The Great Adventure - Day 9 - August 13, 2009 - Part 2

One of the things I like best about a campfire is that the wood smoke smell gets into your hair and no matter how many time you wash it, you'll continue to catch remembrances of it for a day or two. (Stacy, who perhaps has more resources that I do for memory collection, finds this to be one of the things she likes least about campfires.) The phenomenon, however, is not limited to wood smoke; we've discovered another "aroma" that attaches to you and hangs around despite your best attempts to shake it -- the delightful scent of "pig farm." This is one scent stowaway that Stacy and I can both agree to wish to avoid. We failed this trip, but sometimes the price you pay is worthwhile.

Thursday afternoon the kids were sad to leave Camp Wapiti; they had had a great time with Wyatt and Madison, the owner's children, and weren't ready to go. Grampy lightened the mood by suggesting a special treat on the way back to Patten, something L remembered from our last trip to Maine, but N was too young to remember, a visit to his friend Charlie Kenney's pig farm. We forlornly drove out the dirt road past the Camp Wapiti sign, across the little wood bridge over the Shin Pond outlet (single lane, no guard rails!) and on to the road to Patten. On the way we pasted innumerable empty log trucks heading into Shin Pond and onto the vast woodlands beyond to get their next load. Northern Maine isn't Northern Maine without these monster 18-wheelers rolling by all the time. We crossed the Patten line, but instead of taking the turn to Mimi and Grampy's house, we veered off on a side road that took us through the countryside past a number of huge old farms, the last outposts of civilization, nestled up against the boundary of the eternal woods that take over the majority of the state to the north and west. There used to be many family-owed farms in and around Patten, but as is the case throughout the country, they are a dying breed. A few still survived, though greatly scaled back, along Happy Corner Road. It was a beautiful drive.



















Charlie and Laura Kenney's farm seems to be typical of Northern Maine farms - a vast sprawling conglomeration of fields that speak of a dairy past that has now been set aside for more focused, smaller-scale enterprise. My grandfather and my Dad had a similar experience with their farm. The hundreds of acres of dairy pastures gave way to slightly smaller swaths of potato fields, which in turn gave way back to acres and acres of less labor-intensive spruce plantations.

N chasing the world's most
gleeful border collies.

The Kenney's still keep some cows and a sizable garden, but the focus (for us, if not for them) is the pig barns out behind the old traditional barn. You can pack a lot of pigs in a pretty tight area, and the noise and the heat, when you notice, are surprising. The problem is you don't notice right away. Something else hijacks your senses and doesn't let you get around to noticing sound or temperature for quite a while - pigs are, shall we say - fragrant. Manure and urine definitely play major roles in the smell, but there's also something else - something organic and sweaty - something very, very piggy. You will not mistake a pig barn for a cowshed or a horse stable or even a chicken coop. There is a distinct porcine peculiarity to the smell. It takes some getting used to. The scary thing is that once you've smelled it, you will notice it in raw pork the next time you unwrap a roast or some chops from the butcher. It makes your next pork loin a slightly more hesitating experience.



But smell or no smell, we love the pig farm. I have no idea how many porkers Charlie keeps - probably upwards of 50 adults. We always seem to catch it when there are tons of new piglets around, all packed into feeding pens with their prostrate mommas. The piglets (apart from the smell), truly are undeniably cute. They are curious and inquisitive, while at the same time shy and skittish. They remind me of my kids. (No comment about the smell in that regard.) The moms aren't too happy with visitors, but there's not much they can do about it, so Mimi and I take turns sweeping up overly curious piglets and passing them around while the piglets squeals and thrash and the keyed up moms snort and grunt. Once in their arms L and N squeal and thrash while Stacy anxiously frets around, warning verbosely of germs and pig-poo.

The visit is always a ton of fun, but the heat and smell drive it to be a rather short one. We're soon outside gasping for air. Charlie keeps his breeders inside the pig barn, the enormous old mothers and the tiny piglets, but outside in a fenced in pen with a little open-doored shed he keeps the younger mid-sized porkers - the ones with a less romantic future ahead of them. He has them well trained. We walked over to the pen and couldn't see any pigs until Charlie let out a classic "Souuuuuieee! Souie, Souie, Souie!" From inside the pig shack there was a sudden rumbling, then like clowns from a circus car, the pigs poured froth, one-by-one at full speed to find their promised meal. I was amazed that the shed could hold so many pigs, and more amazed that they all seemed to want to be in there together rather than out romping around in the rather pleasant sunshine. In order to keep his pig-call from losing effectivity Charlie pulled up a huge handful of waist-high grass growing next to the driveway and tossed it into the pen where it was immediately set upon. L and N spent the next half-hour passing individual stalks of grass one-by-one through the pen fence to the rather impatient pigs while Grampy and Mr. Kenney shot... um, the breeze.