M
y husband and I were
driving down I-65, still
in Tennessee but near
the Alabama border,
when a statue of a giant
chicken caught my eye. It was stand-
ing in front of a truck stop near Elkton.
I am grateful to be married to a man
who will instantly pull off the highway
when someone says, “Hey, let’s take a
selfie with that chicken!”
That particular chicken is an adver-
tisement for the Shady Lawn Truck
Stop’s fried-chicken plate. It is wear-
ing a chef ’s hat. Its wings hold a giant
fork and a giant carving knife under-
neath them. The combination makes
for a troubling message: chicken as
both dinner and diner. It is also cov-
ered with graffiti, mostly people’s
names but also an exhortation to
“Read More.” Unlike the existential
conflict at the heart of the chicken’s
identity, that’s a message I had no
trouble decoding.
Between Nashville and the Alabama
Gulf Coast, where my husband and Iwere heading, there are quite a few
unusual roadside attractions. An ac-
tual NASA Saturn rocket, all 168 feet
of it, is posed as if for blastoff at the
Alabama welcome center near Ard-
more. The Ave Maria Grotto, where
a Benedictine monk built 125 min-
iature replicas of famous buildings,
religious sites, and shrines—all made
in part from found objects such as
cold cream jars and toilet floaters—
occupies a four-acre park in Cullman.
Fifty-five miles south of this “Jeru-
salem in miniature,” in Birmingham,
the cosmology goes back even fur-
ther. Rising above the city is a mam-
moth statue of Vulcan, the Roman god
of fire and the forge. It is the world’s
largest cast-iron statue, but during the
years when I was growing up there, its
fame lay primarily in its peculiar at-
tire: Vulcan is wearing nothing but
a blacksmith’s apron and knee-high
sandals, and his bare buttocks shine
a moon right at the adjacent city of
Homewood.
Perhaps because that image is stillMitchell Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota; the Leaning Tower of Niles, Illinois; the big
duck in Flanders, New York; Camden Park’s Haunted House in Huntington, West VirginiaM
102 february 2019
Reader’s Digest
from left: courtesy library of congress. thomas barrat/shutterstock. anaglic/shutterstock. courtesy library of congress