Bringing home the bacon with a hog wild night ride
Pedaling through the gloom while chasing a narrow cone of white light can offer a magic all its own. Along my favored bicycle routes, nighttime traffic is light, and creatures of the night are seldom deterred in their travels by my silent pedaling.
Over the years I’ve ridden past a handful of fox and coyote, dozens of opossum, and seemingly thousands of raccoons. My greatest peril exists in the form of wildly bounding white-tailed deer — especially at this time of year while love is in the air. But it was a beast of an entirely different sort that spawned one of my more unusual and entertaining adventures on a ride this past weekend.
Cruising through an evening where neither the temperature nor the wind offered much resistance to my efforts, I was thoroughly enjoying a ramble with no real destination. Turning left or right toward whatever direction seemed most likely to amuse me, I noticed a set of flashing lights up the road and decided to see what the emergency was all about.
As I neared, I found a pair of vehicles parked near the ditch with a half-dozen folks clustered at the front of the lead car. Assuming a driver had clobbered one of those aforementioned love-struck deer, I hesitated to look. Human nature prevailed, of course, and I was drawn into the scene.
Instead of wincing at a bumpered Bambi, imagine my surprise at instead finding an entirely unscathed but nevertheless highly agitated Yorkshire sow corralled by a circle of would-be passersby. The hog was happily grunting her way through the muddy swill at the bottom of a roadside ditch after being gently shooed off the pavement and would likely have remained content to spend the rest of her evening doing so.
I’ve not spent a great deal of time in the company of swine (the four-legged kind that is), but I have observed the will of a pig seems to often run counter to the desire of man. Miss Piggy’s current wallow, a mere foot or two from high-speed traffic, demanded a prompt relocation, and the petulant porcine wasn’t having it.
Thankfully, my own role in the mission had been quickly defined. I’d boosted my bicycle onto my shoulder so the headlight on my handlebars could afford maximum disaster site illumination early on, fulfilling a role that kept me helpfully involved yet gratefully separated from the scrum.
With her master now onsite, an effort was made by a handful of brave and able men to boost all 300 pounds of bacon into the back of a waiting pickup truck. Much is made of the sport of catching a greased pig, but I can now confidently attest that the grease is likely added for cosmetic purposes only. There would be no hand-to-hoof wrangling this day. The effort failed miserably.
A rope was eventually produced, and I learned in an instant how perfectly contrary a self-respecting sow can become when fitted with a leash. The struggle was epic, especially when the leader and the led arrived at the deck of the very roadway bridge the pig had quite willingly crossed on her own just an hour before. If there is music on the down-bound elevator to hell, it’s sung in the voice of a peeved pig.
The last leg of the journey was a cross-country trek through the barnyard to the very pen from which she’d escaped. There our audacious ungulate’s considerably less adventurous sister waited to hear the tale of a nighttime foray gone literally hog wild!
Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.