Swinging the Swine

My first camp memory started with a bang - or rather, a woosh, if we're getting technical. I set a pig on fire. Don't worry - it was already dead.

One of the highlights of Father/Son weekend (held two days after I started working on summer staff for the first time) was the pig roast. A gigantic pig was skewered on a spit, hung over a nice, toasty blaze, and rotated for 8 hours of slow cooking. Fathers and sons could sign up for a half hour stint to "swing the swine" but when there were open spots it fell to myself and a team of two other newbies to keep that hog rolling.

It was a simple repetition of adding logs to the fire, pouring a cup of water over the skin of the pig so it didn't get too hot, and always turning the handle of the spit. At one point the other two girls and I (who seriously puts three women on the task of swinging the swine all day?) were talking and I was getting pretty animated. It was my job to add wood to the fire, so I was talking and waving my hands, throwing one, two, three, four logs on in a row and keeping my audience so captivated that they forgot to both pour the water and turn the spit.

Suddenly two foot flames were shooting out of the pig's mouth and we were screaming. I grabbed the radio that had been issued to me the day before and called for backup.

"Tommy!" I squawked into the radio. "The pig is on fire!"

There was a slight pause and then the fuzzy sound of the button being pushed on the other end of the line. "Sweet; how big are the flames?"

At that point it occurred to me that we had the means to handle this ourselves. I grabbed the entire pitcher of water and threw it over the pig, where it gave a very satisfying hissing noise and completely doused the flames within a cloud of hazy steam.

That night at dinner I tried to enjoy some of the finished roasted pig (someone else had taken over for the rest of the day and cooked it to perfection) but I just couldn't; that swine and I had been through too much together.