Growing up in Texas is different from growing up in other states.  For one thing, your stories tend to revolve around old train bridges out in the middle of nowhere, prickly pear cacti, beer that reaches thermonuclear meltdown temperatures and explodes in the trunk of your car, and pigs.

This is a story about my friend Marty and me and a pig named Wilbur.

Awhile back, Marty and I resolved that we were going to roast a pig for Marty’s New Year’s party at his ranch near Manchaca, Texas.   We decided that we weren’t going to roast this pig “Czech style,”  slowly, over indirect heat in a smoker.  No, we concluded that we were going to roast the entire pig directly over charcoal in a pit that we dug into the ground. Marty claimed that this was known as “vaquero style.”  I had no idea if that was true or not or even what “vaquero style” meant but it didn’t matter:  I just wanted some roast pork.

A couple of days before New Year’s, Marty came by my house to pick me up so that we could go get the pig. He was towing a horse trailer with his pickup truck and we were going to go and fetch the pig, put him in the trailer, and bring him back to the ranch. It was a simple plan. What could go wrong?

We drove north of Austin to someplace out near Taylor and we found the place that was selling the pig. It turned out the pig was some 17 year old blond girl’s FFA project. She was a cute little girl with ribbons in her hair and she had named the pig “Wilbur,” just like in Charlotte’s Web. Apparently Wilbur hadn’t done too well in the Williamson County Jr. Fair and Livestock Show and it was time to sell him so that she could get another one and try again the next year.

Anyway, she was really sad about the whole thing and when we were leaving she said “Goodbye, Wilbur” in a quavering voice that really kind of got to me a little bit. By the way, Wilbur was a 300 .lb Duroc.

So we loaded up the pig, drove back to I-35, and headed south toward Manchaca. We drove all the way through Austin, got off at the 1626 exit, and proceeded to head west on 1626. When we got to Manchaca, Marty decided he needed gas and we stopped at the Texaco there. Marty got out and started putting gas in the truck. He looked in the trailer …. AND THE PIG WAS NOT THERE!

Marty said  “DUDE … THE PIG IS NOT HERE!”

I said “What do you mean, the pig is not here?”

By this time, Marty was panicking and his voice raised up a notch or two and he shouted “I mean the *#&@&&# PIG IS NOT IN THE TRAILER!”

I scrambled out of the truck and looked and, sure enough, the pig was missing.

The horse trailer had a “window” in the back that was about 2 foot square and had no glass. It was just an empty space framed by the iron bars that made up the gate.

“Oh … my …. GOD!!!” I screamed. “WTF?” I kept rubbing my eyes, blinking etc… hoping that when I opened them back up the pig would have miraculously reappeared.

Marty said “He must have sensed his own imminent demise (really, that’s how Marty talks) and jumped out the window!”

Now I was really  beginning to panic, thinking that this 300 .lb Duroc pig jumped out of the “window” somewhere along I-35 in Austin. I had visions of him running free on the highway, 18 wheelers slamming on their brakes and cars crashing to avoid this large pig.

“What do we do?” I asked, my voice sounding more and more like my 12 year old cousin’s.

“Dude, we are so screwed,” Marty said.

Finally, we decided that MAYBE the pig jumped when we slowed down to make the right turn onto 1626 as we exited off I-35. Marty said “We’ll go back to the highway and see if we can find him. If he’s not somewhere between here and there, well, damnit, I don’t even want to think about it. But we will NOT go and look for him any further than that. If he isn’t somewhere between here and there, we are washing our hands of this pig. We don’t know anything about it. Got it?”

So we drove back along 1626 toward I-35, looking for our poor lost pig alongside the road.

Right as we got to I-35 we saw a pickup truck pulled over. We approached it slowly, trying to see if he might have stopped because he hit a very large pig. We pulled up and the driver motioned for us to roll down the window. We did. The driver asked, in the thickest Texas accent I’ve ever heard, “DID YA’LL LOSE A PIG?”

We didn’t see any visible damage to his truck but maybe it was on the side away from us, where we couldn’t see.

Finally Marty said “Well, I think we might have.”  As if we would have had some doubt about whether or not we had lost a pig.  Mind you, one of the things you learn early here in central Texas is if your pig is lost. It is an “either/or”  thing.  You have either lost your pig or you have not. Kind of like being pregnant.

The guy said “I got him tied up to my back bumper.”

Marty and I got out of the truck and holy mother of God this guy had seen the pig, lassoed it, and tied it to his huge rear bumper. I thought “Only in Texas does the guy a) have a rope and b) have the technical proficiency with a rope to lasso a freakin’ scared pig.” Then the guy said, with a wink and in an understated way, “Oh, he was a handful. He didn’t WANT to be caught.”

By this time I was laughing.

So now we had this pig tied up. But we really couldn’t take a chance on it jumping out again. Before I could  think what to do, Marty — a man of action if ever there was one, and an angry man of action, besides —- got a mini-sledgehammer from his toolbox and brained the pig.

So now we had a 300 .lb dead pig. It was like a huge bag of flour. Finally we wrestled it into the trailer. The guy said “you know, we could have probably got him back in the trailer and I would have given you some rope and you could have tied it across the window so he couldn’t jump out and ya’ll could have got him home that way.”

But no. Marty had to kill the pig right there on the side of the road.

We took Wilbur to the ranch and roasted him “vaquero style” over coals in a big dug-out pit and, man,  that was one good-tasting pig.