It was the Fourth of July. Why not roast a pig? Never mind that I had never cooked a whole pig before nor did I even have a pig cooker, but I suggested the idea to my friend John Savides, and he agreed. The problem with having friends like John is that they will agree to most anything.
“Look. There’s a wild bobcat! Think we can take him on?”
“Let’s give it a try,” John would say.
“Wanna go sky diving and share a chute?”
“Sure. Sounds like fun.”
So, I bought a whole pig down in Nelson County and early on the morning of the Fourth of July – with about 30 people expected for the cookout dinner at 5 – John and I put the entire pig on a makeshift grill we had rigged.
The cooker consisted of a couple dozen stacked cinder blocks and an old grate I had discovered.
We dumped two bags of charcoal on the bottom, lit the coals and waited. I suppose about two hours had passed before we realized that our intended protein for the evening meal was not even dripping fat. So we added 10 more pounds of coals. Finally, we saw one tear drop of fat squeeze out and spit into the burning embers.
I was reasonably sure that none of my guests wanted raw pork, so I came up with the suggestion that we place a piece of plyboard over the grill to capture and intensify the heat. If the pig got done early, that would be a manageable problem. By this time, John had bandaged the wounds from the bobcat claws, and he agreed that the plyboard cover was a capital idea. So, we entombed the pig and sat back to enjoy our handiwork.
Soon, my wife Nancy said that we were running out of ice for drinks and asked if we would go into Stanardsville and buy a few more bags.
John and I were off like rockets, and we were already drooling from the tantalizing aroma of our superbly roasting pig.
On our way back from Stanardsville, however, we saw a fire truck zoom past, then caught sight of smoke billowing on the horizon.
I hoped it was just a brush fire and not somebody’s house. When we got closer, we saw the smoke coming from the general direction of our cottage. At that point, we both realized at the exact same time that the smoke might have been coming from our roasted pig.
And it was.
Fifty feet of flames shot up from our homemade inferno. The heat had ignited the plyboard and it was a doozy of a fire. The firemen said just let it die out and it did within a few minutes. The only thing left from my 100-pound pig were a few pieces of pork charcoal.
Back go Stanardsville we headed where I bought five whole pork loins at IGA.
We cooked those loins in just a few hours over a moderate set of coals and it was delicious.
The next weekend, John and headed down a river with Class IV rapids in a 10-foot jon boat, but that’s another story.
