Thinking outside the box or ...
Why Did The Road Cross The Chicken?
By Jerry Hobbs
This is a riddle. On Tuesday morning, a dead chicken was on the north side of an old country road called Seesaw Lane. The following morning, the deceased bird was on the south side of Seesaw Lane. No person or living creature physically touched the dead chicken, so how did it cross the road?
Give up? The answer is that the hapless creature didn’t move – the road did. That occurred when a guy brought a bulldozer Tuesday afternoon and straightened the road by moving rocks and brush so it would bypass the sharp curve where the dead chicken was coincidentally lying. Hence, the new portion of road ended up several yards north of the curve, which meant the poor critter was now on the south side of Seesaw Lane. Clearly, instead of the chicken crossing the road, the road actually crossed the chicken.
Tricky? Possibly. Unfair? Maybe. But before you cry fowl (pun intended), you’ll have to admit it’s a legitimate answer. Especially here in the mountainous terrain of Western North Carolina where anyone with a bulldozer can create or change a country road through the woods wherever she or he wants. And they often do.
Now let’s look at another riddle. A hungry chimpanzee is placed in a locked room where a banana is suspended from the ceiling by a string. The string is just long enough that the animal cannot jump up to reach the fruit. When the zookeeper unlocked the door later, however, the chimp was no longer hungry. How did that happen? Again, the answer is simple. The hungry primate dragged a chair underneath, then climbed up to reach the fruit. Before you cry foul again, notice that no mention was made about the presence of other objects in the room.
Both of these are simple riddles that might be told to children to amuse them, unless they’ve become overly jaded with today’s sophisticated cartoons and computer playmates and consider you to be, “So totally…like yesterday, Dude.” If you also think them corny and not worth the time to discuss, prepare to enter a world where you’ll be given an opportunity to look at things just a little differently.
First off, let’s take another look at that dead chicken, but this time without limiting ourselves to (yawn) conventional thinking. To accomplish this, we must consider what’s not in the box; i.e. where normal people with normal minds think. They’re the ones who look at life in a safe, sane manner and therefore have no desire to write creative fiction (double yawn).
To make sure we’re on the same page at this point, maybe an explanation, or at least a clarification, should be offered for the popular phrase: To think outside the box. It comes from a mind-teaser problem where nine dots form a square box. The instructions are to connect every dot by drawing four straight lines without lifting the pencil. To solve the puzzle requires that some of the lines must pass outside the imaginary border, or box, which people who restrict their thinking find quite difficult. Even though I take no credit for coining the phrase, I believe its meaning is essential to writing creative fiction.
For example, those of us who delight in venturing outside of said box can easily conjure several alternatives as to how that dead chicken crossed the road without the physical contact of living man or beast. For example:
1. A 300 mile-per-hour tornado carried the chicken across the road.
2. Dynamite exploded while someone mined for rubies and blew it across.
3. A flash flood washed it across.
4. Lightning hit the bird and knocked it across – albeit with heavily scorched feathers.
5. Aliens in a spaceship came from the planet “Rhodeislandredia,” hovered overhead and transported it across using an EMP (Electro-Magnetic-Pulsator) tractor beam.
6. The ghost of a man who had a steamy, illicit affair with his sexy sister-in-law in the 1800s and had been brutally murdered by a jealous wife with a rusty axe at midnight on Halloween and who just happened to be buried beneath the very spot where the chicken lay moldering became so overwhelmed from the stench of rotting feathers that his spirit was forced to rise from the unmarked grave and…well, I’d continue but long sentences in creative writing tend to turn people off, but you get the idea.
At this point, I’m sure your imagination has been sufficiently stimulated to encourage even more examples. Since that same imagination has now been prodded into overdrive – ergo, given permission to wander outside the box – it’s time to delve into additional solutions for the second riddle.
To briefly recap (beep-beep, redundancy alert), we have a hungry chimpanzee in a locked room that cannot reach a banana suspended from the ceiling by a length of string. When the zookeeper unlocks the door, the chimp is no longer hungry. Why? Already I can see that it takes all your will power not to jump up, wave your arm in the air and yell, “Me-me! Ask me – ask me!” But…since this is my article, I get to go first.
1. The hungry chimp stood on the shoulders of another chimp who was also in the room. (No one said the chimp was alone.)
2. The chimpanzee was no longer hungry because it ate a huge bowl of fruit that sat on the floor. (This chimp was no chump.)
3. There was a hydraulic mechanism that rotated the room 360 degrees every four hours, so the chimp waited until the ceiling became the floor and then easily reached the fruit.
4. A warped window acted as a magnifying glass and the sun was refracted to a point on the string, which eventually burned it in two and released the fruit.
5. And of course, there’s the old favorite concerning aliens from the planet of the chimps and their EMP tractor beam.
Rather than risk venturing so far outside the box as to require an oxygen mask, I’ll stop there. As you can see, the solutions available for the dead bird and hungry primate riddles are many if you simply allow your imagination the freedom to pilot the helm of its unrestrained, far-out capabilities instead of attempting to remain a normal, logical human being. For those who enjoy writing creative fiction, however, I would offer one piece of advice. Soar in the clouds of fantasy if you will, just don’t forget your way back to earth and reality when not at your word processor. Otherwise people look at you funny.
That said, let’s further fluff the feathers of your imagination and ponder the conundrums of who or what killed that poor innocent chicken and why some sadistic person chose to hang a banana where the hungry chimpanzee couldn’t reach it. Go forth now and release the fetters of constrained proliferation while chewing on those morsels as you let the creative juices flow.