The Good Good Pig Read online

  We’d filmed Ben and the cubs off and on for nearly two years as the babies grew to maturity. Now I was writing the script as the producer and the editor crafted the final sequences. One night—January 8—we flicked on the TV at the producer’s Georgetown house, where I was staying, and to our surprise found New Hampshire on the news.

  The television showed a glazed landscape, naked branches of the trees like glass figurines, pines slumped under the weight of the ice, beech limbs shorn in half. Everywhere were fresh, bright wounds of broken wood, and trees piled on top of trees and telephone poles and power lines.

  The state was in the grip of a crippling storm. About half of New Hampshire lost power, and it was predicted that in some areas it would not be restored for weeks.

  I phoned Howard, hoping he’d be able to pick up the phone.

  At our house, he told me, we’d lost power for only a few hours. Bobbie and Jarvis had power, too. But on the other side of town, the damage was far worse. You could smell pine pitch everywhere. People heard trees falling, like explosions, every thirty seconds all night long. Walking in the woods was like walking through six inches of ice cubes. Howard called it the “have and have-not” storm. On the other side of town, folks had to move in with friends or relatives or were living by candlelight with heat from the woodstove. For days after the storm, that side of town had no electricity.

  It did not take us long to realize the consequences. Far from a natural disaster, the ice storm was a hog’s holiday: soon the melting contents of Hancock’s best-stocked refrigerators and freezers began to make their way toward Christopher’s sty.

  Over the next week, food came by the bucket. Food came by the bag. Mary Garland brought a huge plastic garbage can full, which Howard somehow helped her wrestle out of her car trunk and onto the lawn. It was an astounding boon. Mary is a retired interior designer with impeccable taste, known to throw lavish parties at the last minute (and make them look effortless) and always ready to welcome her many children and grandchildren for impromptu visits. Once I opened her cupboard looking for a glass and found no fewer than four huge bottles of premium balsamic vinegar sitting there, back when no one even knew what balsamic vinegar was. You can imagine the contents of her fridge and freezer.

  Now they belonged to Chris.

  After the ice storm, our pig got his usual quota of banana peels and celery stalks. But now there were melting quarts of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Frozen blueberries hand-picked the previous summer. Brie and Camembert wrapped in puff pastry. Entire frozen lasagnas, Sarah Lee chocolate cakes, frozen eclairs, huge slabs of smoked fish, tubs of crème fraîche…

  At last Chris had achieved pig paradise: his bowl overflowed. For most of his life, we had pretty much given him whatever slops we could get. We seldom got a whole bucket of slops for every day of the week, and we usually supplemented this with grain. But now, he actually had more than he could possibly eat. And he knew it.

  For us, however, Christopher’s astonishing fortune created an almost oxymoronic problem. When I came home from my stint in Washington, I found Howard and I were now the guardians of a picky pig.

  Food items once relished were now disdained. He pushed a cabbage away with his snout like a toy ball. He ignored mushroom stems, celery stalks, and broccoli stems. This went on for months. Come summer, he wouldn’t bother with corn husks. He preferred his corn fresh, on the cob, and buttered.

  Thank goodness we had Fiddleheads Café. Just a year after Harlow sold his cheese shop and retired, a young local couple opened a gourmet eatery and catering business even closer to us, on Hancock’s Main Street. They generously instructed their staff to sort their kitchen garbage in accordance with Christopher’s all-vegetarian, no-citrus, no-onion preferences. Daily we’d pick up the slops buckets from the kitchen. Lifting the lid, out wafted the scent of vinaigrette, homemade pasta or rice salad, imported olives, and smoked Gouda. On Mondays, Fiddleheads was closed, so on Sundays we would get all the leftover pastries: blueberry and poppyseed and banana muffins, cinnamon rolls, cherry, lemon, and cheese Danish. Quite frequently, we would go to weddings and receptions in town that the café catered to find that at these elegant events we were eating the same thing as our pig. The presentation was different: for us, the spanakopita triangles would be on a pretty tray, while in Chris’s slops bucket they might be floating in pancake batter, with strawberry caps piled on top, perhaps topped with a dollop of leftover artichoke dip.

  Still, we would sometimes end up with something in the bucket he wouldn’t eat. Occasionally some well-meaning soul would bring us a bucket of green leek tops or a couple of aging cabbages. We’d thank them and then dump it in the compost pile. There, sooner or later, the chickens would eventually find and discuss it, and I could hear the whole exchange on the baby monitor.

  But Christopher had made his desires known. We simply obeyed, as was our mission and our privilege. And for this, he rewarded us with a rare, uplifting spectacle. Howard and I were happy—but always longed for a wider readership, for our words to change the world. Tess was happy—but always wished we could spend most of the day playing with the Frisbee. But Christopher was another story. Here was a soul whose every wish, beyond his wildest dreams, had been utterly and completely satisfied.

  “NOW THERE IS NO POINT OF VIEW FROM WHICH A REALLY CORPULENT pig is not full of sumptuous and satisfying curves,” the British novelist and essayist G. K. Chesterton wrote in The Uses of Diversity in 1920. It was Chesterton’s boyhood dream to own a pet pig, he confessed in this book. “I could never imagine why pigs should not be kept as pets,” he wrote. “To begin with, pigs are very beautiful animals. Those who do not think so do not look at anything with their own eyes but through other people’s eyeglasses.”

  What other creature could so satisfy the eye? “You can look down on a pig from the top of the most unnaturally lofty dogcart,” Chesteron exalted. “You can examine the pig from the top of an omnibus, from the top of the Monument, from a balloon, or an airship, and as long as he is visible, he will be beautiful…. In short, he has that fuller, subtler and more universal kind of shapeliness which the unthinking…mistake for a mere absence of shape. For fatness itself is a valuable quality.”

  Fatness, Chesterton suggested, bestows satisfaction on the onlooker by proxy: fatness is evidence of satisfaction itself—satisfaction, if you will, made flesh.

  Here in the United States, we worship the svelte and the fit. Fat is decried as evidence of sloth and greed. But other cultures see things differently.

  Unlike Chesterton, I had never truly appreciated the beauty of fat until my first journey to the pink dolphins in Brazil. In Manaus—a city a thousand miles inland, where the two major tributaries, the tannin-stained Rio Negro and the milky Rio Solimoes meet to form the Amazon—fat is celebrated. Manaus revels in the ripeness of flesh and fat. It’s not that its inhabitants are fatter than North Americans—they’re definitely not. The difference is that they like to show it off. The women—even pregnant, even old, even grossly obese—all seem to wear tight stretch pants and clingy halter tops and short, tight dresses, or jeans popping at the seams, often with the top button undone to accommodate the overflow. In the fish market, the big bellies of bare-chested old men spill over the waistbands of their pants like the foaming head on a beer. The people there appreciate strength and fitness, I thought, but they remember, too, that many people in their country are still hungry. Fat is abundance. Fat is fecundity. Fat is the fullness of life.

  Christopher, I thought, would have loved the Amazon. I often saw pigs there, sometimes riding calmly with their people in canoes. Brazil had lots of food. Even the trees that lined the city streets spilled their fruits with lush abandon onto the sidewalks: mango, guava, papaya. The same was true of music: samba, rock, and boi gushed lavishly into the street from stores, buses, and restaurants, spraying notes like the waters of a public fountain. In the rainy season, when my photographer and I arrived on our first expedition, every living creature s
eemed caught up in the sensuous savor of life. In India, they call this rasa: the sweet sap, the juicy life essence, the core satisfaction in the enjoyment of life, be it food or art or sex.

  Never before had I fallen so instantly under the spell of a place. To me, even the sound of human voices was alluring: Brazilian Portuguese seemed spoken through lips numbed from kissing. No wonder they believed that the shape-shifting pink dolphins could seduce you. The Amazon certainly seduced me.

  In fact, each of my four expeditions there was uniquely enchanted. The first day out on the water ended in a storm of pink lightning—like some message, some promise, from the pink dolphins themselves. On my second trip, this time to Peru, I met Gary Galbreath, an evolutionary biologist to whose vast knowledge and kind soul I was drawn like a starving person to a gigantic fruiting tree. He showed me how to time-travel, journeying to the prehistoric past, when the hairy, lumbering ancestors of dolphins walked on land and then transformed themselves into creatures so perfectly suited to water. And more gifts from him were in store: although I didn’t know it at the time, my next big book, as well as two others I wrote for children, was born from our meeting in the Amazon.

  As if casting a spell, the strange, primitive, bulbous-headed pink dolphins completely captured my heart. I followed them every way I could: I followed them back in time. I tried to follow them with radio telemetry. I followed them into the spirit realm, drinking ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew, under the guidance of a shaman to commune with the powers of the waters. I followed them through the people’s stories, the myths about the shape-shifting dolphins who transform into humans and seduce people at dances, luring them into the enchanted underwater world, the Encante.

  And on my last trip to the Amazon, I joined the dolphins there. Along the blue-water Rio Tapajós, in the Brazilian state of Pará, along a deserted white-sand beach I would swim each day a quarter mile out into the river. There I would hang in the water, nearly crazy with anticipation—and seven wild pink dolphins would appear as if by magic and swim around me. I could feel the currents their bodies made as they slipped through the water. Sometimes a dolphin would pull its bulging head from the water, and its gray eyes would focus on mine. Inside those clear blue waters, surrounded by pink dolphins, I felt engulfed in ecstasy.

  Again and again, when local people learned I was swimming with dolphins, they cautioned with the same phrase: “Cuidado com o boto”—be careful of those dolphins, for everyone knows they can sweep you away, seduce you to the Encante. And yes, I knew well the pull of that desire. Again and again in my work I would follow some new animal, pour out my soul, and fill myself utterly with the graces and sorrows, the mysteries and truths, of some new place.

  “How can you go to all these difficult, dangerous jungles?” people often asked me. To me, the travel was a joy. It didn’t matter that there were piranhas in the water, or that my skin burned so badly it blistered, or that ants crawled into my bed at night to drink the fluid from the blisters and feast on my dead skin. To be with the dolphins filled my heart; there was no room for discomfort or fear.

  But to merely travel is not enough. Few people understand that the heroism is in the writing. To bring the stories of these places back, to share the truths amassed by those who live close to the Earth, to help us remember how to keep the earth whole—that is the difficult part. The real work, the real transformation, takes place at my desk in New Hampshire, surrounded by the familiar animals I love. To make sense of the Encante, to make use of its magic, I needed the anchoring fulfillment of home.

  BACK IN HANCOCK, THOUGH, TROUBLE WAS BREWING IN PIG Paradise.

  Some six months after the ice storm, Christopher had trouble rising to his feet. He would rock and rock but couldn’t seem to get his legs under him. Alarmed, I phoned Chris’s vet, Tom, whom we hadn’t seen since the tuskectomy—and discovered he had quit the large-animal portion of his practice. I called Tess’s vet, Chuck DeVinne, for a reference. Instead, he came to see Christopher himself.

  Unbeknownst to me, Chuck had a fair amount of experience with pigs: attending Bethany College in West Virginia, he had befriended a five-hundred-pound pig, a professor’s pet who wandered freely around campus. Between college and vet school he’d even worked as a herdsman on a farm with dairy cattle and fifty Yorkshire hogs. He met an even bigger pig there—a boar who was perhaps seven years old. One of Chuck’s first management decisions on the farm was to give that fellow to someone else as a pet—he weighed too much to safely breed the younger sows without crushing them.

  Chuck had met many pigs since then. But Christopher, now nine, was the oldest pig he had ever seen, and certainly one of the biggest. With one glance, Chuck made his diagnosis: at more than seven hundred pounds, Christopher Hogwood was overweight.

  How could Chuck tell?

  “The body shape,” Chuck said. “The profile. You should be able to look at them and see the definition of the spine, the flank.” But Christopher was, as he delicately put it, “somewhat…amorphous.” The extra weight was just too much on his aging joints.

  Just how fat was Chris? He was not actually obese, I was relieved to hear. Our pig was better off than nearly half of American adult humans, who are 30 percent overweight or more, and thus at increased risk for heart trouble, diabetes, and stroke. Chris was, proportionally, about half that fat—about 15 percent overweight. He was more like the average, middle-aged guy who could stand to lose twenty pounds or so.

  Except in Christopher’s case, he had to lose about a hundred.

  THE HORROR, THE HORROR! OUR PIG ON A DIET! WHAT COULD BE more unfair? At first I was overwhelmed by the prospect of separating Chris from his food—his muse, his bliss, his Higher Power. But Chuck helped me to see that I really had no choice: if Christopher was too fat, he could not stand up to enjoy his meals in the first place. It was a circular argument, as rotund as Christopher himself, and one I could not refute.

  Howard and I conferred. Would Chris have to go on special low-cal pig chow? (No such thing exists.) Should we model his diet on something like Weight Watchers? (Would it work without a support group?) Many of my human friends were familiar with the diet dilemma and offered their advice. Gretchen swore by Atkins, but we agreed that it wouldn’t work well for a vegetarian pig. Besides, carbs were his favorites. Liz had gotten svelte on a diet that featured prepackaged shakes, meals she referred to as “swill.” Well, swill would be fine with Chris. The question was, how much?

  Whatever diet we decided upon, if it was successful, my women friends agreed that I would need to share it with the world: the “My Pig Lost One Hundred Pounds on This Diet” diet. The slogan: “If a pig can lose, you can too.” Liz joked that finally I would have a best-seller. American women would flock to it.

  Except this book would have only one sentence. What finally worked for Chris was simple: one bucket of slops a day.

  He still got at least two meals a day—they were just smaller. He still enjoyed his favorite, luscious treats. He still enjoyed a varied, gourmet menu. He simply got less of it. I slowed the flow of slops from everyone but Fiddleheads. To try to make up for the smaller portions, I fed Chris more slowly: anything that wasn’t too sticky, I fed him by hand, announcing each morsel as I fished it out of the bucket.

  “What do we have here?” I would ask, plucking a crumbling yellow square out of a gooey mix of mushroom soup and pancake batter.

  “Unnnhh?” he would query, the lilt of his grunt rising like lifted eyebrows.

  “A delicious piece of cornbread!” I’d announce.

  “Unhhhhhhhh!” he’d answer—and I would place the item in his opened mouth. As he chewed, I would toss the Frisbee for Tess, and then fish for the next treat. “And how about a piece of…what? Moussaka? Vegetable lasagna? You tell me.”

  “Unh. Unh. Unh.”

  And so it went. Pick, toss, feed. Talk, grunt, chew. The clucks of the hens, the jangle of Tess’s tags as she brought back the Frisbee, the narration of the menu and its reception
—I didn’t realize it, but Howard liked to listen in on the baby monitor.

  The feedings were long. They were messy. And they were deeply satisfying for us both. Though I gave Chris less food, he showed me how to appreciate each mouthful’s sensuous savor.

  And as Hogwood’s weight slowly dropped, his joints improved. The next time Chuck came by, he said he thought Chris was mighty spry for his age.

  I feel sure that Chris would have preferred more food rather than less. This was one of the few times when I had the upper hand. In most other disagreements we had, the pig prevailed. And that was a good thing—because most of the time, he was right.

  IT WAS THE LAST DAY OF AUGUST—AN ACHINGLY BEAUTIFUL, golden day when the air throbbed with cricket song and buzzed with dragonfly wings and smelled like ripening apples.

  This was the sort of day you ought to be outside. Howard and I were admittedly driven—but at least we recognized such times. To me, days like this one were holidays—the word owes its origin to “holy days,” and I felt it a sacred duty to honor them. Even if it meant having to work till nine every night all the rest of the week, and both days of the weekend, on these brilliant, extraordinary days, we’d try to take an afternoon hike with Tess, or steal a few hours watching the loons at our favorite pond. Our friend David Carroll, a turtle expert, artist, and author who lived an hour’s drive away, called this practice “keeping an appointment with the season.” When the salamanders woke for their mass matings on the first warm rainy night in April, when the spotted turtles emerged from hibernation in March, on the moonlit nights when the wood turtles nest in June—well, David just had to be there, no matter what. I sometimes joined him. One appointment for which I was willing to drop everything was the ripening of the blueberry crop in August. Selinda and I would spend hours picking gallons of them, enough for blueberry pie and blueberry muffins and blueberry pancakes and blueberries on breakfast cereal, and we’d freeze the rest to make blueberry jam later, which we’d give as Christmas gifts. Howard branded ours “Hogwood’s Choice: The Jam Hogs Would Choose if Hogs Had a Choice,” and I made labels for the jars with a big rubber stamp.