I was putting on the hot water for tea, my brain still groggy with the tattered remnants of a dream about to dissipate, when Kev came in and said we caught a pig. He was out the door in a camo jacket and work pants and boots before I could understand what was happening.

Wild boars have been tearing up our property for two slow years. We used to replace the sod and stomp it down after daylight revealed the last night’s rampage, covering exposed tree roots and allowing the scar to heal with time. Then they started coming back to the same spot, preferring the ease of lifting broken ground to the work of penetrating new earth. The land couldn’t reseed and take root between their frequent diggings and soon our yard became a map of deep wounds.

When we first arrived, the pigs were almost a novelty to our big city eyes. A minor nuisance, dropping hulking piles of manure across our yard like teenagers pranking the principal on Fright Night. They were prolific with their piles, which were annoying to clean up — and even more annoying to step in — but the cats seemed to enjoy laying in the expanding mud pit on hot days. The pigs and their antics were something (like so many unexpected things) that we accepted as the cost of living in the jungle, and we’d learn to adjust.

Over time, it escalated as they made their mark in previously untouched areas. We began having difficulty maneuvering to and from our front door without slipping and cutting the remaining grass without destroying the mower blades on the lava rock they’d exhumed proved a challenge. We put our plans to install a vegetable garden on hold after they tore up over a dozen of our pineapple plants (which take two years to grow a single fruit!). They’ve uncovered and chewed through underground electrical wires and cables. And in the last few weeks, the pigs have been knocking over the garbage cans night after night, littering the yard with their contents — no matter the lengths we’ve gone to secure them.

We let them alone, reasoning that they were here first. But we’ve gotten the message now: This is not going to stop. Nowhere is off-limits for their snouts, for their eating, for their shitting — for the complete destruction they cause. It’s clear that we are not sharing this land as we initially thought; they have no interest in sharing. We are forfeiting it to families of wild boars and their future progeny by standing passively by as they move in and make our home uninhabitable to us.

What about our family and our future generations? We live here too.

That’s when Kev called our Hawaiian neighbor and told him to bring his traps, that we can’t live this way anymore and we’re ready to do something about it. And the day after he laid them, a boar got its damn snout ensnared in the one closest to the road. I don’t know how long it had been there, wrestling away from the mysterious predator that emerged from solid ground to clutch it. I can’t imagine how long the hours must have felt before Kev discovered the large dark form laid against a landscape green with life, making a noise that sounded like static. I wonder if it tried calling for help, if any of its many brothers and cousins attempted to rescue it.

As soon as Kev came upon it, he texted the neighbor who helped set the traps and came in to change. Within minutes of his proclamation to me, I heard the voices of four men and a boy on his way to manhood by way of initiations like this one drifting across the trees. I had just poured the tea and was beginning to make breakfast, sifting oats into boiling water on the stovetop when I heard it: a single crack of thunder, close — too close — and something inside of me cracked, burst open and emptied out in a downpour of tears.

I don’t know what I was crying for, what I expected to happen once we made the decision to lay the traps. I knew it would come to this. And yet that shot, a deafening period at the end of this animal’s sentence, pierced my heart and brought me down to my knees. With the exhale of a wail sprung an urge — the same urge that would overcome me while walking amongst homeless men huddled with trash eddies in dusty San Francisco doorways like abandoned kittens with sleepy eyes, rife with mange.

Is this the origin of the wailing woman? The burden of realizing that embedded in every life is the seed of its death? Seeing the suffering sewn into the beauty; mourning what’s lost and exalting what remains?

Mothers are born in a million silent acts and wordless daily moments. And we are rebirthed every time we endure what feels too big to bear. When we choose to wrap our arms around the pain and embrace it. When we allow our hearts to shatter and they, miraculously, continue beating.

Who is more capable of carrying these truths simultaneously? Who knows this pain more intimately than those whose bodies tear open so that new life can emerge? Who is better equipped for living in the contradiction of remaining soft amidst such hardness?

Credits

Original score and sound engineering by Kevin Malmgren.

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