Passengers wondering what time it is at Portland International Airport can look at a watch, a smartphone or a digital flight display board.
But it's now far more entertaining to do a time check at the giant cuckoo clock that recently landed in the airport's south atrium.
At 24 feet tall and 9.5 feet wide, the clock is the tallest freestanding cuckoo clock in the United States. Created by sculptor and mechanical designer Nicolas (Nico) Gros, the almost 7,000-pound clock is fully functioning, with wooden gears and chainsaw-carved adornments by Oregon wood sculptor Chester Armstrong representing more than a dozen Portland icons and activities, including Sasquatch, Mount Hood, beer and wine, salmon, roses, timber and Portlandia -- not the TV series, but the 34-foot-tall, hammered-copper sculpture that sits in front of the Portland Building designed by Michael Graves.
As soon as the clock arrived at PDX airport, passengers began gathering around it to take selfies, to see how many of the carved figures they can identify (airport volunteers have a cheat sheet), and to wait for the top of the hour, when a cuckoo (in this clock, a chicken) pops out to lead a parade of carved figures between the two small doors that open at the top of the impossible-to-miss timepiece.
Created to promote Travel Portland's tourism campaign, the curious cuckoo clock visited both Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., before landing at PDX and is scheduled to remain at the airport through March 2015.
After that? "Who knows?" said a Travel Portland spokesperson during a welcoming event for the clock, "There just aren't a lot of places in Portland where you can park at 24-foot-tall cuckoo clock."
Harriet Baskas is a Seattle-based airports and aviation writer and USA TODAY Travel's "At the Airport" columnist. She occasionally contributes to Ben Mutzabaugh's Today in the Sky blog.
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