CHAPTER SEVEN

Let’s face it, we all love a reason to celebrate. And aside from the requisite holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries, there aren’t that many built-in excuses in life to do so. Okay, weddings, job promotions, and pregnancies probably should be in there too. And well… Fridays, meal times (yay, food!), and making a yellow light just before it turns red…

Okay, fine, I guess there are lots of reasons to celebrate—especially now that social media has deemed every single day some national holiday. (Pancake Day? Left-Handers Day? Really?) But that didn’t stop Derek and me from also creating our own milestones to celebrate as Esther’s fandom grew. (I’ve always been up-front about the fact that we like to party.)

Esther’s page reached a hundred thousand Likes at the end of February, which is to say just eighty days after it launched, so we decided to commemorate this milestone in style. And by “in style,” I mean we carved a watermelon with “100,000” in it and presented it to Esther as a trophy. A trophy she could eat. As you can imagine, it was well received. When she chomped into it, watermelon squirted in all directions—everywhere. We did it indoors, and it was a spectacular mess: the ceiling, the cupboards… watermelon even sprayed into the other room.

And that’s when someone from the Toronto Star reached out regarding doing a story about us. From the time we started the Facebook page that first week in December, we were just kind of going along with everything as it came. People would reach out to us and we’d respond, and it all felt safe because we were still communicating online. The virtual interaction gives you that arm’s length feeling of safety.

But the Star was our local paper, and even at a time when the newspaper industry is steadily on the decline, it’s still a huge deal. The Star is the largest daily newspaper in all of Canada, if you can imagine. It’s been in business for more than 120 years and still maintains a weekday circulation of well over 350,000. (That would be huge even for a U.S. newspaper, and keep in mind that Canada has about one-tenth the population of the United States.)

So while we remained a bit worried about making Esther’s illegal presence in our home too public (much as it might seem otherwise), we couldn’t say no to the Toronto Star. As much as I go on about our concerns over the zoning laws and all that, I know it’s obvious to anyone reading this that we were proud of our girl and wanted her to enjoy her moment in the spotlight! If it backfired on us, we figured, So it goes. Like I said before, we knew we’d have to move eventually anyway, and we knew we’d have time to make plans when the hammer came down. Even if we didn’t exactly know what those plans would entail.

We hoped to achieve something else from the article. We wanted the wider audience the newspaper could reach to share our personal transformation because of Esther. We wanted them to see her smile and make the connection that this wonderful animal was their bacon. We also wanted to make it clear that people shouldn’t run out and get their own pigs just because they fell in love with Esther. This was a drastic, life-altering situation for us. Though we’d found a way to make it work, most people couldn’t possibly do what we’d done.

Also, we’d learned more over time about the whole mini pig/baby pig switcheroo. It seems that I’m hardly the only one to fall for that. Turns out people get screwed the way we did all the time. It would be funny if it didn’t turn out so horribly in practice, because almost every other time it happens, it turns out very badly for the pigs. They get sent to shelters. Some end up being euthanized. We felt an obligation to warn people so they didn’t make the same mistake we did.

Our story ended up on the second page of the Star. And it wasn’t just the stamp-sized picture and a couple of sentences as we’d feared—it was a gorgeous, prominent, amazing story. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. It’s like having a massive audience on prime-time television while simultaneously being the top trend on Twitter. And the response was just as epic. The next thing we knew, two Canadian television networks—City and Global—wanted to cover Esther’s story. By this point, we pretty much just said yes to everything. Hell, at that point the cat was out of the bag—or the pig was out of the poke, as it were.

After a while, it became old hat. We’d get the house clean and field the usual questions about how Esther had come into our lives and the effect she’d had on us and her huge (and quickly growing) base of followers. And every time when we thought life was starting to settle down into a new normal, something else would happen. It seemed like our story was everywhere. Our friends and family were freaked out that we were becoming quasi-celebrities based on the fact that we’d fallen in love with a pig. Regardless, it was clear the other shoe was about to drop: We’d just gone public in the most obvious ways, so we knew we’d have to move soon.

It was game over in Georgetown. It was just a matter of when.

Derek and I had talked about getting a farm. The more our lives changed, the more it started to make sense to us. It was still a dream, and a lofty one at that, but in the back of our minds we wondered if we could really make it work. What if we did buy a farm? What if we built a sanctuary so we could rescue lots of animals like Esther?

We decided to put up a post on our page to see what everybody thought. Esther’s fans had been so involved in the entire story that we cared about their opinions. Also, in some subconscious way, I’m sure we wanted to give a large number of people the opportunity to provide us that “snap out of it” smack like Cher delivered to Nicolas Cage in the film Moonstruck. We needed that. Left to our own devices, you can see where we ended up: two men, two dogs, two cats, and a pig in a 1,000-square-foot house.

So we put up a post saying we were considering moving to the country, purchasing a farm, and turning it into a sanctuary. The response from Esther’s fans was overwhelmingly positive. Also, a local real estate agent wrote to us, saying that her parents owned a pig farm, and she wanted to take us to see it.

Everything seemed to be falling into place. Maybe a bit too easily.

The agent took us to see the farm. I kind of liked it, but Derek was underwhelmed. It was a long single-story barn. Honestly, it looked like a long, ugly house with a bungalow attached where we would live. It really wasn’t very special, to put it very nicely. And I did need Derek to be the levelheaded one so I could see it more clearly. I think I was just excited by the idea of having some land. There was no urgency yet, so we left it alone for about a month.

We’d only seen that one underwhelming farm at that point, but even given that anticlimactic visit, we’d been bitten by the farm bug. So we decided to look at a few more.

When we found the farm, it was a total fluke. I was looking for listings to show a client and happened to be showing them a property two doors up. But when I was doing my searches, I came across a listing for Cedar Brook Farm. My clients were looking in a price range Derek and I hadn’t considered before, almost $300,000 over our budget. The farm certainly wasn’t something I would show my clients. But I found myself reading the description anyway, telling myself, “I’ll just take a peek at these photos,” knowing in the back of my mind I was on a mission. What I didn’t expect was for the photos to reveal everything I could ever have wanted for Derek and me, and from the photos alone, price be damned: I knew I had to show it to Derek.

Prior to that point, even when we talked about it on Facebook, the idea of owning or operating a sanctuary was nothing more than a dream. It was a wonderful dream, but at best, it was something we thought we might try to tackle someday far in the future. Not at this point in our lives.

Those photos, though.

I couldn’t get it out of my head. (And a farm is a very large thing to have stuck in your head.)

I printed out the listing itself and made a special trip to the office to print the farm’s photos in color. Then I came home and handed the printouts to Derek.

“We need to see this,” I said.

I watched Derek look over the listing and carefully examine the photographs, his eyes widening. Was that a twinkle in his eye?

Then I heard him scoff.

Yeah, there’s the other shoe dropping. He’s looking at the price.

He looked up at me the way a parent looks at a child whose face is covered with chocolate and crumbs and who swears he did not eat that piece of cake. I knew that look. But I also knew that twinkle. And for whatever reason, he relented and agreed to take a drive with me that morning to “just check it out.”

“This is not going to be another Georgetown,” he said. And I knew exactly what he meant. Before we bought the Georgetown house, I had been showing the property to another client, but I called Derek and told him I’d found our house and that he needed to come over right away. He did, and we bought it that night.

“The location is amazing,” I said, and he agreed that it was.

The price? Less amazing.

To be fair, I probably didn’t expect it to be as perfect in real life, because nothing ever is. I knew the farm could be like a date with someone you met on the Internet. The object of your affections seems so clever in online communications and the photos look amazing. When you meet in person, it turns out the photo was ten years old and taken from that one good angle that hides the lazy eye and hideous hairline. Oh, and the person is three inches shorter and forty pounds heavier than advertised—and has the personality of a rice cake.

Only this Internet date was like if George Clooney and Megan Fox had a baby. Indescribably perfect. And now I had the agony of knowing how much we loved it and how there was no way in hell we could afford it.

And I needed it.

I was in love.

(I know. I do that a lot. Just work with me here.)

The minute we pulled up the driveway, the property seemed magical. From the winding driveway that crossed a stream to the thick forest that blocked the buildings from the road, plus the centuries-old stone walls that divided the fifty-acre property from end to end, it was breathtaking.

We hadn’t even gotten out of the car when we turned to each other and said, “This is it.” Sometimes you just know in life. Like when I first laid eyes on Derek or when that Facebook “friend” said, Do you know anyone who might want a mini pig? We knew this was our farm.

The barn was a filthy mess—cobwebs hanging up to three feet from the ceiling—and it had apparently become a storage/junk collection space. There were no fences other than the collapsing stone walls, but it had so much potential. The house was solid and clean, but it couldn’t have been further from our style. Nor did it have things we thought all houses had, like a furnace for heat. As you recall, we’re not huge fans of freezing our asses off. But it wasn’t about the house or the barn or the fences (or lack thereof). There was just something about the property itself we both immediately fell in love with. And even though, cosmetically, it needed a ton of work, we both knew it was perfect.

Surprisingly, Derek was ready to jump immediately. I, however, was terrified about the cost. What happened to “This is not going to be another Georgetown?” Now I was the one starting to think more responsibly. (Who would have thought?) It was definitely more than we needed, by a lot. But as we were making these big life changes to accommodate our new life with Esther, it just started making sense. Whatever its flaws, this would be a great place to create an animal sanctuary. If you looked at Derek and me and what our lives at the time were all about, this made no sense at all. But with one pig’s smile and the encouragement of thousands of strangers, somehow this made perfect sense.

We felt like this was our opportunity to—as cheesy as it sounds—do our part to change the world. (Like I said, work with me.) We really thought we could make a difference, and it felt like anything was possible.

We would have been happy to move into a little house on a few acres and just keep doing what we were doing with Esther, but we had been presented with this opportunity to maybe do something so much bigger. So how could we pass it up, no matter how scary it was?

Then again, maybe we were delusional, because everybody in our life and their brother thought we were nuts. I can imagine what they were thinking: You’re two guys and a pig. How do you think you’re going to raise the half a million dollars you’d need to actually buy this place? (And that’s presuming we could get the owners to even consider such a low offer.)

But then we posted the idea on Esther’s Facebook page as a hypothetical. (We liked treating the page sort of like a Magic 8 Ball.) We told them we’d found something we loved, but we explained the situation about the cost. We floated the idea of turning it into a sanctuary, and the Comment feed lit up like we had never seen before. Private message after private message came flying in telling us to go for it: We’ve got your back. Follow your hearts. You know you can do this. You got this, yes! (And every other possible iteration of affirmative.) It was a seemingly never-ending series of the most uplifting and reassuring comments you can imagine. We essentially had a hundred thousand cheerleaders making us think this was possible. People were coming from every direction, offering to contribute and help us do it, and that’s how the idea of a crowdfunding campaign came to be.

We figured we had no choice but to throw an offer out there and see what happened. If they accepted it, we would figure out the next steps. If not, at least we tried. It was the reaction from the Facebook page that made us think we might actually be able to do something bigger than what we had initially thought.

So yeah, we drank the Kool-Aid.

Things moved fast, which I’m sure is no surprise. When I decide to do something, I can’t stand any grass growing under my feet. Call it a strength; call it a weakness—sometimes it’s both wrapped up in an enchilada—but I’m all about immediate action. So the time between Derek and my visiting the farm, discussing the idea, asking the fans, and actually making the offer was negligible. It all went down in just three days. The support from the page was enough for us to feel like we could do this, and that gave us the courage to put in an offer at their asking price but with a sixty-day conditional hold to close on the property.

I knew damn well that the offer was totally unacceptable when I put it in. Remember, I work in real estate, and I know asking for sixty days is ridiculous, especially in the best real estate market possible. We’d be asking them to take the farm off the market for two months when they’d told us there was already a competing offer in place. Yeah, there was also that to worry about. We might as well ask Bradley Cooper’s agent whether he’d work for scale (the lowest possible rate) to star in a film of Esther’s life story. In the role of Esther.

I explained all that to Derek as I prepared the paperwork. I guess I was trying to soften the blow for him (and for myself) if they rejected it. But that was the only offer we could make. We didn’t have four hundred grand in our back pocket, and that was the number we’d decided we would need for a down payment to make paying off the rest of the farm possible. It’s funny how things like “reality” set in when you’re in the quiet of your mind and not delusional from the eternal optimism of a hundred thousand strangers (all of whom we love, but none of whom had accepted the responsibility, at least at that time, of paying for this farm).

I just wanted us to brace ourselves, because we had really fallen hard for the farm. Once Derek and I sat down and had a heart-to-heart, we agreed that we truly didn’t think the owners would accept the offer, but we had to give it a shot. If we didn’t, we’d always think in the back of our minds, Remember that perfect farm? What if we’d made an offer and they’d said yes?

When the offer was ready to be presented, I knew because it was a competition—and because Derek and I were so emotional—that I wouldn’t be able to present it the way I wanted to. I asked the listing agent if I could fax a cover letter with the offer so the farm owners could know a little about us.

In the cover letter, we told our story. We explained why we had come to look at Cedar Brook, how much we’d fallen in love with it, and what we planned to do with it. We just laid all our cards on the table in the hopes that they’d like the idea and would want to be supportive. I wanted to tug at the heartstrings a little so they’d see this wasn’t just a piece of property to us—this was our game-changer. This was how we were going to make a difference.

We needed them to know this wasn’t going to be a situation where we wanted to tear the farm down and build a McMansion. Cedar Brook was in a big development area. We figured the other people looking at it would probably tear it down and turn it into a subdivision. They’d sell it off for big estate houses—that’s what people were doing in the area.

But we wanted to keep the farm a farm. We wanted to keep all the character it had, and we hoped that would matter to the owners—especially since we would only be the third unrelated owners of the farm since it was settled in 1860. If they went with someone else, all the history more than likely would be gone.

Then came the matter of the deposit. We had only $5,000 to put down. Again, that was absurd, and we knew it. That’s the kind of deposit offer you’d make on a $200,000 house. So we were coming in with this ridiculous pittance of cash and asking them to hold it for sixty days while we tried to determine whether we could come up with the money for the actual down payment. If you’re a gambler, you do not bet on those odds. You pack up what’s left of your chips, tip the dealer, and go home. (Always tip your dealer and servers, folks. That’s just good karma.)

Picture it: You walk up to someone trying to sell their house and say, Hey, I really like your house and I want to buy it, but I’ve got no money and I’d need to raise a half a million dollars to be able to do this. So… could you please wait sixty days while I try to do this impossible thing? Nobody in their right mind says yes to that. (Especially when they had that other offer from people who might have had all cash—we didn’t know.)

It wasn’t just our lowball $5,000 deposit that made it such a joke of an offer. It was the combination of that with the extended conditional hold so nobody else could have it. That last part was the killer. The five grand was just insult to injury. (And yes, I realize that we were the ones doing the insulting and injuring in this case, but remember: It’s only a metaphor.)

I’ve been selling houses for eleven years and never in my life have I seen someone accept an offer like the one we proposed. We offered supplemental deposits, but those were conditional upon our raising the money and doing what we were hoping and were telling them we could do. And then they had to take the leap of faith that we could get our shit together in a matter of days. Good luck.

And then… believe it or not…

They accepted our offer!

(Sure, of course you believe it, because there’s no way this story was ending with They told us to fuck off, so now we live in a double-wide trailer behind a Walmart. But put yourself in our shoes for the moment.)

We were in complete shock when they said yes. They called to tell us they had changed next to nothing in our offer. They made a couple of small revisions, such as adjusting our closing date, and basically left everything else alone. Their changes were nothing that would make a difference in whether we forged ahead, so now the ball was in our court.

Well.

Shit.

Now we actually have to deal with this situation.

You know that saying, Be careful what you wish for? Well, there we were.

It’s sort of like walking right up to the prettiest guy in school, or girl in school (or whatever gender you’re into—you get it), and asking that person out. There’s no way on earth you’re expecting a yes, so there’s nothing to lose! Well, except your pride, but you knew you’d get rejected anyway, so it’s no biggie. It’s not like you’re devastated when you buy a single lottery ticket and don’t win a million dollars.

That’s how we felt. We’d asked out the dreamboat, and now we actually had to take out the dreamboat. And this wasn’t just a date: This was a marriage proposal.

We literally only had a couple of hours to decide whether we were going to sign the deal and be bound to the offer… or let our dream farm go. Plus, Esther had a cold.

Derek and I were both a bit freaked out. Suddenly everything became real. How were we going to get this money? The minute the owners said yes, the money clock started ticking: We had to figure out how we were going to do it.

We’d thought all along about the crowdfunding campaign. We’d seen everybody else do one—hell, one guy on the Internet built a crowdfunding campaign to make macaroni and cheese (and did very well)! We had a way better angle than that.

The only issue, of course, was that we had exactly zero knowledge of how to build a crowdfunding campaign.

We didn’t know where to begin or what site to use. There were so many to choose from: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, HelpMeBuyaSandwich.com—you name it. (Okay, we ruled out the last one pretty early on.) We didn’t know which one to use, how to set one up, what the expenses were.

The other big question: How much do we ask for? Two hundred thousand? Four hundred thousand? Six hundred thousand? And holy crap, we’d better get going.

Shit got really fucking real right about then. We’d just started the process of purchasing something we couldn’t afford. We were putting ourselves in a position to lose everything if we didn’t do this properly. Our mortgage was about to triple. Animals need to eat. How many could we rescue? The questions were endless and it seemed like we had minutes to make every decision because it was happening so fast.

We decided to set the goal at $400,000 and to launch the campaign with Indiegogo because it had the most flexibility. Kickstarter wouldn’t let us fund something that involved purchasing real estate, and if we launched the campaign there and didn’t meet the goal, all the money would be returned to the donors. Indiegogo had next to no restrictions. They charged 3 percent if we hit our target and 9 percent if we didn’t. But Indiegogo also had something called “flexible funding”: If we didn’t hit the target, we’d still get the money we’d raised—we’d just have to pay out that higher percentage fee.

We figured if we set a goal for $400,000 and the campaign ended with us at $375,000, we could still find a way to make it work. Having to start from scratch if we didn’t hit the target seemed like too much to ask of people, and that was the bottom line when choosing which site to use: the one that would piss off people the least.

Esther’s fans rallied like crazy from the moment we launched the campaign. By the end of day one we hit $30,000. For the first couple of weeks, the donations climbed steadily. Three weeks in, we were at $160,000, which was amazing. At that point, donations stalled a bit, which was concerning. But we knew there were ways to reinvigorate the campaign, such as refreshing perks and adding new ones, so we started to do that to keep it interesting. If someone had given twenty dollars for a twenty-dollar perk, we’d change the perk so maybe it would entice them to give another twenty dollars. We tried to keep the campaign evolving and to respond to what people were buying.

At the same time, we were pursuing the real-life things we had to do to fulfill our end of the offer’s conditions. We had the sixty-day contingency to get the finances, but we only had a week to do inspections and nail down insurance. There were a whole bunch of other steps we needed to complete to get the offer moving forward. At no time was there just one thing on the table. We were still trying to balance the rest of our life as well, and Esther’s cold—if that’s what it actually was—was getting worse.

She was lying on the couch, trembling like a leaf, which was every bit as upsetting as you can imagine a trembling Esther would be. We think of her as our big, strong, happy girl. To see her so vulnerable, weak and shaking like that threw us into a tailspin entirely separate from the campaign. She’d even stopped eating and drinking. (Very unlike our girl.)

We’d heard that pigs sometimes eat ice in winter conditions and that if they eat too much of it, the ice can throw their internal temperature out of whack, causing fevers or shock to set in. You freak out when you seek out answers on WebMD about any of your own health concerns, but when it’s your kid (or your pig), you freak out that much more and imagine the worst. (And you know me by now. If anyone’s going to freak out, it’s me.)

Esther could have eaten the equivalent of a twelve-foot ice sculpture for all I knew, and after a couple days of her quivering on the couch, one thing was certain: We had to take her temperature. Her ears and belly were super hot and really pink—pinker than normal—and her snout was beaded with sweat, so she really looked like she was suffering from a fever. Never having had to take a commercial pig’s temperature before, we didn’t happen to own a commercial pig thermometer. (In retrospect, that was an oversight.)

So Derek and I took one for the team, as it were. We sacrificed our personal thermometer.

You can see where this is going. We lubed it up, and while the queen was sleeping… we slid it right up in there. The first time we did this, it went off without a hitch. The thermometer confirmed that she did have a fever, so we started giving her juice to keep her hydrated. (This wound up helping her get better, but it also kind of screwed us, because this is when she stopped drinking plain water and she never drank it again.) We realized that Esther’s condition was the flu.

The second time we attempted to take her temperature was less easy breezy. Esther was definitely on the mend by then, and she did not take kindly to having anything inserted in her caboose! She shot off like an out-of-control Mack truck—down the hall and into the office. She might as well have slammed the shutters and flipped up a CLOSED FOR BUSINESS sign.

Meanwhile, back on the campaign front, an anonymous donor offered to match all donations up to $50,000 over a two-day period. Can you imagine? Talk about an incredible offer! So we made that announcement and the donations came in like crazy.

As wonderful as that seemed at first, the plan ran into a big hiccup: Several weeks went by without our receiving the matching donor’s money. People were watching the numbers on the campaign and when they didn’t see that extra $50,000 from the donor, it made us look like liars. Nobody actually came out and made that accusation, but we knew what it looked like, and I think people started to question what was going on. (That’s totally understandable in retrospect, but it was a huge kick to the gut at the time.) So once again the donations started to stall.

It was a dark time. The idea of Esther’s fans’ losing faith in us made us start to lose hope and feel like failures. All those people who’d said we were crazy… were they going to be right? We started to question ourselves. Maybe we were nuts. Maybe we couldn’t do this.

It was scary for a while. Derek and I relied on each other and our faith that if we kept believing, if we kept at it, things would work out. It wasn’t easy, but we did our best to be vigilant. We knew we were doing the right thing. We knew we had a lot of people counting on us. We knew we had to find a way to make this happen.

Or we could just say screw it and run off to the Bahamas.

Okay, I’m just kidding. We weren’t going to do that. But it sure seemed tempting!

At least Esther was on the mend. Now we just needed our little campaign to follow suit.

And just as Esther’s flu cleared up to the point that she was again getting into mischief, the matching donor money finally arrived for real. It bumped the donation total over $240,000 and completely reignited the campaign. Still, we only had a few weeks left, and a huge gap remained.

On June 28, two days before the campaign was going to close, Derek woke me up, holding his phone in my face.

We were at $404,000. We’d done it. And like every other completely insane thing that had happened to us over the past year, once again we were like, Holy shit—this is happening.

Right up to that morning, we still had an out. We could say we weren’t actually going to purchase the farm for any number of reasons, either real or contrived: the farm didn’t accept the offer, the campaign failed and we couldn’t get the money, whatever. But we’d done it.

Of course, this was scary in its own way—scarier than anything we’d dealt with before. We had just committed ourselves to millions of people who were watching online. In that moment it became official, literally and figuratively. There was no shutting this down anymore. We’d done it.

We’d literally bought the farm.

We’d have to sell our house and move. Up until that point it had still been a far-off dream, something neat to watch unfold, but it wasn’t real. Now, even if we wanted to go back, we couldn’t. We’d told people we were doing this; we’d taken money for it, so now we had to do it.

Almost everybody had thought it was impossible. Even people who supported us had had their doubts. If you tasked some of the biggest organizations in the world with raising half a million dollars in two months, they’d struggle. And we certainly were no big organization. We were just Derek and Steve and our dream for Happily Ever Esther. And we did it.

I’d never felt anything like it in my life. I went within three seconds from tears of happiness to tears of terror. And occasionally back again. We’d felt so inconsequential before any of this. Esther’s existence had gotten the attention of people from all over the world, and now here we were setting off to make our mark. But more important, we had a purpose. A real purpose. We were going to save countless animals and give them a home and a life that would not otherwise have been possible. That was everything.

It was crazy to think how much our lives had changed since Esther had entered them. As hokey as it sounds, even when you think you have the most unsurpassable challenge in front of you, you can do it. Three years ago, we’d never have thought this possible. And yet…