The Good Good Pig (14 page)

For me, the Amazon was the ultimate Eden. The river embraces a jungle the size of the face of a full moon. With ten times more fish species than the Congo, electric eels that grow as long as limousines, and five thousand species of orchids, the Amazon's diversity dazzles; its vastness overwhelms. I always knew I would one day explore this richest of rain forests, but first, I would need an extraordinary guide to fathom it.

I had glimpsed that guide, oddly enough, in Sundarbans, on a day when the muddy waves opened and I saw into the future. There, in a tributary of the Ganges, I saw rising from the water the pinkish dorsal fins of three river dolphins. I saw them again and again on my travels there, brief glimpses only, but I never forgot them; sometimes they swam through my dreams. When I attended a marine mammals conference in Florida, I met a man who told me why.

He studied a different species of river dolphin,
Inia geoffrensis,
which lives in the Amazon. He told me the river people say these dolphins are shape-shifters. These dolphins can turn into people. They show up at dances (wearing hats to disguise the blowholes) and seduce men and women. And you must be careful, the river people told him, or the dolphins will take you away to the Encante, the enchanted city beneath the water—a place so beautiful, you will never want to leave.

I knew then what my next book would be: I would follow the pink dolphins of the Amazon. I wanted to follow them to Eden. I wanted to follow them to the Encante.

I wanted to follow them back, down, deep into the watery womb of the world, to the source of beauty and desire, to the beginning of all beginnings—and through their story, to show again the power of animals to transform us, to lead us home to Eden, and to remind us we can always start anew.

W
HILE
H
OWARD AND
I
WERE EATING DINNER ONE NIGHT
, S
ELINDA
knocked at the front door. Since she'd moved in, we visited often. We made cookies together, commuting with our baking sheets between ovens at opposite ends of the house. We canned jam, shared dinners, and sometimes went cross-country skiing with the three dogs on winter afternoons. The elegant Tess was disdainful and aloof among Selinda's rambunctious larger dogs. Howard nicknamed them Numskull (Reba) and Knucklehead (Louie) because they stole Tess's Frisbee, chased the wild turkeys that the neighbors fed with grain, and once ate an entire pan of fudge that a neighbor had set out to cool.

But this time Selinda had a request. “I was wondering,” she asked, “if Howard would help me bring in a plant.”

Selinda had transformed the rental unit into a cross between a greenhouse and a florist shop, with an excellent natural history library and some antique furniture from her grandmother's tossed in. I called her the Plant Goddess. She had well over a hundred leafy creatures crammed into the downstairs, drinking in the southern light: slipper orchids, purple shamrocks, bromeliads, jasmines, begonias, Amazon lilies, a tall jade plant, and at least thirty African violets. Potted plants hung from nails in the rafters, perched on plates by the windows, crowded the floor. Also, she usually had at least one vase of fresh flowers—Ken, from his lonely exile at their home, sent flowers every week. Selinda sometimes bought more at the local florist. She was always on the lookout for new plants, and seemed to be adding to her botanical collection every week.

“Oh—
I
can help you bring in a
plant,
” I offered. How difficult could that be? But Selinda was adamant: “I think I really need
Howard.
”

Howard was not delighted to have our dinner interrupted. But it was winter, and if the plant was not soon rescued from Selinda's car, it might freeze. He pulled on his parka and boots and trudged outside to see her latest prize. To his horror, he discovered a five-foot-tall tree lying on its side in her pickup. The sixteen-inch-diameter pot contained perhaps seventy pounds of soil. “If only we could harness Christopher to this job!” he said. But no; Chris would certainly have knocked the pot over, and then begun scattering the dirt with his nose. Besides, there was snow on the ground, and Chris did not like the feel of snow on his trotters for very long. Let outside, he'd run and push his snout through the snow, and then his feet would get all pink and cold and he'd rush back into his warm pen.

It was all Selinda and Howard could do to push the huge tree to the house through the snow in a wheelbarrow. Howard wrestled the thing to the front step, then onto the porch, then up another step through the door, fighting his way through the existing foliage in the hallway to install the new plant near an east-facing window in Selinda's kitchen.

This newest photosynthetic roommate was a tropical creature, a member of the same botanical family as the banana, Selinda explained. In fact, its leathery, blue-gray leaves were shaped like bananas. It had no flowers—yet. But it was the promise of these flowers that had made Selinda bring the huge, expensive plant home on a day when she had been feeling low. One day it would produce a riot of orange and yellow color, the spikes of its blooms splayed out like the crest of some imaginary tropical bird, opposite of which a bright blue tongue curved forth like a beak. The unborn but hoped-for flowers gave the plant its name: bird of paradise.

P
ARADISE: THE NAME EVOKES AT ONCE HEAVEN AND EARTH
. I
T
names a whispered longing; it tugs at our wishes and then spirits them away. Dictionary definitions imply that paradise is not of this life. Paradise is an afterlife, or a vanished Eden, or an idea that exists only in the minds of the holy men who wrote the texts of the great religions, an exhortation to a perfection we lost but still crave, or a promise of delight deferred. Paradise is what we want, and yet we are told that by definition we can't have it.

Ever since Sunday school, I'd been intrigued by the notion of Eden. It irritated my Methodist teachers that Eden appealed to me far more than heaven. Heaven you might get to after your death, if you were good—but there was no hope, I was told, of finding Eden. Heaven seemed boring, though. There is no mention of plants or animals there, whereas Eden was full of them. In Eden, the animals spoke (at least the snake did), and we understood what they said. In heaven you had to live in a building (“In my Father's house there are many mansions,” Jesus said), and I wanted to live in a hollow tree. In Eden, there were not too many people (only two), whereas heaven sounded like it would be miserably crowded, considering everyone who thought they were going there. It would surely be even worse by the time I got there, if indeed I were headed that direction—of which my Sunday school teachers weren't so sure. To their dismay, I also stubbornly refused to blame the snake for all the trouble with Adam and Eve. I suspected God did, too. After all, He kicked the people out of Eden, but He let the snake stay.

Ever since we left that garden, we have been longing for Eden. It is a testament to human blindness that so few of us find it. “Heaven” wrote Thoreau, “is under our feet.” Heaven, Eden, paradise, the Encante—call it what you will. It is as close as a backyard or a barnyard, and as extensive as the Amazon. Granted, in the Amazon, one might need a dolphin as a guide. But in Hancock, all you needed to point you to Eden was a good pig.

O
NE DAY SHORTLY AFTER SHE ARRIVED
, S
ELINDA BEGAN TO SUSPECT
that the place she had chosen to live was very unusual indeed. She came home from work in Peterborough and noticed a pickup in the driveway. As she got out of her truck, she heard opera music coming from the direction of the barn—a wonderful tenor voice. She approached quietly. Harlow was singing the score from
The Gondaliers
to Christopher as he filled his dish with burned bagels, dill Havarti cheese, and cream of potato soup.

Several times each day, as she played in the yard with her dogs or collected firewood from the woodpile for the stove, Selinda's travels would bring her near the barn. Chris heard her footsteps and called to her: “Unh! Unhh! Nunhhh!” If she didn't come over, the calls reflected Christopher's growing irritation: “Unnnnhhhhh! Unnnnnhhhhhhhhhhh! Unhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Finally, if she still didn't come over, he would start banging the gate back and forth on its hinges with his nose, like a frustrated restaurant patron might bang a spoon trying to catch the ear of an inattentive waiter.

“OK! OK!” she'd call to him. “I'm coming!” Selinda was quickly trained not to leave the house without a carrot or an apple for Chris, or if there was none handy, to immediately swing by the grain bin and scoop up some pig and sow pellets to pour directly into his mouth. Except for orange peels and onions, she didn't save anything for the compost pile anymore. She fed it directly to Chris. And this, she realized, was in her own self-interest. As winter melted into mud season, as the March songs of returning phoebes and red-winged blackbirds gave way to the sleigh bell calls of the spring peepers in April and May, Selinda was counting the days till she could plant her garden.

T
HE GARDEN WAS EVERYTHING TO
S
ELINDA
. S
HE IMAGINED IT IN
her spare moments. She designed it in her head and on paper. From her second-story bedroom, she would look out at the area she would soon dig. Although she was still working at the computer magazine, in her mind, as she told me, “the garden was really what I was doing with my life at the time.”

It was a garden with mostly annuals. She knew she wouldn't live at our house forever—though she was surely welcome to. It would be completely organic—no pesticides, no weed killers, no fertilizer other than Christopher's. The garden would supply much of the food we would eat that summer. But it was also a garden to feed the soul. “I want it to be a pretty garden to hang out in,” she said. It would have not only vegetables, but also flowers and fragrant herbs: “I want it all!” she said. Even before she tilled its soil, the garden was “my world,” as she put it, “my refuge.”

The spot had been a garden once before. We remembered our landlord's previous tenants had grown vegetables there. But after they left, it had reverted to grasses and goldenrods and ox eye daisies, indistinguishable from the rest of the unmown field that stretched between the back lawn and the woods by Moose Brook.

When finally the threat of frost was past, Selinda began to till on June 1, as the wild strawberries began to bloom and the bobolinks first called. She pushed the heavy rototiller back and forth, back and forth, amid clouds of biting blackflies. It took Selinda three days to till the plot. The garden was enormous: twenty by fifty feet. We offered to help, but it was a one-person job. One person, that is, and one pig. From his tether, Christopher assumed the role of supervisor, following her work with great interest, ears forward, nostrils flared. The scents issuing from the freshly dug earth must have brought him a symphony of fragrance. Sometimes he called out to her to bring him something to eat. Often she couldn't hear him over the roar of the rototiller, but she knew he was there, and he was good, cheerful company. When she paused, she would bring him a handful of juicy weeds and pet his furry ears as he chewed.

And then it came time to plant. She had mapped out a circle of flowers in the middle: white narcissuses and low-growing twinkle phloxes, with daisylike calendulas and late-blooming dahlias toward the edge. A path ran around that circle, kept clear by cardboard under mulch to keep weeds out. Radiating from that circle were curved beds of lettuce. Irises would bloom in one corner and sunflowers rise from another. And there would be vegetables in abundance: arugula, chard, green peppers, Anaheim peppers, celery, spinach, green and wax beans, zucchini, carrots, cucumbers, and three kinds of tomatoes: Oregon Spring for sandwiches, plum tomatoes for canning, and cherry tomatoes for snacking. She planted herbs: scallions, parsley, dill, and thirteen kinds of basil. And she grew pumpkins. They were just for Chris.

Over that summer, Selinda's garden gave us its all. Before the Fourth of July, we were enjoying giant salads of peppery arugula and buttery lettuce. By the end of the month, the dinners we ate under the silver maple often came directly out of the soil: sauteed chard and red peppers, green and wax beans with dill. By August we were wondering what to do with all the zucchini—in a Methodist church cookbook, I even found a recipe that used up two cups of the stuff in a chocolate cake. (The cake was tasty but as heavy as lead.) As fall approached, Selinda made jar after jar of pesto to use up all the basil. The fate of the pumpkins, however, was ensured from the start.

What was perhaps most astonishing about Selinda's garden was that Christopher never invaded it. Our hens had no qualms about hunting bugs there, which was actually a boon to the plants and a strategy employed by many an organic gardener. Selinda's Reba and Louie would sometimes follow her into the garden and step on her plants. Even Tess ran through the garden once or twice, in pursuit of an errant Frisbee. Deer occasionally visited to munch on the vegetables, as we could see by their hoofprints in the soft soil. But why not our pig?

Because Selinda had maintained a border of tall grass around her garden—a strategy that discourages certain bugs—the garden could not be seen from a pig's eye view. But Christopher couldn't see the Amidon's lettuce garden down the road either, and that never protected it from his incursions. Our pig could certainly smell every ripening vegetable from throughout a huge range, one that might extend for miles. The olfactory powers of animals are only now starting to be chronicled; a wildlife biologist I know, Lynn Rogers, believes that bears, for instance, may be able catch the scent of ripening hazelnuts
forty miles
away. Pigs' sense of smell is legendary. They can even smell food underground, a talent people have exploited to locate prized truffles since Babylonian times. To this day, truf-fle pigs are still in service in the south of France, where they help to harvest the famous “black diamonds” of Périgord, which sell for up to $1,000 a pound. Sows are uniquely attracted to the scent of this truffle because it produces a steroid that is chemically identical to the testosterone present in the saliva of an amorous boar.