Pigs in Marietta

The above is a Google Earth View looking down on the top of Blackjack Mountain in Marietta. At the bottom left of the center the round green things are huge water tanks. Beside the tanks a road goes by, which is Barnes Mill Road. Watch Barnes Mill Road curve around and on the left is a little lake or big pond. Take note – I’ll get back that it in a minute.

We just watched on TV a show on pigs. It showed how pigs are massed produced and most are slaughtered when they are only six months old and they stay in the same little cubical all their lives until they take their only walk, which is also their final walk to the slaughter room. Some keel over dead of exhaustion because the walk is too much for them.

They don’t even get to have sex to reproduce. They are artificially inseminated.

The pork business is very sad.

It made me think of when I was growing up in the south side of Marietta. Several of my neighbors had hogs that seemed to have spent their entire life wallowing in a small pen in slop, so I don’t suppose they had it much better. They were usually slaughtered on the first real cold day of the year, around Thanksgiving.

Some of the neighbors had cows and some, including us, had chickens. I don’t recall any other section in the Marietta city limits that would tolerate livestock except our section. I can’t imagine anybody on the Westside of town having hogs or chickens (maybe horses), and none on the east side.

I guess we on the Southside were special… or, as they probably looked at it, the livestock probably kept us off welfare.

I think our area was the only area that tolerated outhouses – so that gives you an idea how we rated on the social register.

Back to the lake on top of Blackjack Mountain: In our early teenage years we used to go to that lake and swim. The owner worked at Lockheed and had the little lake on his property which had a little dock. Back when very few people lived on the mountain we came across the lake during our wanderings and went to the house, knocked, and asked the owner if he would mind if we went swimming there sometime. He said he didn’t mind but he said we must come to the door and ask permission each time.

No problem.

Within a day we were back with our bathing suits and swimming. The water was very cold. I suppose it was spring water – how else did it get on top of a mountain?

Now, as you can tell by the picture the top of the mountain is covered in houses and apartments. Then, it was all woods and big rocks with only a few houses and farms. A nice place to ramble around and explore.

Quiet a few times that summer we would go there, asked permission, and splash away.

As you walk into his dirt driveway off Barnes Mill Road the driveway went by a pig pen with a few pigs in it, then it went over the damn and curved around to their house.

One time we brought the late Jimmy Pat Presley with us. Jimmy Pat enjoyed talking to the pigs on our way in. He got a stick he found on the ground and stuck it up a female’s vagina. The female started squealing in ecstasy and started hunching the stick . While hunching the stick we realized it was an old dead stick and it broke inside her, leaving only a short piece sticking out. Then the pig sat down on her rear end and felt the stick even doing more wonders to her. She found if she sat on her hine-quarters and scooted – well, she was a very happy squealing pig.

We decided not to go swimming that day…. Or there, ever again. We didn’t want to show our faces. We walked back home with us cursing Jimmy Pat all the way and he was laughing all the way.