Origins

A Country Mile, as the Chicken Flies

by S. D. Liddiard

As last Sunday morning was blessed with bright sunshine and a cool, dry breeze, my companion and I were moved to action.

"Let's go for a drive," I said.

"Where to?" she asked.

"No place in particular, just a drive."

"You mean, just go out and drive around and around?"

"We'll go for a drive in the country: commune with nature, admire the countryside. We'll cruise the country roads for the pure pleasure of it."

"Without actually going anyplace?"

We decided to visit the Bonnechere Caves, a series of natural caverns about two hour's drive away. My ally was much happier at having a definite destination; I was sure I could find a route along the back roads to stretch out our journey. At 8:00 in the morning under a cloudless sky, buoyed by a rustic breakfast of bacon, pancakes and abundant coffee we began our odyssey.

"Shouldn't we call for directions before we leave?" An odd light came into her eyes, which I chose to ignore.

"I know the way," I asserted. I didn't want my plan for a leisurely drive confounded by an efficient set of directions from the management of the attraction. I'd seen the road signs for the place dozens of times.

The landscape was beautiful. We passed old stone farmhouses and sun-bleached barns in rolling fields of ripening hay. We saw cows and horses and even a half-dozen bison. We skirted calm lakes and climbed wooded hills. By noon, we were ready to stop for lunch and a tour of the caverns.

Inexplicably, however, although we had toured the vicinity in which I was sure I remembered seeing the signs, they were nowhere to be seen.

At my companion's urging I stopped at the next town to ask directions. The gas station attendant had never heard of the Bonnechere Caves. Neither had the proprietor of the general store. I got blank stares in the restaurant too, but then an elderly diner beckoned me over to his booth. He was visiting these parts from another province.

"The Bonnechere Caves are in Renfrew county, son, on the other side of the river." A smile raised crow's feet at the corners of his eyes. "It's about a hundred and fifty miles from here as the crow flies."

A chill ran through me. We had missed our target by rather more than the proverbial country mile. My earlier claim to know the way was revealed as arrogance and overconfidence; now the chickens had come home to roost. I knew my cohort would make me eat crow.

In the end, I figure I got off lightly. We could have spent the evening at the local Cineplex watching An Ideal Husband. Instead, we settled for a fine French meal at Les Fougères. By comparison, the $150 it cost me seemed like chicken feed. I comforted myself with this thought as I scratched my crow's tracks on the credit card receipt.

The expression as the crow flies has been in use since at least 1800. I don't know that there is any evidence that a crow flies in a straighter line than any other bird, but corvus brachyrhynchos of North America has a reputation for intelligence that, I suppose, would tend to lead it straight to its goal.

The smile lines at the corners of a person's eyes have been known as crow's feet since Chaucer's time because of the resemblance they bear to these appendages.

A country mile is an exaggerated distance. Mile is from the Latin for 1,000 paces [mille passuum] and has become standardized in English as 1,760 yards. The term "country mile" may be by analogy to a nautical mile (one minute of a great circle of the earth; fixed at 6,080 feet), an Irish mile (2,240 yards), a Scottish mile (various, including 1,976 yards), or it may be because the winding character of many country roads requires a long distance to be traversed in order to travel a mile as the crow flies.

Chicken feed is small change, a paltry amount of money. In pioneer days in North America, chickens were fed the poorest of grains, not good enough to be fed to humans or other farm animals. Broken bits of grain were good to feed to chickens because they were small enough for the chickens to swallow. Colonel Crockett's Exploits (1836) of a riverboat gambler contains the line, "I stood looking on, seeing him pick up chicken feed from the green horns."

Chickens come home to roost means that evil acts (or their consequences) return to plague their originators. English poet laureate Robert Southey in The Curse of the Kehama (1810) wrote "Curses are like young chickens; they always come home to roost."

Crow's tracks originated at least 150 years ago. It denotes illegible writing, which resembles the tracks of the bird's feet. Such writing is also called chicken scratch.

We did have a wonderful drive through the countryside. Missing out on the caverns was less a disappointment to my friend than it was an embarrassment to me. In fact I can barely suppress a suspicion that she was secretly pleased.

S. D. Liddiard has studied French, German, Latin, Russian, psychology, and linguistics, which have all fed his interest in the English language. To this day, he can lose a couple of hours in an etymological dictionary without noticing the time passing. Despite this, he has only been earning a living at writing for four years.