The Chicken Who Tried to Swim Backwards

Birdie was not like the other chickens at Tumbledown Farm. While they were perfectly content scratching in the dirt and pecking at seeds, Birdie had a dream. A magnificent, feather-ruffling, absolutely ridiculous dream.

She wanted to swim. Backwards.

“Why backwards?” asked her best friend, a sensible hen named Marigold.

Birdie puffed up her chest feathers. “Because EVERYONE can swim forwards. I want to be special!”

Marigold pecked at a beetle. “Birdie, chickens can’t really swim at all.”

“Not with THAT attitude!” Birdie declared, and she marched straight toward Farmer McGillicuddy’s duck pond with her tail feathers pointed high.

The ducks watched with great interest as Birdie arrived at the water’s edge. She studied them carefully, noting how they glided across the pond with their orange feet paddling below.

“Excuse me,” Birdie called to the nearest duck, a plump fellow named Puddles. “Could you teach me to swim backwards?”

Puddles nearly fell off his own reflection. “Backwards? But… but we ducks prefer forwards! It’s aerodynamic! It’s sensible! It’s—”

“BORING!” interrupted Birdie. She dipped one yellow foot into the water. It was cold. Very cold. And very wet.

But Birdie was determined.

She closed her eyes, counted to three, and hopped into the pond with a spectacular SPLOOOOOSH!

Water went EVERYWHERE. It went up her beak. It went in her eyes. It absolutely soaked her beautiful golden feathers. And most importantly, Birdie discovered something terrible: she was sinking like a stone wearing cement shoes.

“BAWK BAWK BAWK!” she squawked, flapping frantically.

Puddles and three other ducks rushed over and pushed her to the shore with their beaks. Birdie flopped onto the grass, looking like a very soggy, very embarrassed mop.

“Perhaps,” wheezed Puddles, trying to be polite, “swimming isn’t for chickens?”

But Birdie just shook herself off, spraying water in all directions. “I need swimming lessons! And equipment!”

The next morning, Birdie appeared at the pond wearing the most extraordinary outfit. She had tied inflated balloons to her wings (borrowed from the farmer’s grandson’s birthday party). She wore swim goggles made from jar lids and string. And she had fashioned flippers for her feet out of large leaves held on with rubber bands.

The entire farm came to watch.

“This will DEFINITELY work!” Birdie announced confidently.

She backed up to get a running start—because if you’re going to swim backwards, you might as well RUN backwards into the water, she reasoned—and took off at top speed.

Unfortunately, running backwards while wearing leaf-flippers and balloon-wings is much harder than it sounds.

Birdie tripped over a rock, bounced off a tree stump, rolled through a flower bed, and launched herself into the pond in a magnificent backwards somersault.

SPLASH!

For exactly two seconds, it looked like it might work. Birdie was moving! She was in the water! She was going backwards!

Then the balloons popped. The leaf-flippers fell off. The jar-lid goggles slipped over her beak.

“MMMPH BAWK MMMPH!” said Birdie, which roughly translated to “Help me, I’m drowning again!”

The ducks, who were getting quite good at chicken rescue, fished her out once more.

“Maybe,” suggested an old rooster named Cornelius, “you should try a different dream?”

But Birdie’s eyes lit up. “That’s it! I’ve been thinking about this all wrong!”

Before anyone could stop her, she raced to the farm shed and emerged pulling a little red wagon. She filled it with water from the hose, climbed in, and started wiggling backwards.

“If I can’t swim backwards in the pond,” she explained, “I’ll swim backwards in HERE!”

She wiggled. She jiggled. She flapped and splashed. Water sloshed everywhere, turning the dirt into mud. Soon Birdie was sitting in a wagon of mud, moving absolutely nowhere, looking extremely pleased with herself.

“I’M DOING IT!” she cheered. “I’m mud-swimming! Backwards!”

Marigold shook her head, but she was smiling. “Birdie, that’s not swimming. That’s… that’s just sitting in mud going backwards very, very slowly.”

“It’s BACKWARDS mud-swimming,” Birdie corrected. “Completely different. And look—I’m EXCELLENT at it!”

She wiggled her bottom, and the wagon rolled backward approximately two inches.

All the farm animals began to cheer. Not because Birdie was actually swimming, but because she looked so utterly ridiculous and so completely happy covered head to toe in mud, sitting in a tiny wagon, celebrating moving two inches backwards.

“TEACH US!” clucked the other chickens, suddenly inspired.

And that’s how Tumbledown Farm started the world’s first (and probably only) Backwards Mud-Swimming Club for Chickens. Every Tuesday afternoon, you could find a line of chickens sitting in wagons full of mud, wiggling backwards, and having the time of their lives.

The ducks still swam forwards in their pond, because they were sensible creatures.

But sometimes, just sometimes, Puddles would float backwards for a moment and think of Birdie. Because even though her dream didn’t work out exactly as planned, she had figured out how to make it work in her own special, silly, perfectly Birdie way.

And on sunny days, if you visited Tumbledown Farm, you might hear a familiar voice calling out: “Come on, everyone! Let’s try SIDEWAYS mud-swimming next week!”

Because Birdie had learned the most important lesson of all: sometimes the best dreams are the ones that turn into something even sillier than you imagined.

The End

“Dreams don’t always work out exactly as we plan—and that’s okay! Sometimes the fun is in trying, and sometimes we discover something even better along the way.”

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