part0036

Maybe Eugene, Oregon (see the preceding section), is a center of automobile mishaps and legends. At any rate, here is a wonderful automobile story that I got in 1984 from Eugene via fellow folklorist Sharon Sherman of the University of Oregon. She clipped it from Don Bishoff’s column in the Register-Guard , where it was attributed to an acquaintance of the writer.

I put the story into my book The Mexican Pet in 1986 and into a newspaper column in July 1987, wondering whether readers would verify that it was told in other places. And, sure enough, they did.

As Bishoff told the story: A guy is driving down the street and passes a car that has just come around the corner from the opposite direction. The woman driver in the other car shouts “Pig!” at the guy. He promptly retorts, “You’re not so great-looking yourself!” Then he turns the corner and runs over a pig in the street.

Incidentally, few newspapers carrying my column about this story could resist a punning headline reference to “road hogs.”

Eventually, “The Pig on the Road” was confirmed as a wandering legend, thanks to a reader in California, the Associated Press, and radio commentator Paul Harvey.

B. T. Miller of San Luis Obispo sent me a clipping of an Associated Press news item, datelined Waurika, Oklahoma, that retells a version recounted by Harvey in January 1988.

As Paul Harvey told it, Oklahoma State Highway patrolman Bill Runyan was driving his patrol car in the country near Waurika, when he spotted a farmer jumping up and down by the roadside shouting, “Pig! pig! ”

According to Harvey, Runyan leaned out the patrol car window and shouted back, “Redneck! Redneck!” Then, just beyond the next hill, he ran smack into a huge hog that had strayed into the middle of the road.

But, according to the AP, Runyan denied that the anecdote was true. The story, he said, came from his cousin—a newspaper editor—with whom he often trades “war stories” that they jokingly pass off as actual experiences.

My guess is that the Oregon version is older than Harvey’s, which picks up the slang usage of “pig” as an insulting term for policeman. This guess, in turn, was supported by the two latest letters I’ve received about “The Pig on the Road.” One contained just the bare memory of a similar item being in the Reader’s Digest twenty years or so ago; this time, supposedly, the incident was set in England.

The second letter, from O. V. Barlow of Nashua, New Hampshire, provided the following summary of a version told by an Englishman of his acquaintance:

“A lorry driver is negotiating a twisting rough road with numerous blind curves and switchbacks. Rounding a particularly sharp turn, he is suddenly confronted by a woman in an open car who waves her fist and shouts out, ‘Bloody pig!’

“Leaning from the window, the driver shouts out, ‘Bloody cow!’ as she departs in a cloud of dust.

“Then he swerves his attention back to the road just in time to collide with a quite genuinely bloody pig, the victim of a previous mishap.”

The oddest thing about Mr. Barlow’s letter is that he mentions remembering the first version of “The Pig on the Road” that he heard in 1979 or early 1980. He was—of all things—working for the Eugene (Oregon) Register-Guard at the time. This is where I came in!