The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds.

This may seem like a small bit of trivia to a lot of people. But it matters when you are involved in an organic, free-range chicken business. And last year, I was.

My cousin the hippie talked me into investing in her free range chicken farm. The idea was organic eggs and great tasting chickens. She needed $2000 and I decided it was worth trying. She had just gone through a divorce and I wanted to help her out.

The 13 seconds part came into play. Her property butts up against a creek, and she laid out her pens to go up to the creek, rationalizing the creek would keep the chickens penned in “without feeling caged.” They weren’t caged alright. About 80% of those cluckers flew the coop — we figured out the flight time to cross the creek was more like 8 or 9 seconds.

So I lost that $2000, just at a time when I needed it for another emergency. What did I do? I used Car Title Loans in Hillsboro, a car title loans store, to find the cash. It was painless, really, and I have been able to pay it back gradually (some things take longer than 13 seconds).

Since my layoff last year, I decided to use my severance to pursue that age old mystery: Why a duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and why no one knows why.

It seemed like a containable pursuit. You get some ducks, you put them in some kind of a sound chamber, you measure things and you run it through some analytic process. I’m not an engineer or anything, but I figured if I looked into it I could find the answer and maybe get on a reality tv show. Like Erin Brokovich, sorta.

My wife wasn’t so happy about this plan. She got real upset when my savings ran out just when I found a student at Columbia College IT willing to take me up on this. Of course the ducks out in the garage weren’t making her happy either. So I needed about another $1500 to pay for the test.  I found Car Title Loans in Beaverton, a car title loans store online.  They were perfectly reasonable to deal with, and I got my money in time to get the test done.

Unfortunately, the test was inconclusive. But I’m writing a story about the process and maybe that will get on the Internet somewhere.  We ate the ducks, so that calmed my wife down just a bit.