The Wild Boar of Gerrish Island

Last Friday morning, little did Roberta know that she would be instrumental in creating a Maine island legend.

Recently moved from Connecticut, Roberta brought with her a Maine Coon cat named Pongo, a chocolate Lab named Christine, and a small Lhasa Apso who answers, if she feels like it, to Cassie. A more unusual addition to the seacoast-bound safari was a black, pot-bellied pig, sporting more bristles than a case of Fuller brushes, and in possession of a handsome set of tusks, which, while not elephant-like, certainly more than sufficed to hang a pig’s pride on. The name was Elwood, and if he had legs any shorter, he might easily have been mistaken for a roly poly snake with a very big head, and should at least have been accorded accolades in the pig world comparable to those accorded to Danny Devito in the world of Hollywood.

For the first few months of Elwood’s Maine citizenship, he slept in a cage next to the house, where Roberta made sure he was snug, warm and well-fed through the winter and spring. In the daytime he would take walks in what would be, come springtime, the garden, availing himself of every opportunity to scratch various parts of his porcine anatomy on the many large, rough granite stones decorating the yard. He feasted daily on sow pellets, an especially rich mixture for lactating mother pigs, which he obviously was not, banana peels, leftover lettuce and apple cores. While fairly rotund for a person, Elwood was quite svelte for a pot-bellied pig.

Several weeks ago, as summer rounded spring’s final corner, it was decided to move Elwood a bit farther away from the house, so that the singular odors that so definitively mark the habitat of a pig might waft freely into the overhanging floor of a perfectly situated, dilapidated tree house, long since abandoned following its initial function as a movie set a few years earlier, rather than permeating the antique copper screens of the lovely Gerrish Island home inhabited by Roberta, her significant other, and his two teenage sons, Smith and Dylan.

To be sure, the decision to move Elwood was not Roberta’s. If Roberta had had her way, Elwood would not have been moved farther from the house at all. Nor would he have remained next to the house. No, if Roberta had had her way, Elwood would have been IN the house. However rarely it might occur, on this particular issue, the male voices of the house were victorious in their resolve against this co-habitation.

So, Elwood was moved under the tree house, secured by chain link fencing nailed to the circle of the half a dozen trees supporting the tree house itself. Roberta and friends used tent stakes to secure the areas of fencing between the trees to the rocky ground. They fashioned a crude gate of the fencing and set large hooks in one of the trees to fasten the gate closed. An old white patio table and heavy piece of rusted pipe were used to ensure that the gate was kept in place.

Inside the enclosure were placed a plastic dish of water, a bed of wood shavings, some of the rich sow pellets, a banana peel or two, Elwood’s red and black blanket, and finally Elwood himself. The master’s first act in his new domain was to defiantly hook his tusk into the water dish and send it tumbling and rolling in people-drenching cartwheels. Then, while those in proximity dried themselves off, he began to cry. Not his usually perky grunts in answer to his name being called, but pleadings specifically designed to get him out of this strange place one hundred feet from the house. Only Roberta’s through-the-fence caressing of his bristled jaw was comforting enough to cause him to prostrate himself next to the fence, and surprisingly quickly, fall into a restful sleep. Until she stopped, that is. Then, just as suddenly, he was up again and pleading.

Throughout the day, Elwood seemed to adjust comfortably to his new abode. The addition of a tarp along one side of the fence, because as Roberta explained it, pigs are no less privacy advocates than are Republicans, helped keep Elwood from the prying eyes of passing deer.

It wasn’t long, however, until this diminutive envy of the barnyard began to pursue a penchant for freedom that would have made Papillion proud. Almost immediately upon being left to meditate in his new apartment, Elwood used his built-in earth moving equipment known as a snout, to squeeze himself under one stretch of fence, pushing aside the heavy horizontal roll of leftover fencing placed along the base of the standing fence that had erroneously been assumed to be inviolable, and made his way to his favorite patch of mud beside the driveway near the house. There he was discovered by Smith a short time later, no longer black, but an uneven creamy brown, and in a particularly excellent mood.

But all too soon for Elwood, he found himself back in his new digs. Large rocks were enlisted to make the escape site inescapable. More staple-shaped nails fastened the fence even more securely to the circled wooden sentinels. These obstacles, however, were to baffle Elwood’s Steve McQueen-like spirit for only a few short days.

Meanwhile, a silvered plastic ball was purchased at a local supermarket with the intention of distracting him from his excavatory pursuits, in the hope of inspiring the prospect of a solo career in boar soccer. As fate would have it, Christine, Roberta’s beloved chocolate Lab, was laboring under the rather unfortunate delusion that if it was a ball it must be for her, and if it was for her, then she must bite it. Soon the perfect roundness of the ball was replaced by what seemed like the exhaled shape of a collapsed silver lung. It was in the trash before Elwood even saw it.

Whether or not the ball would have made a difference in the events of last Friday night, or even whether or not it would have been of any interest to the would-be fugitive, are a matter of casual speculation among those close enough to Roberta to have managed a lucky glance at the duskily-mirrored sphere before its untimely demise. Probably, said the general consensus, not.

In any event, it was only a matter of days before Elwood again found a chink in the armor of his restraint. This time, after another little taste of his signature tunneling, he was again discovered, prior to a quick re-incarceration, basking in freedom next to his old cage, which, it was planned, was to join The Wood, as Roberta’s significant other called him, in his new haunts as soon as she could convince the men of the house to lug it across the uneven ground and upturned rocks to Elwood’s enclosure.

But that hadn’t happened yet, and this lack of complete relocation was, as Roberta was to later put it, no doubt a major cause of Elwood’s non-acceptance of his most recent quarters. Whether or not that was true, Roberta later found it a rather handy tool for administering self-blame. “If only I hadn’t listened to you, and insisted on his cage being moved immediately,” Roberta later opined to her significant other, “then what happened wouldn’t have happened.” Again, the consensus among the male members of the household was in fairly direct opposition to this point of view, but in this regard they didn’t stand a chance. Roberta is very attached to her animals, as she is to not infrequent self-flagellation on their behalf, regardless of the opinions of others.

What happened was, that late last Friday night, a wave of thunderstorms swept over the island which were prohibitive to Roberta’s making the usual evening visit to Elwood to make sure he had enough water and that he wasn’t in the midst of executing some new plan of escape. “Do you think he’ll be alright if I don’t go out?” Roberta asked plaintively of her significant other. “Of course,” came the re-assuring answer, “he’s got a roof over his head and his blanket to comfort him. Besides the thunder is nothing compared to the giant loader that the landlord operated near him a few weeks ago. After that he probably laughs at thunder.” Roberta seemed to accept this and Elwood was forgotten until the next morning.

About eight AM, Roberta opened one of her office windows and repeatedly called Elwood’s name in the direction of the tree house. No answer. So she called again and again, listening each time for a familiar grunt in reply. She called so often, that her significant other requested as tactfully as possible, that she refrain, out of consideration for any neighbors who were not named Elwood, and even for those who might be, should they favor sleeping in on a Saturday morning in lieu of being paged by a lovely re-located Connecticut woman with a voice that could easily rouse the dead.

A hasty trip to Elwood’s compound revealed that another section of fence had indeed been breached, but not without first the rolling away of the large stones that had been given the overmatched task of preventing just such a Houdini-like extrication.

Elwood’s tracks revealed his rather laid-back departure. Some time after the rain, he had, it could be seen, strolled about the property, wallowed in his favorite driveway mud, revisited his old cage, and then let his hooves do the wandering down Pocohontas Lane a good mile or so before his trail suddenly vanished.

Roberta, aided by Dylan and his father, instituted a massive search rivaling those conducted by early Spanish explorers for the Fountain of Youth. Trails were walked, underbrush undertaken, signs and posters distributed, neighbors informed, passers-bye queried and the police called. All to no avail. Elwood was nowhere to be found. Roberta imagined every evil possibility that could have happened to The Wood, and blamed herself thoroughly for each one, just in case.

Saturday became Sunday. Then things began to happen. One of Roberta’s regular calls into police headquarters in hopes of someone reporting having found her cherished fugitive, resulted in the information that an unnamed woman had called to report the sighting of a wild boar on the other side of the island. Being as there never have been boars, wild or otherwise, on Gerrish Island, Roberta lost no time in abandoning much, but not all, of her guilt in exchange for a glimmering of new-found hope.

Then more reports came flooding in. Neighbors talking to neighbors revealed more signs of the casually-fleeing pig. Droppings, more tracks, uprooted earth, vandalized gardens, all began to tell a tale of a former prisoner intoxicated with his new-found freedom. Elwood had not been picked up on the road by a ham-eyed out-of-state redneck and thrown into the back of a pickup for a future Sunday supper. Elwood had not expired at the merciless claws of an errant bear. Elwood had not found a liberating bridge leading off the island and been gobbled up by the interior of a heavily forested mainland. Elwood was here! Alive! Elwood was alive and living on oceanfront property! He had become what destiny and his unquenchable thirst for adventure insisted he become, a free pig!

I must warn you, dear reader, that there is as of yet, no happy ending to this story, except for those who may leap to take heart from the courageous escapades of a cloven-hoofed lover of liberty, or those who unabashedly claim to be unwavering supporters of a pig’s right to choose. For Roberta though, at least, there is, as of yet, no happy ending. “If only,” she exclaims more than often through torrents of tears, “if only I could be looking at his sweet face again right now.” Sometimes she can be heard to state to no one in particular, simply, “I want my pig back.” Needless to say, most of Gerrish Island, even perhaps the entire seacoast region, feel the same.

Or do they?

There is mounting evidence that, to those caught up in the romance of Elwood’s exploits, life, or so it seems, is not as simple as it used to be. A strange restlessness, an indescribable sense of delicious self-exploration, has permutated the lives of all whom Elwood or Elwood’s mythological exploits have touched. Many a troubled soul, and several who were untroubled but have recently reconsidered, have taken Elwood’s example and are beginning a quest to break free from the constraints of their pathetic former lives. And there are, evidence indicates, many more who are planning to do the same, or at least wishing they were.

Whether Elwood is finally recaptured and returned to his doting mistress is a part of the tale yet to be told. Really, though, according to many, that is unimportant now. Really, now, many who live nearby agree, there isn’t much that IS important anymore, outside of Elwood’s growing influence. Elwood has seen to that. His shining example of those qualities that make America great have already left an indelible mark on lives, on a civilization, on history.

Regardless of what twists and turns his own rather squat life may take, The Wood is now eternally the stuff of legend. Whether or not he is bodily returned to the drab existence he used to lead is immaterial. His spirit has escaped, never to be recaptured. His guiding light now is destined to shine on unendingly in the grateful hearts of many a woman, man and pig. Now he belongs unforgettably to the ages. Now he is, and forever shall be, the Wild Boar of Gerrish Island!