by Matt Weiland
J F: What’s funny, listening to you, is how much less ancient this all seems than my own early twenties. Three hundred million years is nothing compared to how long it’s been since I was a senior in college. And even college seems relatively recent compared to the years right after. The years when I was married. If you want to talk about a tortured, deep geology.
THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: I don’t suppose you married your vivacious cousin?
J F: No, no, no. But definitely a New York girl. Just like I’d always dreamed of. Her people on her dad’s side had been living in Orange County since the 1600s. And her mom’s name was Harriet. And she had two very petite younger sisters who were a whole lot like the girls in the backseat of Martha’s Town Car. And she was deliciously unhappy.
THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Unhappy was never my idea of delicious.
J F: Well, for some reason, it was mine. Three hundred million years ago. The first thing we did when we got out of school was sublet an apartment on West 110th Street. By the end of that summer, I was so in love with the city, it was almost an afterthought to propose that she and I get married. Which we did, a year later, on a hillside up in Orange County, near the terminus of the Palisades Parkway. Late in the day, we drove off in our Chevy Nova and crossed the Hudson on the Bear Mountain Bridge, heading back toward Boston. I told the toll-taker that we’d just got married, and he waved us on through. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that we were happy then and happy for the next five years, happy being in Boston, happy visiting New York, happy longing for it from a distance. It was only when we decided to actually live here that our troubles started.
NEW YORK STATE’S PUBLICIST: (Distantly) Hal? Hello? Hal?
THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Oops—excuse me. Janelle! Wrong way! Over here! Janelle! She can never find me … Janelle!
NEW YORK STATE’S PUBLICIST: Oh, this is terrible, terrible! Jon, she’s been ready for you for five minutes already, and here I’m wandering around and around and around in this warren. I know I promised you a half hour, but I’m afraid you may have to content yourself with fifteen minutes. And, I’m sorry, but, hiding back here with Hal, you do bear a certain amount of responsibility yourself. Honestly, Hal, you need to install escape-path lighting or something.
THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: I feel lucky to be funded at all.
J F: It’s been nice talking to you.
NEW YORK STATE’S PUBLICIST: Let’s go, let’s go. Run with me! I should have sprinkled some bread crumbs behind me. … A person could lie down and die here, and the world might never know it. … She hates to be kept waiting even five seconds! And you know who she’ll blame, don’t you?
J F: Me?
NEW YORK STATE’S PUBLICIST: No! Me! Me! Oh, here we are, here we are, we’re coming coming coming coming, here, just go on in, she’s waiting for you—go on—and don’t forget to ask about the pictures—
J F: Hello!
NEW YORK STATE: Hello. Come in.
J F: I’m really sorry I kept you waiting.
NEW YORK STATE: I’m sorry, too. It cuts into our already very limited time together.
J F: I’ve been here since eight-thirty this morning, and then, in the last half hour—
NEW YORK STATE: Mm.
J F: Anyway, it’s great to see you. You look terrific. Very, ah, put-together.
NEW YORK STATE: Thank you.
J F: It’s been so long since we were alone, I don’t know where to begin.
NEW YORK STATE: We were alone once?
J F: You don’t remember?
NEW YORK STATE: Maybe. Maybe you can remind me. Or not. Some men are more memorable than others. The cheap dates I tend to forget. Would this have been a cheap date?
J F: They were nice dates.
NEW YORK STATE: Oh! “Dates” plural. More than one.
J F: I mean, I know I’m not Mort Zuckerman, or Mike Bloomberg, or Donald Trump—
NEW YORK STATE: The Donald! He is cute. (Giggles) I think he’s cute!
J F: Oh my God.
NEW YORK STATE: Oh, come on, admit it. He really is pretty cute, don’t you think? … What? You truly don’t think so?
J F: I’m sorry, I’m … just taking it all in. This whole morning. I mean, I knew things were never going to be the same with us. But, my God. It really is all about money and money only now, isn’t it?
NEW YORK STATE: It was always about money. You were just too young to notice.
J F: So you remember me?
NEW YORK STATE: Possibly. Or possibly I’m making an educated guess. The romantic young men never notice. My mother even came to find the Redcoats rather handsome, back in the war years. What else was she supposed to do? Let them burn everything?
J F: I guess it runs in your family, then!
NEW YORK STATE: Oh, please. Grow up. Is this really how you want us to spend our ten minutes?
J F: You know, I was back there last month. The hillside where I got married—her grandparents’ house. I was driving up through Orange County and I went back to try to find it. I remembered a green lawn spilling down to a rail fence, and a big overgrown pasture with woods all around it.
NEW YORK STATE: Yes, Orange County. A lovely feature of mine. I hope you took some time to savor the many tracts of spectacular parkland around Bear Mountain and to reflect on what an extraordinary percentage of my total land area is guaranteed public and “forever wild.” Of course, a great deal of that land came to me as gifts from very rich men. Perhaps you’d like me to be pure and virtuous and give it all back to them for development?
J F: I wasn’t sure I ever actually found it, the land was so altered. It was all hideous sprawl, traffic, Home Depot, Best Buy, Target. Next door to the town’s old brick high school there was this brand-new, pink, aircraft-carrier-sized building with signs at the entrance that said PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY, WE love our children.
NEW YORK STATE: Our precious freedoms do include the freedom to be tacky and annoying.
J F: The best I could do was narrow it to two hillsides. The same thing was happening on both of them. Building-size pieces of earth-moving equipment were scraping it all bare. Reshaping the very contours of the land—creating these cute little fake dells and fake winkles for hideous houses to be sold to sentimentalists so enraged with the world they had to inform it, in writing, on a road sign, that they love their children. Clouds of diesel exhaust, broken full-grown oak trees piled up like little sticks, birds whizzing around in a panic. I could see the whole gray and lukewarm future. No urban. No rural. The entire country just a wasteland of shittily built neither-nor.
NEW YORK STATE: And yet, in spite of it all, I am still rather beautiful. Isn’t it unfair? What money can buy? And trees do have a way of growing back. You think there were oak trees on your hillside in the nineteenth century? There probably weren’t a thousand oak trees left standing in the entire county. So let’s not talk about the past.
J F: The past was when I loved you.
NEW YORK STATE: All the more reason not to talk about it! Here. Come sit next to me. I have some pictures of myself I want to show you.
NORTH CAROLINA
CAPITAL Raleigh
ENTERED UNION 1789 (12th]
ORIGIN OF NAME In honor of Charles I of England
NICKNAME TarHeelState
MOTTO Esse quam videri (“To be rather than to seem”)
RESIDENTS North Carolinian
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 13
STATE BIRD cardinal
STATE FLOWER dogwood
STATE TREE pine
STATE SONG “The Old North State”
LAND AREA 48,711 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Chatham Co., 10 mi. NW of Sanford
POPULATION 8,683,242
WHITE 72.1%
BLACK 21.6%
AMERICAN INDIAN 12%
ASIAN 14%
HISPANIC/LATINO 4.7%
UNDER 18 24.4%
65 AND OVER 12.0%
MEDIAN AGE 35.3
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br /> NORTH CAROLINA
Randall Kenan
“I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
The rural North Carolina world in which I grew up has largely gone. Farms were small and plentiful, and country boys like me learned so much about life from livestock—especially, in North Carolina, from hogs.
My cousin Norman lived directly across the dirt road from my mother and me. Along with his other farm concerns—tobacco, corn, soybeans, chickens—he raised scores of hogs, killing a number in December for their meat, and selling the prized ones a bit later for cash money. An old man when I was born, he had the air of an Old Testament figure, and seemed to know everything there was to know about coaxing plants from the ground and the feed and care of animals. His grandsons, Harry and Larry, were daily fixtures on his farm, and my best buddies in the whole wide world.
Then in high school, they were a few years older than me, and they were my educators about all those things grown-ups were never going to explain to me. Grown-up things. The birds and the bees sorts of things. Subterranean, hidden things were our major topics, after basketball and comic books. So much of the good stuff about adult human society seemed off-limits to me, which made me even hungrier to know about them. The world was an endlessly fascinating, alluring, deadly, promising place, and they had the vocabulary to describe it all, and the opinions to make it make more sense. They had a knack about making the salacious seem routine, yet still somehow magical. As far as I was concerned they knew everything.
Their grandfather kept his hogs in a two-story barn: It held corn in a great room and had an open cavity where the tractor slept. Above that was the tall, wide room with large double doors in front—the belfry, where the dried tobacco was stored. To the south were stalls for the hogs. Their pens extended from their wooden chambers out into the fenced-in cornfields where they rooted and rutted and went about their hog business.
One early spring afternoon after school we awaited the arrival of a particular hog star the way a crowd of fans awaits the arrival of the UNC basketball team after winning an away game. There was much talk of what would occur between boar and sow—between boar and many sows in fact, one by one. About how that boar was a right lucky fellow: a true stud. I had a vague notion of what was about to happen: a boar hog was to impregnate each sow so that Cousin Norman could have more hogs to raise and butcher or sell. This part made sense. The fuzzy part, in my eight-year-old mind, was the act itself. Thanks to Harry and Larry’s impeccable tutelage, as well as the R-rated films they took me to, I had learned about the congress between a man and a woman. But the mechanics of hog sex boggled my mind. I kept trying to figure out how it was done, and I was too proud to ask the right questions: What went where? Does the boar ask permission? This was an event I had to witness to complete my education as a North Carolina farm boy. For my cousins—well, this was basically country-boy porn.
The headliner boar hog arrived in a massive wagon towed by an oversized truck. The hog itself did not disappoint: When the slats were removed, he lumbered out like a creature from a nightmare. It was huge in every direction, dark brown and much hairier than the workaday porkers I slopped in the twilight after supper. I’ve never seen a hog that big. It stood taller than me, almost as tall as a grown man. The wideness of him, the heft of him, the length of him … he was a real-life monster. His head was the stuff of horror movies: Its giant size was matched with mean eyes and woolly mammoth tusks. (Who knew that domestic hogs grew tusks?) I’d never seen such a thing. His cavernous mouth dripped white, frothing ropes of drool. When he snorted I could see the air, like steam but thicker, heavier: The hog looked like pure evil. And, yes, his testicles were outrageous—mighty: pendulous, bulging, spherical things, clearly potent.
But he did disappoint with his seeming indifference to his first intended. A few attempts were made—now I saw how they did it: The impossibly large beast clambered on top of the female hog, herself no sylph, his hooves insistently drawing his great weight across her back, and then his red business attempted to invade her red business. The entire activity was clumsy yet riveting to behold. Suddenly the word “hump” had an entirely new meaning. Piglets were to be the outcome, by and by, by some mysterious process that I still accorded to magic. How else could you explain it?
We leered. Me, Harry, Larry, Cousin Norman, who had the most interest in seeing that the deed was done, for what seemed several hours, until boredom overtook us, and we retreated to watch something far less titillating: Charlie’s Angels.
But all that night my curiosity pricked at me like fire ants. Are they doing it? What does it look like?
The next morning, while everyone else chewed their bacon, I slipped outside. I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had hog sex on the brain: I had to see. I walked across the road, under the great oak, to Cousin Norman’s big barn, past the tractor and corn crib, to the rear stall where the great boar hog entertained his hog lady—wow! He was atop her. Penetration had not only been achieved, but was occurring right before my prepubescent eyes. His sighs and grunts sounded like the air being slowly released from a great engine. And the motions he was making were, frankly, obscene. Like a shot I ran back across the road, into the house, into the dining room—the eight-year-old herald of pig fornication.
“They’re doing it!”
I ran back to the barn followed by two horny teenagers whose interest in the matter held different curiosities than my own. We witnessed. Larry made some nasty, Rudy Ray Moore—like observations. Harry told me something then that I did not believe, but have come to learn is true: Male hogs have a corkscrew-shaped penis, and their sex act goes on longer than most mammals’. And for me, something momentous had occurred. My mind had been expanded in some mysterious way. I was seeing through a glass a little less darkly.
We sauntered back across the road to finish breakfast, our eyes and ears satiated by having witnessed something primordial, something that felt even forbidden to have beheld.
My mother stood on the porch. Arms akimbo. A look upon her face: I imagined Jack’s mother looked the same when he told her he had sold their only cow for some dad-gummed magic beans.
“Don’t you ever—ever—do something like that again!” she said. I had never, nor have I since, seen her so close to apoplectic rage. Her fury seemed to loom above her like a towering phoenix afire, her tone like a pissed-off biblical prophet. “You just don’t do things like that! You don’t talk about such things! Have you lost your mind?” Her disappointment, her disapproval, bewildered me, and I felt dirty and ashamed. “That’s not information you broadcast to people. Polite people don’t speak of such things. What kind of person do you want to be?” She retreated into the house to get ready for school. Harry and Larry slapped me on the back and laughed.
“Don’t worry about it,” Larry said to me, “it’s natural.”
The business of hogs.
The eminent historian Charles Reagan Wilson has joked that the South began when Hernando DeSoto brought hogs with him on his treks through Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—the land that would become the heart of the Confederacy a few centuries later. The ease of raising and feeding hogs, and their adaptability, led to their wholesale adoption. Native Americans took to the domesticated meat swiftly.
Pork products of all types came to form a solid core at the center of Southern culture: hams and bacon and sausages and loins, not to mention chitlins and pig feet and neckbones, as well as lard and headcheese, which takes a true connoisseur to appreciate. In North Carolina, passion for pork is a birthright. Smokehouses were ubiquitous, dotting the rural landscape along with the tobacco barns and cotton fields. Most of the pork consumed by North Carolinians was raised and butchered locally by individual farmers, like my Cousin Norman, long after Carl Sandburg declared Chicago “Hog Butcher to the World,” long after the invention of refrigerated trucks and train car
s. The identity of most North Carolinians was bound up in the homegrown hog.
But in the course of a few decades the entire pork industry has changed more than it has in centuries. And Duplin County has become the epicenter of this new and improved hog husbandry in one of America’s most swine-happy states thanks largely to Wendell H. Murphy, from Rose Hill, about nineteen miles from where I grew up. Forbes magazine once called Murphy “the Ray Kroc of pigsties.” Murphy pioneered ways to dramatically increase the numbers and weights and quality of his pigs, thus—like Kroc—changing our eating habits and our landscape.
In 1964, a few years after graduating from North Carolina State University in agriculture, Murphy and his father started a feed manufacturing operation in a town near Raleigh. In 1979 they began what is called sow and farrowing operations, borrowing a practice used by poultry producers: contract other farmers to raise the animals. Murphy would provide them with fences, food, and piglets, and the farmers would receive $1 per hog at fifteen weeks, when Murphy would take the developed pigs. This benefited farmers who were too short on funds to make investments on their own, and allowed Murphy Farms to grow at a meteoric rate.