This isn't really relevant to anything in particular, but I saw that someone had posted about pig farming and I thought I would share my own pig farming experience.
It was when I was sixteen, when my dad decided that I needed additional character-building. Apparently lying around the house reading Star Trek novels didn't count at character-building, so off I was schlepped to Jose's pig farm out in the middle of Harquahala Valley, Arizona. Harquahala Valley is difficult to really see as a valley, mostly because by 9 AM the heat shimmer has completely erased the surrounding mountains. It's as bleak and hostile a place as the Frau Mauro Highlands on the moon, the kind of place where missing tourists are found twenty years later, mummified. The pig farm was a pretty big commercial place, with four or five long rectangular pens covered with tin roofs. The pens ran east-west, so during the winter the pigs had shade all day. The automatic watering systems leaked (perhaps on purpose) so the pigs had additional shelt in the form of the most extensive mudholes I've ever seen. Had Coleridge seen them, he would have written:
In Harquahala Valley did pigs A stately mudhole churn up.
I wasn't involved in the actual pig-keeping per se. I was involved in the production of Bleen. Yes, that's right, bleen. Lemme explain.
Twice a week Jose would arrive like a thunderbolt from wherever he had gone, and he would get the truck and a crew of helpers and we'd roar off to Phoenix. The first stop was the Shamrock Dairy, where we loaded the truck with the milk and various dairy products that the dairy couldn't sell, due perhaps to it being too old or failing some key quality control test. This stuff was stored in a refrigerated loading dock and most of it was still palatable, and it was great fun to grab a gallon jug of orange drink like a swashbuckling pirate apprehending a jug of rum and chug it down. "Arrrrr," I would exclaim, with spilled orange drink staining my shirt.
Then we would go to the bakery. I can't remember if it was Holsum or Rainbow, but it was a big commercial bakery that always left the west side of Phoenix covered with the most heavenly scent of yeast and baking bread. The bakery likewise had a certain inventory of stuff it couldn't sell, and we took that too (well, actually, we bought it, but for cents on the dollar). Mostly it was loaves of bread whose bags had been ripped somehow (I guess you can't sell bread with a ripped bag) but every now and then mutant bakery products would appear - loaves of bread with pineal glands, English muffins with primitive nervous systems, that sort of thing. Once we loaded up a large tray of cinnamon rolls that had curious smooth round holes in their centers, as though someone had plucked the centers out of each of the rolls. To me, they looked like replacement large animal sphincters.
So we'd rumble back to the pig farm with our dairy products and bakery products. The truck in question was a breezy old military-surplus six-by that would make maybe forty miles an hour with a favorable tailwind, and we had plenty of time to inventory the bakery items in search of coolness. For some reason the bakery had to get rid of a lot of potato chip-like things. Never actual potato chips, but things like Bugles. Only not real Bugles; these were imitation Bugles that had been sprayed with dubious spice mixtures that turned them bright magenta or vivid yellow. They all tasted as though they belonged in the barbecue family somewhere, but they never tasted good. In fact, they were almost bad enough we wouldn't eat them, but only almost.
So we'd unload the stuff and go off to bed, which I'll describe later.
First thing in the morning, one had to fill The Tank. This was a roughly 10,000-gallon water tank with an open top into which one dumped the rotten milk, melted butter, and whatnot. It didn't take long in 120-degree heat for the milk to go bad, sometimes very bad. Occasionally the milk would produce so much gas as it decomposed that it would blow the top of the carton open, and once I upended such a carton. Nothing happened for a while - all the fluid had evaporated. Finally a brick-like lump of some solid material that looked rather like cornbread eased out of the carton and fell into the tank with a dull splat. I remembered thinking That is no longer a dairy product. That has been transformed into a substance altogether new to mankind, a substance that I shall call Bleen. Soon enough the contents of the tank itself became known as Bleen.
One of the curious features of the tank was the way it resembled a huge raisin cream pie. There was a foot of tapioca-colored foam on top of the Bleen, and flies, driven mad by the stench, would attempt to burrow into the foam. They'd get stuck, of course, and soon enough there would be so many flies in the foam the whole think looked like a twenty-foot-wide pie...
The bread: for the bread, one simply unbagged the various loaves and muffins and dumped them into a trailer, which was never as overtly and wretchedly foul as the tank of Bleen, but it had its own nasty yeasty-moldy smell and its own population of twenty billion flies.
To feed the pigs, a team of guys would take off with the tractor and wagon, heaving the bready material into the feed troughs with scoop shovels. Meantime the Bleen Man (that would be me) would stand under the Bleen Platform and open the gates in the pipes that allowed the foul, stinking material to ooze sluggishly into the very same troughs. The pigs went wild. Normally they were completely covered with mud, but soon they were completely covered with a bread pudding-like mixture of bread and Bleen. The stuff flew through the air, the stuff coated the pigs, the stuff stank so bad we would have been instantly closed down had anyone cared.
Every now and then the pipes would get clogged up, so one had to grab the long metal pole with the washer welded to the end. If you've seen early episodes of Dirty Jobs, you'll recognize it as a crude example of a turd-hurdler, and it worked in about the same way, only it wasn't turds we were hurdling, but Bleen. You'd poke the rod into the pipe and sort of jigger it back and forth, and eventually the offending mass of Bleen would break up and a fresh chorus of pig squeals would rise...
So that's the routine. Load up the bread wagon twice a day, keep the Bleen tank nicely full of vile rottenness, and move out.
There were about ten of us working there. I was the only native speaker of English, and the only speaker of English period. The other guys were what we would today call undocumented workers, mostly young guys except for the old guy who did the cooking. Breakfast consisted of giant hand-made tortillas warmed and lightly toasted in a skillet and served with cowboy coffee - pretty tasty, actually. But lunch and dinner consisted of beans, tortillas and heads of lettuce. The beans were unbelievably hot, in a spicy sense. That old bastard must have put battery acid in the beans to get them that hot. It was, for lack of a better word, unbelievable. You'd eat beans with a rolled up tortilla as a utensil until your head burst into flames, then you'd take bites out of your head of lettuce as though it were an apple to quench the flames. Beans, lettuce, and repeat.
We didn't have many options for entertainment, so once the sun went down it was pretty much time to bed down. We slept in a trailer house, only someone had torn out all the interior walls, leaving it just one giant room with a bathroom at one end. Now, picture eleven guys bedded down in a single room. Eleven guys who've been eating basically nothing but red-hot pinto beans for weeks. The rippings and sulfurous blasts were not to be believed. You just sort of tuned them out they were so frequent, but every now and then someone would produce a fart that seemed to cry out for attention: one fellow could produce astonishing basso-profundo E-flat tones for as long as five seconds, and one was always tempted to offer golf claps. Other times some poor fellow would give vent to a particularly painful-sounding eruption that would compell people to ask him if he was all right (not that I ever did. I'd learned to swear pretty well in Spanish by then, but if I had to articulate a concept much more sophisticated than "That ****ing thing! That ****ing thing!" I was pretty much doomed).
Once I was wandering around, having discharged my Bleen Duty for the time being, and I found that the guys had set up 55-gallon drums on low fires. They were boiling a curious mixture of water and milo (I think it's called sorghum in other parts of the country). At the time I was pretty naive and believed them when they told me it was "special cattle food". It wasn't until much later that I said "Hey, we don't have any cattle!" I think they were making 120-proof glove cleaner, if you know what I mean.
Wow! What a concoction. I wonder how the pigs kept from getting sick.
I only had experience with two pigs at a time on the farm where I grew up. We'd raise them from piglets until such time my daddy thought they were big and fat enough to eat. We always named our pigs as we did all our farm animals no matter how temporary their lives on earth were to be.
My favorite two pigs were Batman and Robin. Batman, of course, was bigger than Robin. He was a black and white pig. Robin was red. We used to ride Batman around the pig pen. Although he probably didn't like it, it must not have bothered him too much because he would plod around the pen with one of us kids on his back until we got bored and did something else.
Robin was an incessant squealer, always very nervous. It was hard to get near him. Batman, on the other hand, was very gentle. Loved those pigs.
I can't resist asking, did anyone ever say anything like "Holy pork chops, Batman!" or "Holy Bacon, Batman!"? I would have, but I'm helpless in the face of cheesy Batman jokes.
Nervous, squealy pigs are no picnic to raise. Even when a placid hog gets really huge you never really imagine that they're going to do violence to you or anything else, but having to work around a good-sized squealer always put me in mind of the scene from Old Yeller where the razorbacks tore up the yeller dawg.
And the guys who owned them, they were from Corsica, weren't they?
Either way, that was the most sinister part of the book to me, the evidence-destroying pigs and the Corsicans (if they really were Corsicans) who loved them. Sardinians? I don't remember.
