Esther the Wonder Pig

by Steve Jenkins

  When the offer was ready to be presented, I knew because it was a competition—and because Derek and I were so emotional—that I wouldn’t be able to present it the way I wanted to. I asked the listing agent if I could fax a cover letter with the offer so the farm owners could know a little about us.

  In the cover letter, we told our story. We explained why we had come to look at Cedar Brook, how much we’d fallen in love with it, and what we planned to do with it. We just laid all our cards on the table in the hopes that they’d like the idea and would want to be supportive. I wanted to tug at the heartstrings a little so they’d see this wasn’t just a piece of property to us—this was our game-changer. This was how we were going to make a difference.

  We needed them to know this wasn’t going to be a situation where we wanted to tear the farm down and build a McMansion. Cedar Brook was in a big development area. We figured the other people looking at it would probably tear it down and turn it into a subdivision. They’d sell it off for big estate houses—that’s what people were doing in the area.

  But we wanted to keep the farm a farm. We wanted to keep all the character it had, and we hoped that would matter to the owners—especially since we would only be the third unrelated owners of the farm since it was settled in 1860. If they went with someone else, all the history more than likely would be gone.

  Then came the matter of the deposit. We had only $5,000 to put down. Again, that was absurd, and we knew it. That’s the kind of deposit offer you’d make on a $200,000 house. So we were coming in with this ridiculous pittance of cash and asking them to hold it for sixty days while we tried to determine whether we could come up with the money for the actual down payment. If you’re a gambler, you do not bet on those odds. You pack up what’s left of your chips, tip the dealer, and go home. (Always tip your dealer and servers, folks. That’s just good karma.)

  Picture it: You walk up to someone trying to sell their house and say, Hey, I really like your house and I want to buy it, but I’ve got no money and I’d need to raise a half a million dollars to be able to do this. So… could you please wait sixty days while I try to do this impossible thing? Nobody in their right mind says yes to that. (Especially when they had that other offer from people who might have had all cash—we didn’t know.)

  It wasn’t just our lowball $5,000 deposit that made it such a joke of an offer. It was the combination of that with the extended conditional hold so nobody else could have it. That last part was the killer. The five grand was just insult to injury. (And yes, I realize that we were the ones doing the insulting and injuring in this case, but remember: It’s only a metaphor.)

  I’ve been selling houses for eleven years and never in my life have I seen someone accept an offer like the one we proposed. We offered supplemental deposits, but those were conditional upon our raising the money and doing what we were hoping and were telling them we could do. And then they had to take the leap of faith that we could get our shit together in a matter of days. Good luck.

  And then… believe it or not…

  They accepted our offer!

  (Sure, of course you believe it, because there’s no way this story was ending with They told us to fuck off, so now we live in a double-wide trailer behind a Walmart. But put yourself in our shoes for the moment.)

  We were in complete shock when they said yes. They called to tell us they had changed next to nothing in our offer. They made a couple of small revisions, such as adjusting our closing date, and basically left everything else alone. Their changes were nothing that would make a difference in whether we forged ahead, so now the ball was in our court.

  Well.

  Shit.

  Now we actually have to deal with this situation.

  You know that saying, Be careful what you wish for? Well, there we were.

  It’s sort of like walking right up to the prettiest guy in school, or girl in school (or whatever gender you’re into—you get it), and asking that person out. There’s no way on earth you’re expecting a yes, so there’s nothing to lose! Well, except your pride, but you knew you’d get rejected anyway, so it’s no biggie. It’s not like you’re devastated when you buy a single lottery ticket and don’t win a million dollars.

  That’s how we felt. We’d asked out the dreamboat, and now we actually had to take out the dreamboat. And this wasn’t just a date: This was a marriage proposal.

  We literally only had a couple of hours to decide whether we were going to sign the deal and be bound to the offer… or let our dream farm go. Plus, Esther had a cold.

  Derek and I were both a bit freaked out. Suddenly everything became real. How were we going to get this money? The minute the owners said yes, the money clock started ticking: We had to figure out how we were going to do it.

  We’d thought all along about the crowdfunding campaign. We’d seen everybody else do one—hell, one guy on the Internet built a crowdfunding campaign to make macaroni and cheese (and did very well)! We had a way better angle than that.

  The only issue, of course, was that we had exactly zero knowledge of how to build a crowdfunding campaign.

  We didn’t know where to begin or what site to use. There were so many to choose from: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, HelpMeBuyaSandwich.com—you name it. (Okay, we ruled out the last one pretty early on.) We didn’t know which one to use, how to set one up, what the expenses were.

  The other big question: How much do we ask for? Two hundred thousand? Four hundred thousand? Six hundred thousand? And holy crap, we’d better get going.

  Shit got really fucking real right about then. We’d just started the process of purchasing something we couldn’t afford. We were putting ourselves in a position to lose everything if we didn’t do this properly. Our mortgage was about to triple. Animals need to eat. How many could we rescue? The questions were endless and it seemed like we had minutes to make every decision because it was happening so fast.

  We decided to set the goal at $400,000 and to launch the campaign with Indiegogo because it had the most flexibility. Kickstarter wouldn’t let us fund something that involved purchasing real estate, and if we launched the campaign there and didn’t meet the goal, all the money would be returned to the donors. Indiegogo had next to no restrictions. They charged 3 percent if we hit our target and 9 percent if we didn’t. But Indiegogo also had something called “flexible funding”: If we didn’t hit the target, we’d still get the money we’d raised—we’d just have to pay out that higher percentage fee.

  We figured if we set a goal for $400,000 and the campaign ended with us at $375,000, we could still find a way to make it work. Having to start from scratch if we didn’t hit the target seemed like too much to ask of people, and that was the bottom line when choosing which site to use: the one that would piss off people the least.

  Esther’s fans rallied like crazy from the moment we launched the campaign. By the end of day one we hit $30,000. For the first couple of weeks, the donations climbed steadily. Three weeks in, we were at $160,000, which was amazing. At that point, donations stalled a bit, which was concerning. But we knew there were ways to reinvigorate the campaign, such as refreshing perks and adding new ones, so we started to do that to keep it interesting. If someone had given twenty dollars for a twenty-dollar perk, we’d change the perk so maybe it would entice them to give another twenty dollars. We tried to keep the campaign evolving and to respond to what people were buying.

  At the same time, we were pursuing the real-life things we had to do to fulfill our end of the offer’s conditions. We had the sixty-day contingency to get the finances, but we only had a week to do inspections and nail down insurance. There were a whole bunch of other steps we needed to complete to get the offer moving forward. At no time was there just one thing on the table. We were still trying to balance the rest of our life as well, and Esther’s cold—if that’s what it actually was—was getting worse.

  She was lying on the couch, trembling like a leaf, which was every bit as ups
etting as you can imagine a trembling Esther would be. We think of her as our big, strong, happy girl. To see her so vulnerable, weak and shaking like that threw us into a tailspin entirely separate from the campaign. She’d even stopped eating and drinking. (Very unlike our girl.)

  We’d heard that pigs sometimes eat ice in winter conditions and that if they eat too much of it, the ice can throw their internal temperature out of whack, causing fevers or shock to set in. You freak out when you seek out answers on WebMD about any of your own health concerns, but when it’s your kid (or your pig), you freak out that much more and imagine the worst. (And you know me by now. If anyone’s going to freak out, it’s me.)

  Esther could have eaten the equivalent of a twelve-foot ice sculpture for all I knew, and after a couple days of her quivering on the couch, one thing was certain: We had to take her temperature. Her ears and belly were super hot and really pink—pinker than normal—and her snout was beaded with sweat, so she really looked like she was suffering from a fever. Never having had to take a commercial pig’s temperature before, we didn’t happen to own a commercial pig thermometer. (In retrospect, that was an oversight.)

  So Derek and I took one for the team, as it were. We sacrificed our personal thermometer.

  You can see where this is going. We lubed it up, and while the queen was sleeping… we slid it right up in there. The first time we did this, it went off without a hitch. The thermometer confirmed that she did have a fever, so we started giving her juice to keep her hydrated. (This wound up helping her get better, but it also kind of screwed us, because this is when she stopped drinking plain water and she never drank it again.) We realized that Esther’s condition was the flu.

  The second time we attempted to take her temperature was less easy breezy. Esther was definitely on the mend by then, and she did not take kindly to having anything inserted in her caboose! She shot off like an out-of-control Mack truck—down the hall and into the office. She might as well have slammed the shutters and flipped up a CLOSED FOR BUSINESS sign.

  Meanwhile, back on the campaign front, an anonymous donor offered to match all donations up to $50,000 over a two-day period. Can you imagine? Talk about an incredible offer! So we made that announcement and the donations came in like crazy.

  As wonderful as that seemed at first, the plan ran into a big hiccup: Several weeks went by without our receiving the matching donor’s money. People were watching the numbers on the campaign and when they didn’t see that extra $50,000 from the donor, it made us look like liars. Nobody actually came out and made that accusation, but we knew what it looked like, and I think people started to question what was going on. (That’s totally understandable in retrospect, but it was a huge kick to the gut at the time.) So once again the donations started to stall.

  It was a dark time. The idea of Esther’s fans’ losing faith in us made us start to lose hope and feel like failures. All those people who’d said we were crazy… were they going to be right? We started to question ourselves. Maybe we were nuts. Maybe we couldn’t do this.

  It was scary for a while. Derek and I relied on each other and our faith that if we kept believing, if we kept at it, things would work out. It wasn’t easy, but we did our best to be vigilant. We knew we were doing the right thing. We knew we had a lot of people counting on us. We knew we had to find a way to make this happen.

  Or we could just say screw it and run off to the Bahamas.

  Okay, I’m just kidding. We weren’t going to do that. But it sure seemed tempting!

  At least Esther was on the mend. Now we just needed our little campaign to follow suit.

  And just as Esther’s flu cleared up to the point that she was again getting into mischief, the matching donor money finally arrived for real. It bumped the donation total over $240,000 and completely reignited the campaign. Still, we only had a few weeks left, and a huge gap remained.

  On June 28, two days before the campaign was going to close, Derek woke me up, holding his phone in my face.

  We were at $404,000. We’d done it. And like every other completely insane thing that had happened to us over the past year, once again we were like, Holy shit—this is happening.

  Right up to that morning, we still had an out. We could say we weren’t actually going to purchase the farm for any number of reasons, either real or contrived: the farm didn’t accept the offer, the campaign failed and we couldn’t get the money, whatever. But we’d done it.

  Of course, this was scary in its own way—scarier than anything we’d dealt with before. We had just committed ourselves to millions of people who were watching online. In that moment it became official, literally and figuratively. There was no shutting this down anymore. We’d done it.

  We’d literally bought the farm.

  We’d have to sell our house and move. Up until that point it had still been a far-off dream, something neat to watch unfold, but it wasn’t real. Now, even if we wanted to go back, we couldn’t. We’d told people we were doing this; we’d taken money for it, so now we had to do it.

  Almost everybody had thought it was impossible. Even people who supported us had had their doubts. If you tasked some of the biggest organizations in the world with raising half a million dollars in two months, they’d struggle. And we certainly were no big organization. We were just Derek and Steve and our dream for Happily Ever Esther. And we did it.

  I’d never felt anything like it in my life. I went within three seconds from tears of happiness to tears of terror. And occasionally back again. We’d felt so inconsequential before any of this. Esther’s existence had gotten the attention of people from all over the world, and now here we were setting off to make our mark. But more important, we had a purpose. A real purpose. We were going to save countless animals and give them a home and a life that would not otherwise have been possible. That was everything.

  It was crazy to think how much our lives had changed since Esther had entered them. As hokey as it sounds, even when you think you have the most unsurpassable challenge in front of you, you can do it. Three years ago, we’d never have thought this possible. And yet…

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  One of the most popular T-shirts we offer in the Esther Store on our website reads: Eat. Sleep. Root. Repeat. Because those are Esther’s favorite things to do, most often in that order. (But you’d really have to ask her if you want to know for sure.) The root in eat, sleep, root, repeat is non-negotiable when it comes to Esther’s lifestyle. A girl’s gotta root. For the uninitiated, rooting essentially involves Esther’s digging her snout as deep as she can into the grass and sod, flipping it over, and then moving an inch to the left or right (depending on her mood) and digging another hole. She roots. This is what she does. She’s going to root at any given time during any given day. Multiple times.

  Dogs bury things. Cats sharpen their claws (on everything). Chickens cluck, snakes slither, meerkats… okay, I have no idea what meerkats do, but it’s probably something adorable. You get the point. Animals do what’s in their nature, and rooting is what pigs do. Hence the slogan.

  Over the course of the previous two years, Esther absolutely destroyed our grass. Because we wanted to make everything look nice for Esther’s birthday party, we’d put new sod in the backyard in July. That way the lawn would look nice for our guests. Makes sense, right? We didn’t consider that there would be at least two months between the party and selling the house. You’d think as we were getting the house together, it might have occurred to us that we probably should not have put new sod in the backyard until the very last few days we were going to be there.

  Well, it didn’t.

  Which brings us back to the slogan, and whereas the eat and sleep didn’t create issues, the root and repeat sure did. Just two months after we’d replaced all the sod in the backyard, it looked like we’d done virtually nothing to fix it. Esther just rooted the shit out of it. Such is the power of Esther. We weren’t upset at her, of course. She was just doing her job, following the
instincts directly wired into her genetic coding. Instincts that demanded she completely fuck up the backyard. But what was done was done, and we needed to do our best to mitigate the damage as we readied to sell the house.

  For the two weeks before we had our first showings, I was constantly out back, rolling the sod Esther had flipped over, trying to get it to take. I would spend forty-five minutes fixing everything up until the yard looked pristine. I’d go back in the house, tired but content in a job well done. The next time I’d look out the window, there would be ten pieces of sod flipped upside down. And the same would happen to Derek after he’d spent some time out there making things look nice. Esther would go outside and play Whack-a-Mole in reverse.

  Getting sod to take is a process; you have to water it so the roots will grow, but all the watering makes it soft, so having a 600-pound ballerina dancing around the yard when you’re trying to establish healthy roots definitely complicates the process. There were holes everywhere. We might as well have dug foxholes and put in bunkers, because the yard looked like a war zone. All the topsoil we’d put down ended up just making a mushy mess. (I must say, it was gorgeous as of the actual night of the party. Just not, you know, before or after that night.)

  On the day we were finally hosting our agent open house, we also had seven showings scheduled. They were scattered throughout the day, so there was really no good time to bring Esther back into the house or the backyard. That meant she and Derek were stuck in the storage container, which we’d haphazardly jammed full of all of our boxes and belongings.

  We’d had so many wonderful times in our home. Just like people who raise children in a home have fond memories, we felt that way about having raised our pets there. This was where our animals had grown up, had all their adventures, and brought so much joy into our lives. This was the house Esther had come home to when she was only as big as a sneaker. We wanted the buyer to love the house.