In March of 1847, 19th century literary journal The Knickerbocker published what is most likely the first printed version of what has become one of the most ubiquitous terrible jokes in the English language. It asks, “Why does a chicken cross the street?” It also offers up the answer: “Because it wants to get to the other side!”
And because as everyone knows, a joke is always funnier when its punchline is thoroughly explained, the editor includes that as well: “There are ‘quips and quillets’ which seem actual conundrums, but yet are none.” In other words, the joke is vaguely funny, because it’s not.
This joke has been running through my head a lot the last couple of weeks because my family and I recently returned from a vacation in Hawaii, a big trip when you consider that we live in Missouri.
Many years ago, my husband and I decided we wanted to visit all fifty states in the US by the time we turned fifty. Our ambitious now eighteen-year-old son decided he would do it by the time he turned 25. He’s close, and pretty smart, so when we asked him to choose our family vacation destination before heading off to college, he didn’t hesitate.
When the boys were small, and we lived on the West Coast not far from an airport with direct flights to the islands, the two of us left the kiddos with grandparents and visited the Big Island, but this was the first trip there with all four of us.
We chose Maui this time (with a quick hop over to Oahu to visit Pearl Harbor for the history buffs among us) and it was as absolutely gorgeous as you might expect. There were waterfalls, and rainbows, and sea turtles, and lava tubes, and secluded beaches, and deadly narrow roads on mountainsides, and feral chickens.
So many chickens. There were chickens at the airport, at our hotel, on hiking trails, in the parking lot of the grocery store, and even hanging out beside the pumps at the gas station, where I assume they were fueling up to head out across the road.
I was more or less expecting most of the sights we took in, but I admit I was not expecting feral chickens. I didn’t remember noticing them on the Big Island. I’ve since discovered that while it’s a problem there, too, the islands of Maui and Kauai are especially overrun.
There have been chickens on the islands for as long as there have been people there. When the Polynesians first arrived as early as 1200 AD, they brought food supplies with them, including several crops and animals like red junglefowl, which is believed to be the ancestor of the domesticated chicken.
When Captain Cook arrived in 1778, he brought a more domesticated version with him. So did the missionaries, turned businessmen who ran large sugarcane plantations. That industry surged through the American Civil War when the North couldn’t import sugar from the South and then declined sharply toward the end of the century. Chickens, which were good to have around for pest control on the plantations, were then released into the wild where they began really fowling up the place.
And then there are the hurricanes and storms that blow up and tear apart chicken coops, releasing even more of the birds onto islands where there’s abundant food for them and not much in the way of predators that want to eat them.
Of course, humans make a pretty formidable predator of chickens, except that these have crossbred with the protected red junglefowl, making it difficult to know which, if any, can be legally harvested. Also, rumor has it, they are awfully gamey.
The state has made attempts to address the growing problem of loud, messy, feral chickens scratching up gardens and making a general nuisance of themselves, but they haven’t made a lot of progress. And so, for now, Hawaii has breathtaking sunsets, gorgeous flowers, awe-inspiring starry skies, majestic marine life, and a whole bunch of chickens crisscrossing its streets. That could seem vaguely funny, except that of course, it’s not.