The hogs are with us again. They have been with us since De Soto brought them here for food in the 1500s. In the early 1900s, Russian boars imported for sport escaped hunting preserves and bred with De Soto’s legacy and the free-ranging feral pigs of regional farmers.
The cross turned survivors into thrivers, creating a hybrid with the intelligence and aggression of the Russian combined with the prolific breeding of domestic pigs. The population here waxes and wanes, and despite sustained efforts to control it, enough always survive to multiply again and come back to plow your field for you.
Tracey and I have been more fortunate than some. The herd plowed a beautiful fuel break for us during the Rock Mountain and Boteler fires in 2016, when wildlife caught between the two fires was driven here ahead of the flames. The pigs saved me hours of labor digging up my sweet potatoes and left them intact because they were either in a hurry or didn’t like the taste.
Recently they uprooted a swath of pesky bamboo sprouts that return every year to make me regret ever planting bamboo, and they subsoiled a patch I’ve been conditioning for Tracey’s sunflowers. My neighbor and I were joking about how much we should charge to rent out our team of hogs for plowing gardens and undergroving. He thinks we should charge by the mile.
Many farmers, gardeners, and lawn lovers are not amused. The pigs are highly destructive and do great ecological damage to the mountain ecosystem, not to mention the costly destruction of many a hayfield. They do have one weakness though: They don’t like electricity, and if my beans and tomatoes could talk, they would tell a harrowing tale of the night a pig got tangled in the electric mesh fence that protects them.
That fence needs maintenance today, and it’s not going to happen while I’m sitting here drinking coffee and pushing pixels. “It’s not hot enough to work yet,” we often say in jest. The thermometer touched 60 degrees last night, and the cool, delicious air is pushing me back into my chair, even though every tired muscle knows that pounding t-posts is a lot more fun at 70 degrees than it is at 88 with 88 percent humidity.
Is it just me, or does the weather seem more miserable more often? Misery loves company, so I looked into the numbers to find something to blame. I was disappointed. The numbers say that relative humidity in our area has remained stable in spite of the constant massaging of fears about global warming.
So that means it’s probably just me and a few grumpy friends and acquaintances. There is some evidence that COVID can have long-term effects on the body’s ability to regulate temperature, and we’ve all had the ‘rona by now, but the evidence is inconclusive.
Which brings us back to “misery loves company.” Simmering in information and hype while the big weather show gives names to individual thunderstorms, news breaks at all hours to tell us that summer is hot in case you forgot from the last time they told you 15 minutes ago. When you make a habit of thinking about being hot, you might just start to feel hot.
There is also an inconvenient truth pushing back on the recliner. As one approaches that 39th birthday and then recedes from it, the body’s ability to handle heat diminishes. Sure, we ran wind sprints with the football team in June and hiked with a 70 lb backpack in July and replaced the shingles on the roof in August, but maybe all that didn’t happen last week, or even last year.
Come to think of it, there is a stack of t-posts waiting for me in the shade right now, and the sun is starting to peek over the ridgeline. If I get up now I may finish the job before it’s necessary to sweat like a pig. Pigs don’t have sweat glands, by the way, but you knew that. See you next week.
Outside The Box 