Pigs In Space

To anyone who went with me on my vicarious Memorial Day paddlin trip, thanks for coming along. Hope you had as much fun as I did.

Paddlers can come up with the strangest names for rapids eh? Wooton's Folly, Diamond Spliter, Table Saw, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Paddle some of 'em and you can see how the name came to be. For others you have to be familar with the particulars which usually involved not so pleasant experience by some unfortunate paddler. There's Broken Nose on the Ocoee. Jerrod's Knee and Reeders Rock on the Tellico.

A few are enegmatic. Nobody knows where it came from or who named it. Such is the case of a rapid called Pigs in Space on the Little River IN The Park near Gattlinberg. I've seen it but never had occasion to paddle it. It was in flood the day I saw it and there ain't nothin there to associate the name with the rapid. Speculation is that it came because you had to be crazy to paddle it or maybe on whatever the Beatles were on when they wrote Lucy In the Shy With Diamonds.

Its a popsicle licker and an ass kicker all at the same time. Here's a look.

And thats just the first drop.

Then again it coulda just been the experience itself and the namer was as straight as a razor-drawn line of cocaine. I've been on trips that do that to you and you need no help from Doctor Feelgood.

So this entry is about pigs in space. But its got nothing to do with paddlin. We're going on a different trip here.

Its more about pigs in hell actually.

I grew up on a farm in Iowa. Today farming is a bid'ness. Back then it was survival. We rotated crops, grew huge gardens, and kept livestock for food and market. Our primary stock was a beef cow herd, hogs, and chickens. When you're raised around animals you get exposed to things and you end up with a ton of stories to tell. Sometimes those things can be very disturbing.

One of the most disturbing things to me were certain brood sows that would snap and eat their young or most of them. It was not uncommon. Sometimes it happened over night when none of the other sows were farrowing so we weren't keeping tabs. We'd go to bed with 9 in the litter and wake up with 3 left. Sometimes we'd catch em in the act.

There were 8 of us in the family and everyone was in 4-H except mom. They teach you all about keeping records in 4-H. We lost track of the ID on one once. Next farrow nothing happened in the brood.

There was another reason to give them amnesty. The smart money said they knew what they were doing and this was their way of reducing the size of the litter to what they knew to be a managable number for them under the current circumstances and for the betterment of the rest of the litter. A kinda morbid twist in the survival of the fittest game.

So early on we gave them 2 chances. More often than not the same thing would happen next litter. Two strikes and your out. We'd cull em out and send em to market.

The smart money wasn't looking into those crazed eyes while they were in this so-called twist of a so-called benevolent and alturistic act. The madness wasn't limited to the eyes. You can get to know your animals pretty well. Know who's stubborn about what, who needs a special kind of attention or approach, who's a good mother to her young, and so on. 30 brood sows and their offspring from farrow to market is what we were set up for so it wasn't that hard to keep track of em. A sow might check off as a good mother through 3 litters and then go bat-shit crazy with the 4th. It is not a pretty picture to watch 'em tearing their stalls apart to get to the babies to tear them apart. And it can be very dangerous to intervene.

If the smart guys were right I'da thought it would be more like communion. At least a somber occasion and mom ought to at least look sad about it.

But hell no. I could describe it but I think you get my drift.

Just a state they put themselves in so they could do the deed?

Maybe. But how 'bout this....

Years later I might be watchin a TV report about somebody going nuts and offing a buncha people. Friends and relatives of the perp would say... "he was a nice guy, a loner but he seemed harmless enough... he musta just snapped."

I knew exactly what they meant by "snapped" cuz I'd watched those sows do it.

I know what you're gonna say... "Wait a minute here. Pigs are pigs and people are people. One has got nothin to do with the other!"

Oh really? Why do they both go mad then?

I disagree. I know a little of what lurks in the shadows from my own healing work and after 20 years of study I've got a little deeper understanding of what I think happens. Something threatening triggers some dark, deeply held issue in the survival chakra in a very twisted way. A demon comes out and the reptillian brain takes over. The details are illusive and sketchy and the best one can do really is speculate unless you're dealing with your own demons, your own shadow, your own experiences, your own sinister inclinations.

The shadow. The sub-conscious.

That deep, dark, irrational place where consciousness dare not venture and everything unacceptable lurks. There can be good stuff down there too as we found out last weekend. As long as we can keep the evil shit held down, it stays down. But somethimes an event will happen and trigger it and it surfaces before consciousness knows it. What was conscious and in control seems to go unconscious and what was unconscious becomes conscious, takes over, and runs rampent acting out what's held there.

Where'd those demons come from? They just blow in on the wind like some like some bad seed? Or where they there all the time lurkin in the shadows?

Whatever this is its not limited to the shadows either. There is some pretty twisted consciousness too. A henious crime is committed and the perp is found to be a psychopathic killer. Planning everything in bizarre ways with conscious intent. It might be maniacal but its still conscious.

Study it and its looks like the perp is operating on some very twisted wiring or imprint in a sick, obsessive way.

How is this killer different than the obsession to drink alcohol I delt with for 27 years other than the way it manifested and I didn't kill anybody? But I was certainly killing myself veeery slooooolly. How is he different than the one that just snapped and went on a rampage? How is he different from pigs in hell? The mama sow who goes berzerk and eats her young in a crazed state?

Or.....

How are we the same?

And.....

How do we find out?