This happened over sixty years ago, back when I
was a student at Bona’s summer school yet I still recall the
day’s events as sharp and clear as Waterford crystal.
Here in Cattaraugus County, during that summer of
’42, five days driving rain swamp local waterways to the point
of overflow. Newspapers
call it a “Flash Flood!”
The swollen Alleghany inundates Bonaventure’s
campus outback, including the large barn in which a hundred and
fifty pigs are penned.
They start to drown.
Care to find out whether any of ‘em get saved?
Keep reading.
Bona’s then president; Fr. Thomas Plassmann, is
audibly distraught.
Students around campus hear him agonizing, “Pray tell, what
direction would Cassiodorus take ad hoc?”
Bona’s collegians and summer-school clerics, unwilling to
wait for Cassiodorus to even show up, take a direction all their
own.
One clever cleric we’ll call “Doc,” makes the
suggestion, “Several strides in back of Friedsam Library is a
tub filled with ducks.
This tub is built entirely of sturdy wood-staves so it’s
eminently capable of floating in Alleghany flood-waters.
Being at least 12 feet in diameter it’s also fairly
spacious. All you’d hafta
do is boot out the ducks and you can use their tub to ferry
drowning pigs back onto dry land.”
A pretty nifty idea, don’tcha think?
Employing Doc’s “pretty nifty” idea, clerics haul the duck tub from
the muck it’s mired in and scrub it clean.
Bona prof Fr. “Pete” Biasiatto, broad-shouldered collegian “Pappy”
Power, and university cartoonist “F. Mc” manage somehow somewhere to
scrounge a pair of hawsers, each 60 yards in length.
As
a cluster of clerics drags the freshly scrubbed tub to the
flood-water’s edge, Fr. Pete joins the two hawsers end to end,
making them into a single, doubly-long life-line.
Securing one end round a tree-trunk at water’s edge he
anchors its other end to the drowned barn 120 yards out in the
rampaging river.
Togged in beat-up dungarees Fr. Pete slides off the stern of the
rowboat that’s brought him, into flood waters up to his chin.
With an arm crooked around the steel stanchion to which the
hawser-end is tethered, he surveys a scene that grows grimmer minute
by minute. Piglets have begun
to drown.
The Bona barn houses close to 150 pigs.
This includes a number of small piglets plus dozens of
medium–size pigs that lack a precise designation.
Y’might call’em teen-agers.
Or intermediates.
The majority however, are portly, mature pigs.
Call the females “sows” and the males “boars”.
In
the course of the day, Mc will come to call the more troublesome
ones “hogs,” confiding with a grin, “The cartoon spelling is ‘Hawgs.’”
Meanwhile, back in the row boat, Pappy and Mc return to pick up Doc.
These three then pile into the “Rescue” tub.
By dint of gut-busting effort they propel it hand over hand
along the life-line all the way to the barn, where Fr. Pete awaits
them, amid a cacophony of perishing pigs.
Seizing
the one nearest by an ear, our Bona prof attempts to heave her over
the high railing of the arriving tub.
No cigar. She is much
too heavy for even a muscly gent like Fr. Pete to heft by himself.
Remember, most of these Bona hogs are monsters.
Many weigh from 300 to 600 pounds.
Each one sports tusks that can gash you deep and hooves that
flail every which way when y’try to lift their owners outa the
river. Their hooves can rip
ya, too.
So, with Fr. Pete boosting hog from beneath and the three ferry
people lifting hog from above, the task of transferring any hog from
river to tub is arduous. A
real tough haul!
These difficulties help convince rescuers they better not try to
ferry more than 3 pigs per trip.
Add to that, the length of time it takes tub to leave barn, reach
shore, dump three hogs and return to barn, gives Fr. Pete scarcely
minutes enough to round up the next hog trio and have’em ready for
pick-up.
Mc’s job will be kicking the hogs in the snout to keep them apart.
Y’ let three big ones jam together on one side of the tub and
their combined weight can flip the flat-bottomed craft over in a
flash. This will actually
happen on two of the rescue trips, happily close to shore both
times.
By
noon we rescue 40 pigs, losing only one…- a huge porker that barrels
past Fr. Pete, out the barn’s entrance and into the surging current.
In mere seconds he’s swept far down-stream.
Watching him vanish from sight, Mc hazards the prediction,
“That hawg’s a gone gosling!”
By
high-noon the rescue work has grown popular, attracting more than a
few volunteers. A goodly
bunch of Bonamen now wait in line, eager to “haul hawg,”
including a couple of footballers, big, brawny buckos who
look to be in top shape.
Among’em, a big, brawny ex-footballer named Nick Cihiwsky, paying
his alma mammy a visit, gets around to telling us about an unusual
prof he had here, name of Merton.
“Wouldya believe this English “teach” kept giving all us
football players A’s? Me, I
never deserved no A, especially in English.
So I just hadda learn t’live with it.”
Big
Nick, who played left guard for Coach Mike Reilly, informs us he’s
gonna try out for the NFL Dee-troit Lions.
No cowardly lion, he.
Each time the rescue tub touches dry land its haulers turn their
oinking charges over to the Franciscan brothers who’ve sedulously
cared for the pigs prior to the Flash Flood.
Once back on land, the famished critters are fed ample measures of
wheat cum corn and given buckets of fresh water
to drink. The hardworking
brothers are also busy setting up temporary pig pens for their pigs
even as we ferry’em ashore.
Doc, talking with the brother in charge, learns that pigs, unlike
humans, have no sweat-glands whatever.
That’s why they’ll often roll in puddles of mud.
“Not to get dirty” explains the brother, “but to keep cool.
Otherwise they could suffer heat-stroke and perhaps die.”
Not one of us pig-rescuers knew about that.
Did you?
Throughout the long afternoon, a robed friar
moves among the spectators, inquiring of each “Were you at any
time in the flood-water?” Say “Yes” and y’get a free shot of
whiskey, the supposed antidote for flood-water typhus.
Mc here desires to stress a point.
“Never once during the entire Rescue effort does Fr. Pete
go ashore either to ‘chow down’ or ‘take five’ as the rest of us
all do.”
True, we do ferry him a sandwich from
time to time, artfully thrown together by the Blue Sox nuns, who
run our university eatery.
Because the Allegheny is still rising, Fr. Pete must
munch his eats on tip-toe, with murky flood-waves now lapping at
his lower lip.
The flood flummoxed the barn’s
electrical system, leaving it without lights.
With the coming of dusk its interior grows menacingly
dark, making it difficult for Fr. Pete to distinguish shapes
that keep bobbing up in the stygian waters.
They may well be piglets who’ve drowned.
Mc recalls a joyous Fr. Pete emerging
from the barn earlier that morning, holding two squirming
piglets aloft, one in either fist- a picture nicely symbolizing
the Bona effort of the day.
At this point in time our Bona prof
runs up against the pig barn’s most combative critter… an Alpha
male…a boar both quick and powerful who, angered by the
encroaching flood, has grown meanly aggressive as well.
For a quarter of an hour Alpha is able
to deter every attempt by Fr. Pete to move him from barn to tub.
Looking on from the tub, Pappy Power can’t help but note
the priest is growing perceptible weary.
To lend a helping hand he drops into the flood-water,
striding quickly through it shoulder-deep, to interpose his own body between priest and slavering boar.
Too quickly as it turns out.
Big Alpha’s sharp hoof shoots out, slices through Pap’s
pant-leg, wounding his quadriceps and bloodying the water around
him. Pappy, tough cookie
that he is, keeps right on coming.
Few classmates are aware Pappy’s older
than they are.
Though he doesn’t look it, Pap has labored strenuously
for a dozen years since graduating high school.
On campus only Mc knows what at.
Through the years Pap has been driving red-hot
rivets into the frameworks of skyscrapers…a job
requiring him to daily stride across planks only 5
inches wide while lugging welding equipment… usually in
dangerous winds…often 50 stories above Gotham City’s
sidewalks.
It isn’t surprising this top-storey work
of Pap’s impresses Mc, who gets dizzy just walking
upstairs to a second floor.
Wielding 8 foot pikes they found closeted
in the barn’s equipment room, the two Bonamen are able
to crowd big Alpha against a wall.
There, each seizes one of his floppy ears which
they use to drag the protesting monster out to the tub.
But here giant Alpha makes use of his
massive bulk to frustrate four attempts to hoist him
over the craft’s high railing.
“There’s no way we can lift the bristly bugger,”
yells Mc. “He’s
too slippery!” As
if both men in the water were not already well aware of
this.
Idea-man Doc comes up with the solution.
For an impasse such as this he has brought along
a king-size Army blanket.
This the men in the water snug closely ‘round
Alpha’s sopping length, being careful to imprison his
big snout in its folds, thus neutralizing both his
wetness and his scary tusk attacks.
The four rescuers are now enabled, using
ropes, to hoist hefty Alpha above the rail and lower him
gently down rather than letting him crash kerbam on the
splintery wooden deck.
In such manner is 600 pound Alpha readied
to make the trip back to dry-dock.
Waving g’by to bad ol’Alpha, Fr. Pete
murmurs wearily, “Today we should both have been
swimming at Cuba Lake but here we are hoisting critters
in hawg heaven. I
Sure hope St. Francis appreciates all the TLC we’re
lavishing on these none-too-lovable brutes.”
And to Pappy, “Today everybody’s supposed
to be giving his very best, but you, young man, YOU have
endured to the shedding of blood.”
Slipping off his T-shirt, the prof rips
it into narrow strips, which he tightens above and below
Pap’s quad wound by way of tourniquet.
“Soon
as the tub gets back, young fella, hop in and get
yourself over to hospital.
We don’t want you coming down with lockjaw.
So, ask the head nurse for a tetanus shot.
And tell her it’s on Fr. Pete Biasiotto.
I don’t want you volunteers paying one thin dime
out of pocket.”
Quickly Pap and the prof round up a trio
of pigs, marveling how much easier it is without having
to contend with cantankerous Alpha.
Soon as the tub returns Pap hops in but
his return trip has to wait till cartoonist Mc outs with
his “Pigs in Flood-water” bit, the spiel he’s been
hashing up during the last six rescue trips.
It goes: “Fum now on we gotta keep away fum flash
floods, ‘cause it’s down in dem billows dat we’s gwine
to get hung.
Anybuddy tell us we ain’t fitten to eat wid de pigs, we
kin tell’em right back: Ain’t nobuddy fitter than us to
eat wid’em and tonite we kin do jus’like Huck Finn’s
pappy useta do: sleep wid de hawgs in de tanyard.”
Not only is Mc’s dialect awful gimpy,
it’s also way too long.
Mark Twain said the same thing earlier, quicker
and a while lot funnier.
After all, Mr. Twain’s the Lincoln of our
literature.
Pap now makes it back to land, thumbs his
way over to the hospital and gets his tetanus shot.
By 8:30 that night we’ve saved maybe 150
pigs. Minus one.
President Plassmann makes an appearance.
Moving from student to student, he expresses
heartfelt thanks for the amount of effort we’ve expended
throughout the day.
But it’s Fr. Pete, just in from the barn
and looking dead-tired, who has the final word.
Smiling his easy smile, he comes at us with
gentle irony. “If
it weren’t for you Campus Do-Nothings and you
not-so-bright clerics, we wouldn’t have a pig left to
our name. You
gents deserve a ree-ward so yer all gonna get to eat
pork for the rest of the summer, everyday but Friday.”
We take his kidding in good spirit, well
aware that no one knows better than our gimlet-eyed prof
who busted their butts and who chilled out on the Day of
the Pigs.
Close to 9 pm, soon as the brothers have
put the rescued pigs to bed, Pap and Mc grab a lift over
to Olean, rent a rowboat and help rescue the few
flood-stranded unfortunates still marooned on
roof-tops…a happy ending to their hard day’s night.
After graduating from Bona’s, Pappy and
Mc will go their separate ways but never stop writing
one another.
Which explains how come Mc knows all about mean ol’Alpha
and a lot of other stuff only Pap was in on.
Sometime in the 1990s, hearing Fr. Pete
has a close relative in the Order Mc goes out of his way
to learn where the young man’s stationed and pens him a
letter. In his
missive Mc sets down diligently every act of fortitude
he personally witnessed Fr. Pete perform that warm
summer day.
Why would Mc write such a letter?
In his own words, “I figured this was the one
person in the whole world who’d want to know what his
kinsman had done that made him our “college hero non-pareil”
and be eager to celebrate the cardinal virtue of a
fellow Biasiotto.”
And WAS he?
With a puzzled shake of the head, Mc has to
admit, “I dunno, the guy never bothered to answer my
letter.”
No matter, this happening of which we
write turned out to be an ever-so-memorable, truly
serendipitous, extra, ultra, big-time BONAVENTURous
event! Amen. cum
Alleluia.
END
P.S.
What took us twelve hours of an entire day to
accomplish, I’ve tried hard to encapsulate for you in
prose. Fast
readers get through it in about twelve minutes.
Can you?
Time yourself.
You realize of course, this is just my
gimmicky little ploy to getcha t’READ the darn thing.
