although I am a bit of a redneck, I do think that we should be careful about what we eat, and where it’s been prior to landing on our plates. However, sometimes I think we just carry everything we do to the extreme and we don’t always practice what we preach. Although there are huge amounts of fruit trees in the Slocan, none of it is being sold in the local stores. The fruit comes mostly from Washington or Ontario, and in some cases even from the nearby Okanagan. It is predominately grown by large producers who do use pesticides and artificial fertilizers. But the cherries, pears, apples, plums and even peaches and nuts, that grow in the Slocan lie rotting on the ground. Go figure! You know folks, that chicken might have been happy on some level, appreciated only by fowl themselves, but I’m pretty sure I saw that waitress at the meat counter in Safeway in Nelson just the day before.