The Good Good Pig

by Sy Montgomery

  BRUCE’S HARD DAY’S WORK, WE FEARED, HAD BEEN A BUST. BUT this was not true. The shot of Hogwood wearing the giant glasses came out beautifully. Bruce generously sent us a copy with his permission to use this however we liked. It gave us an idea.

  For years, we had received holiday greetings from our smiling friends in their gracious homes, photos of their chubby-cheeked infants, and newsletters detailing the academic and sporting achievements of their successful children. A writer for the New York Times style section once called the annual family Christmas card “a billboard of wealth, position, marital status and procreative success.” Now we could join that tradition. Except we were unemployed, childless freelance writers. It was obvious what we should do: send out holiday photos of our pig.

  We figured we owed as much to our friends. For Christopher was, in a sense, a community effort. By now, Christopher commanded a vast slops empire. Besides the girls next door, the postmistress, and the minister, regular contributors included the world’s top experts on wildebeests. Lovers of all hoofed creatures, Dr. Richard Estes, a biologist who has spent half a century flying between New Hampshire and Tanzania studying antelopes, and his wife, Runi, whom he had married during a break in the wildebeest rut, saved their kitchen garbage for Chris all week, keeping it in bags in their freezer. I picked it up at their house on Saturdays (and more than once brought home a bag of frozen shrimp or a whole frozen chicken by mistake). Cindy Dechert, who lived across from her parents, the Amidons, brought Christopher an old-fashioned leafy forage called mangles, cut fresh from her garden. Barry Estabrook, the editor of my first published collection of Boston Globe columns, mailed Chris stale bread from the bakery across the street from his office in northern Vermont. In late summer, Hogwood’s bowl overflowed with Hancock’s surplus zucchini; at first frost, gardeners brought him green tomatoes caught on the vine; after Halloween, the wheelbarrow in the upstairs barn was heaped high with donated pumpkins.

  And all this on top of perhaps the most impressive slops score of Christopher’s career: the Wide World Cheese Shop. Although Howard and I could rarely afford to eat out, our pig now enjoyed a regular supply of gourmet foods from one of the most popular luncheon spots in the area, a seven-mile drive away, over in the next town.

  Red leaf lettuce. Sourdough bread. Dill Havarti cheese. The first and last slices of the tomato. And soups—lots of soups. “If it burned,” the cheese shop’s chef and owner, Harlow Richardson, told us, “the soup went Cajun. But if it went beyond that, it went to Christopher.” All these delicacies went into the green, five-gallon pickle pails stationed beneath the prep counter, and from there into Harlow’s Chevy pickup. In a rural area where even pizza delivery was unheard of, Christopher Hogwood alone received regular door-to-stall deliveries. Harlow even served Christopher music with his meal. Harlow usually showed up singing—The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, Orpheus in the Underworld, whatever community performance for which he was currently rehearsing—and Christopher quickly grew to love opera.

  We owed many others in town for their escort services. How many times had Ed rescued Christopher? How often had Mike herded him off the dangerous state road? Then there was the time we had driven to Long Island for Thanksgiving and returned to the scene of every homeowner’s worst nightmare: the entire volunteer fire department was at our house. We saw no fire truck, but we recognized everyone’s car. As it turned out, Chris had escaped and everyone had shown up to make sure he got back to the barn safely.

  We initially sent out a hundred Christopher cards. Then we started getting requests from people who hadn’t gotten one. We had to go back to the camera shop and ask them to print more.

  BRUCE DIDN’T REALIZE IT, BUT HE WAS FOLLOWING IN A GRAND tradition. The oldest known picture of a pig is the image of a leaping boar painted forty thousand years ago in the cave of Altamira in northern Spain. Artists have drawn fresh inspiration from pigs ever since. One source, the artist-author of The Pig in Art, even suggests that the most famous early image of a woman—the zaftig limestone figurine known as “Venus of Willendorf,” dated between 24,000 to 22,000 B.C.—might really be an indirect homage to a pig. (The idea is less outlandish than it sounds, considering that pigs have long been seen as symbols of fecundity. And no one would deny that this Venus looks pretty porky.)

  The first domestic pigs depicted in human art seem to be Chinese offerings found in Zhou tombs dated to the ninth century B.C. Since then, as pigs have continued to inspire us with their bravery and fecundity, as they have fed both our bodies and our spirits, it’s no wonder humans have celebrated pigs in almost every imaginable medium: Chinese pigs of jade, Egyptian swine of ebony. Pigs carved from rhino horn and elephant ivory. Pigs in terra cotta and porcelain. The Vatican houses a life-sized marble sculpture of a great white mother pig, and the Louvre enshrines a frieze of an Assyrian sow and her piglets among its art treasures.

  When we sent out those first pig Christmas cards when Chris was only five, we had no grandiose plans. But Chris had been born beneath a lucky star. He had what every great soul needs to make his mark in the world: gravitas. (At five hundred pounds and counting, that is true gravitas.) Fame, of a sort, found him.

  Letter addressed to Christopher Hogwood, from Blanchard & Blanchard Ltd. of Norwich, Vermont, manufacturer of “pure and fancy foods from Vermont”:

  Dear Mr. Hogwood,

  We know you appreciate fine gourmet foods…

  Tess, too, had been the recipient of bulk mail sent to our address (One read: “As CEO of your company, you…”) But this one was unnerving. How did they know?

  From the police log of the Monadnock Ledger:

  HANCOCK—Fame was too much for Christopher the pig, who appeared on the Boston television show Chronicle on Thursday. The day after his appearance Christopher escaped from his home. Police responded to Old Antrim Road and looked for him, but could not find him. His owner, Sy Montgomery, found him later. Said Chief Ed Coughlan, “He can’t take the publicity.”

  From the Peterborough Transcript:

  A photo op with Christopher Hogwood, a huge pig owned by Sy Montgomery and Howard Mansfield of Hancock, was one of the prizes auctioned off at a fund-raiser for Peterborough’s cultural museum, the Mariposa Museum. The highest bidder—Jim Jenkins of Antrim—was named Hog Reeve for Life.

  From election news in the Keene Sentinel:

  HANCOCK—No one filed for election as town moderator and Thomas Ward won with 69 write-in votes. He easily beat Selectman Neal Cass and Christopher Hogwood, who each got three write-in votes. Hogwood is a pig owned by Howard Mansfield and Sy Montgomery. Voters apparently want an exciting town meeting next year; their new moderator isn’t a boar.

  Howard sometimes accused me of being a stage mother. This wasn’t really true. Yes, if the local press needed a photo when I had a new book coming out, I always wanted Chris in the picture. I was proud of our pig. But I was also shrewd enough to realize that the wrong camera angle can make even a size four look fat—but not if I’m standing beside an enormous hog.

  Our photos together appeared in the local weeklies. We were in the big-city daily, the Keene Sentinel. (The Sentinel reporter’s first question to me was about Chris, and, I thought, rather personal. “Does he fart?” he asked. “Rarely,” I demurred.) We were also on TV together. The editor who had mailed Christopher bread from a Vermont bakery had published a second collection of my columns, among which was an essay on mud—New Hampshire’s most abundant natural resource during the month of March, and the subject of a segment on the Boston TV show Chronicle. But Christopher, as always, stole the show. He was, after all, a bigger expert on mud than I. The cameraman wisely devoted much footage to letting Hogwood demonstrate the highest and best use of this splendid substance. He pushed it around with his nose, looked at the camera, pronounced “Unh!” (as if to say, “Like so”), and rolled over. George happened to be over at Gretchen’s house, shoeing one of her ponies, when the program aired. “George, you won’t believe it!”
Gretchen cried, “Christopher Hogwood is on TV!” George raced inside to watch. All through the segment, George was silent, shaking his head in amazement. Finally he spoke. “That pig,” George said to Gretchen, “has done awfully well for himself.”

  Chris’s photo appeared in the Boston Globe. It had nothing to do with my column. It was a stand-alone photo in the state section of the New Hampshire edition. I knew the photographer, because he specialized in wildlife and because he and his wife ran a rehabilitation center for injured owls in Massachusetts. He stopped by our barn to say hello one day when he was in the area. Next thing we knew, Hogwood occupied a quarter page of the Sunday newspaper. He was standing on his hind legs with his forelegs resting on the gate, foaming drool cascading from his jaws, anticipating a bagel. “Animals are favorite photo subjects and pigs can be very photogenic,” read the caption, “but Pavlov’s hog, a.k.a. Christopher Hogwood, stretches things as he comes drooling toward the camera in search of dinner.” (I thought indignantly that the caption writer was too gauche to appreciate Christopher’s fashion statement: a pig accessorizes with drool.)

  His photo also appeared in the Washington Post, where Howard’s best friend from college and his wife worked as reporters. (Their kids had done Pig Spa and loved it.) For several years after The Hidden Life of Dogs became a bestseller, Liz Thomas wrote a column for USA Today—and managed to work in a reference to Christopher Hogwood there. He was mentioned frequently on New Hampshire Public Radio. “That was Hayden’s Symphony No. 84 in E-flat Major,” the classical music program’s host would announce, “Christopher Hogwood conducting.” Occasionally he would also reference our barnyard opera-lover. Even when he did not, we got comments from our neighbors: “Heard your pig on the radio today.”

  But Hogwood’s most wide-reaching media coverage resulted from Howard’s literary efforts. Yankee magazine often published Howard’s articles on historic preservation and New England icons. Christopher became one of the latter. The editors titled Howard’s article about Chris “It’s a Hog’s Life.” The subtitle asked: “Food, Visitors and Media Attention—What More Could a Pig Want?”

  “Our pig is a Zen eater,” Howard explained. “He becomes his food. He is his food. He loves his food. No remorse. No guilty dinner chat about fat or sugar or pesticides. A pig brings us back to a simpler time in our dining history: all food is good food.”

  No wonder, my husband wrote, that so many people bring him slops. “It’s as if the whole world tilts and vegetables roll toward the commodious jaws of our pig….

  “Over the past five years, “Howard boasted, “Christopher Hogwood has built a larger constituency than most congressmen…. For someone who spends most of his time in his penor outside sunning himself, he sure can network.”

  As a result of Howard’s story, the network only expanded. One day as we were leaving to visit friends for supper, a car with California plates pulled up in front of the house. “Does Christopher Hogwood live here?” the driver, a middle-aged fellow, asked. “My wife and I read about him in Yankee. We wondered if we could take a picture.”

  We escorted the West Coast paparazzi to Christopher’s stall. When we drove off, they were still taking photos.

  AS CHRISTOPHER’S NETWORK AND GIRTH EXPANDED, SO DID OUR mailing list. More and more people wanted Chris’s picture: the editors at all the papers, magazines, and publishers for which we wrote, Howard’s associates in historic preservation, story sources at universities and museums. Most of them had heard a parrot squawk or a dog bark during telephone calls to us, and since I had taken to augmenting our chicken flock every second or third spring by raising baby chicks under a heat lamp in my office, often folks would hear chicks peeping as well. “Are you calling from a zoo?” they would wonder. Not exactly…but we would end up telling them about our animal family, and Christopher. We would send a card. They loved seeing a happy pig wearing pink sunglasses. They all wanted to know when the next card was coming out.

  Christopher’s holiday cards became a tradition, another way of marking time. There was the year Christopher wore the elf hat. Then there was the year we featured Chris drinking a Schlitz. (Some of our friends accused us of pig abuse. We weren’t sure whether they thought alcohol wasn’t good for pigs, or whether they simply didn’t like Schlitz.)

  One year, Jane’s birthday fell during the Perseid meteor showers, and we all lay out in the backyard counting shooting stars. Between meteors, we wondered: what should we do for next year’s pig photo? How can we top last year’s?

  But that was the summer Lilla told us that she and the girls would be moving away. The divorce and its aftermath had cleaned Lilla out. As a single mother with two kids to support, Lilla now turned to her own mother for help. But she lived in Connecticut. The family would have to move there.

  The day before the move, we held an all-day Pig Spa. Lilla was next door packing. Howard was upstairs in his office, trying to write, feeling empty and sad. Kate and Jane and I were down at the Plateau, brushing Christopher in the sun. Kate looked up. “I want to do Pig Spa again tomorrow!” she said.

  We reminded each other that Connecticut was not so far away. We would visit. The girls would come back to Hancock for a couple of weeks every summer.

  But there would be no Pig Spa tomorrow. The sweet old house next door would be empty. It seemed too awful to bear. The three of us flung our arms around each other and over the pig’s prone body. As he grunted softly, we sobbed into his bristles.

  CHAPTER 9

  Finding Eden

  “THERE’S JANE’S BUS.” EVERY MORNING, AS I SERVED THE EGGS OUR hens had given, Howard would sit at the wobbly card table by the window and make this wistful observation as the elementary school bus went by. But Jane, of course, was not on it.

  The Doll House stood empty. The sweet little cape now looked sad to us, as if it were as lonely for its former occupants as we were.

  We missed the girls terribly, and we worried over who would move in next door. What if they had aggressive dogs who ran loose, or kids who chased or teased animals? Would our hens be safe? What if they didn’t like our pig? Christopher’s hefty manure heap was composting just inches from the stone wall that separated our two yards. What if the new people didn’t like pig manure?

  We had a long wait to find out. Though the owner of the house moved back in for a while, he lost his job as a buyer for a sporting goods company, and soon the bank foreclosed on the house. New Hampshire had hit another recession, and this time the real estate market, too, was slow. But in this case, the real estate agent had an additional challenge—one we didn’t know about until Christopher’s special friend, the software expert, Ray Cote, told us about a conversation he’d had with the agent at a Chamber of Commerce gathering.

  “We had this couple up from New Jersey,” the agent told Ray. “They were looking for a nice, quiet place, sort of out of the way, so I showed them this house. We did the entire inside of the house and they liked it. They were very happy with it. We went outside and there was this beautiful garden back there, with flowers in bloom, and they were really enjoying it. They were really looking like they were interested in the house. I thought they were going to make an offer. The husband was just about to say something to me—at which point we heard this yell.

  “And I looked over to this other yard, next door. And there is this little, skinny, five-foot-five woman, wearing these huge floppy boots, and she is running as fast as she absolutely could. And she is carrying this bucket, which is obviously heavy, and running like mad. Why on earth is she running?

  “So we look behind her. And what we saw was this: The head of an enormous black and white hog. And then we saw the body of an enormous hog. And then some more of the body of this hog. This hog is thundering out of nowhere. And it’s running after her making loud, snorting noises. Snort, snort, snort! Snort, snort, snort! And then the woman goes flying into the barn. And the pig goes flying into the barn. And then the door slams. And then there’s silence.”


  “So what did you say to the couple?” Ray asked.

  “I turned to them and said, ‘So it’s a nice neighborhood.’”

  The couple left in stunned silence. They never called again.

  HOWARD AND I WERE PLEASED WITH RAY’S STORY. WE FIGURED Christopher had done the neighborhood a service. Anyone who didn’t want to live next door to a pig was certainly not worthy of our town.

  But meanwhile, the house seemed lonely for a family. Lilla and the girls would be a tough act to follow. There was not a day we didn’t think of them. But they kept their promise and came to visit us every few months. One year, they surprised Howard on his birthday, and the next year surprised me on mine. They came up summers. And we visited them at the house they were renting in Connecticut—a huge ’70s contemporary with cathedral ceilings and a deck and sliders.

  Their new town was a different world, the girls told us. Practically no one had two parents; lots of kids were on Prozac; everyone was in therapy. Kate explained the social strata of the high school: there were the popular jocks and jockettes, the freaks, the poseurs (who pretended to be something they weren’t), and the “froseurs” (fake poseurs, every week pretending to be a new different thing they weren’t). The popular style was to dress up for school—no jeans and sweatshirts like in New Hampshire. One time when we stayed overnight, in the morning Kate emerged from her bedroom dressed for school in a miniskirt and fishnet stockings. Howard’s bushy eyebrows shot up and nearly merged with his curly hair. Out of his mouth came words I had heard in my youth from my father, but which I’d never thought I’d hear from my own husband: “You are going to school,” he asked, “dressed like that?”

  Little girls no more, Kate and Jane were changing into beautiful young women. Yet they remained, in an important way, part of Hancock, part of our family, forever rooted to the joys of Pig Spa, of reading Walker’s Mammals and dreaming of adventure with orcas and wolves and otters at our kitchen table. Jane was accepted at a private school that had its own zoo, where she particularly enjoyed caring for the captive emus. She excelled in art and biology. Kate, who had always struggled with dyslexia, now loved both reading and writing. Her reports on wildlife and essays about conservation and animal rights impressed her teachers. It was clear that both girls would grow up knowing how to find their bliss. They knew what bliss looked like: it looked like a black-and-white sleeping hog.