hectors

What a very strange and thought-provoking day.

Heaven Hill Farm is one of those rural pick-yer-own-apples-and-pumpkins places, and it's in Vernon, New Jersey. Two weeks ago Heaven Hill Farm posted an ad on Craigslist looking for someone to fill the position of Potbellied Pig Race Announcer for the season.

I've been a little isolated and depressed since moving to upstate New York. It's beautiful here, and I love that, but the jobs I'd been counting on finding aren't here after all; my plan of teaching circus arts here as I did in San Francisco just died and collapsed with a big THUD. So as I wait for calls from the temp agency, I meander the house, and when I'm done meandering the house, I meander the internet, and vice versa. Craigslist sees a lot of me.

I saw the ad. It made me laugh. I love pigs. I need to get out of the house. I like being goofy in front of crowds of people. Why not?

I went to Heaven Hill last weekend to meet Martin, who owns and runs the place, to talk about the position and check out the grounds. With any place like this I figure there is a degree of hokiness that is just part of the bargain, but sometimes under the hokiness, there's something authentic, and lovely, and sweet. So I was neither surprised nor dismayed when I drove up and saw the scarecrows sitting around in overalls on bails of hay in front of the Farm Store, or the wooden painted sign proclaiming "punkins this way" in a faux-kid-scrawl with the s's turned the wrong way. The rows and rows of cheap plastic kids' Halloween costumes, just across from the fresh produce in the store, I must admit, did give me pause - but in an effort to suppress unproductive cynicism at a time when it seemed I needed all the help I could get, I tried to just redirect my focus toward the handsome bins of acorn squash, and to keep a smile on my face.

Driving into Heaven Hill this morning, it wasn't the scarecrow at the gate I saw first, but the carnival. A carnival, small in size but depressing in all the average and familiar ways, had set up shop. The hokey signs and decor had multiplied exponentially. And the other pig-announcer they'd hired was already there, in his overalls and straw hat, warming up for the gig.

His name was Andrew ("Hillbilly Andy," by the time he'd reached the pig racing arena). He'd just graduated from college in New Jersey and was employed at a nearby Shakespeare festival as a stagehand. He had a nice smile, but eyes that seemed incapable of settling on anything; his acne, covered in large areas with drugstore foundation, was painful to look at. He was working on building up his acting resume.

We walked together to the pig racetrack. The pigs, it turned out, weren't potbellies at all - just piglets. Babies, only two months old. When I came to the window of the little wooden stable, their port to and from the track, they all ran to me, wet round noses raised, snorting and sniffing for food I didn't have. There were four of them, and another four in the pen on the opposite wall, and between these a pen with four small goats. Everybody was frantically looking around and stomping in their empty plastic bins for food.

A Mexican man, in his late thirties, stood in the corner, putting something into a cabinet.

Andrew and I were both given a "script" to review for the announcing job, but really it was just a transcription of what the last guy who'd done it had said at one of his shows. The crowd was to be instructed in hollering out, SUUUUUWEEEEE! They were to be divided into four groups, one for each pig, and one child from each group was to be the Offical Cheerleader for the pig assigned to his or her group. Usually the pigs wore colored bandanas to identify them, but today somehow the bandanas were missing. The pigs were to be introduced by special Pig-Punny names: Oprah Pigfrey, Hamway Twitty, Barbara Hamdrell, Jay Swino ... After two rounds of pigs had run, the Announcer was supposed to declare that the last race featured exotic pigs donated by cousin Billy Bob in Tennessee - and that was the cue for the Mexican dude to let the goats into the arena.

It was the farm's first open day of the season, and the weather was uniformly gray. The scant customers walked about the grounds in small family-sized clumps, with great distances between them. While we waited for a crowd to gather at the track, Andrew told me about the southern accents he'd been practicing, and how he figured this would be good practice at improvisation. When it was time to start, he walked into the Announcer's Area, and I parked myself by the little stable to watch.

Andrew knew how to try to sound like an announcer pretending to be from Tennessee, but he didn't know how to work a crowd. He didn't even really know how to communicate. Still, his stumbling didn't matter; it was about the pigs. I leaned into the window of the shed and watched the animals pushing and stepping on each other trying to be first to the gate, and to the food that they knew was at the other end of the track.

The mexican man wore an orange cap bearing the University of Texas longhorn emblem. I watched him in the shed, getting the food ready for the pigs. I told him I was from West Texas, and asked if that was where he came from, too. No, he said, he was from Mexico, but he'd been in New Jersey for seventeen years. We introduced ourselves; his name was Hector. He said he'd worked at the farm for twelve of those seventeen years - Martin gave him housing on the premises, and he said it was a good job. He told me how Martin had started with just a roadside apple stand and over the years bought land and built the store. Some people have the brains for growing things like that, he said. I asked him if it snowed much in the winter here. Oh, yeah, he said, and laughed, sometimes five, six, seven feet! Very different from Texas, he said. And Mexico, I added. Yes, he said, and Mexico.

Between pig races, I wandered around the grounds with my juggling clubs, and Andrew followed me. We saw the llamas, the goats, the exotic chickens, the strutting turkey, the ducks, the geese, the lop-eared bunnies in their cages. We saw the strung-out, dark, skinny guy working the slide. We saw the girl deep inside the carnival ticket booth, with her chin in her hand, glaring listlessly out the window. We saw small crowds of toddlers gazing fixedly at the mechanized robot display, with its two bots dancing bot-like to a neverending loop of "The Monster Mash." We saw many paper plates piled high with funnel cake.

One little boy, about six, enjoyed playing hide and seek with me. He became my secret play partner during our between-race strolls. When Andrew was announcing the races, and I was juggling alone by the band-tent, this little boy watched me, and came up to me to ask me how I knew juggling. Finally he said to me, "Do you know who runs the pig races?" I said it was Andrew, the other guy who was usually with me. "No, no," he said, "do you know who always runs them?"

"Oh!" I said. "Yes, there is a man, I met him... but I don't remember his name right now."

"Hector," the little boy said proudly, "like me."