We did the handshake. Five dollars was the bet. According to Matt, the chicken owner's aunt liked the taste of chicken neck so he aimed the axe fairly high up the neck.
Off with the head and Mike doesn't die. So the owner starts feeding the body of Mike through the hole in its neck with a dropper. The chicken, although obviously blind, socializes just fine with other chickens. He stands on fence posts, and instead of crowing, he gurgles. After a while, Mike becomes famous. Scientists test him. He and his enterprising owner leave their humble home of Fruita, Colorado, and with a chicken skull in tow, they tour America. They said the skull was Mike’s, but really a cat ate Mike’s real head. A sensation everywhere, Mike becomes famous and hometown Fruita erects a statue in his memory.
I was so this story is crap.
But all I had to do was get that piece of evidence to prove it to Matt. My five dollars, I would do anything for it. I started contacting scientists and I went to a library. I got in touch with the editor of The Skeptical Enquirer, tantalizing him with the taste of a hoax that had never been disproved.
Six months later I found the article in Life Magazine from 1946, and the editor of The Skeptical Inquirer had written me back. "We have every reason to believe this is a true story," he wrote. I had lost my five dollars; but in the end my skepticism was justified, and the process of realization was divine: all chickens primary motor functions operate from the command center of the neck. By some amazing combination of events, this chicken didn't die from the trauma of having his head lobbed off.
Some sort of skepticism is required for travel writing; for me without it there can be no story. But how does a travel writer compel his reader's to trust him?
When I first started writing about driving in the desert, I sent a travelogue on Mexico to the Los Angeles Times. I’d never submitted anything before. I didn’t consider myself a writer. But the Los Angeles Times jumped and said, ‘this is perfect for the Special Mexico Edition.’
Great! I thought. But later, an editor called and said, ‘We’re not going to run the Pinacate story. Look, it’s just a dusty desert down there and there are no hotels. No advertisers, and that’s where all the drugs come through, so its our policy not to support something like that.’
And I thought, wait a minute. Advertisers? This is travel writing…truth, perspective, subjectivity, history, social commentary, geography, memoir, natural history, culture!
I tried pitching my stories to an online magazine called GORP, which I admired for their lack of annoying advertising, commercialization or pop-under ads or marketing associations. Because the article was more or less a guidebook entry, I thought it appropriate to move our account of the pronghorn antelope to evening rather than morning. This would adjust the continuity and put the focus on travel tips, not our subjective experience. I then asked my brother Hans, who drove with me to Pinacate, to review the piece before I submitted it to GORP. He told me the following: This article is inaccurate. He said we saw the pronghorn antelope in the morning.
So I corrected it and realized there is never an excuse to fabricate or exaggerate, even in a travel tips story. If you stay consistent, credibility will be earned.
GORP accepted other articles and edited heavily. The editor said I should try to describe the water of Mexico’s Pacific Ocean.
I told him the water was unremarkable and it was unnecessary to the story, which was about people.
He edited the ocean himself. He used the word ‘aqua’. Then, ‘undulating.’
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