Vanishing Fleece

by Clara Parkes

  Ladd said workers would often dip a finger in the grease and rub it on whatever needed softening, healing, or waterproofing. “Usually a boot,” he said. The antibacterial and antifungal properties of lanolin are designed to keep the sheep’s skin healthy, which makes it rather perfect for our skin, too. Picking up on my desire to add a 420-pound barrel of wool grease to the project, Jen shot me a “no” shake of the head.

  After that last twenty-ton press, the wool moved up a conveyor belt and into the dryer, another recent upgrade. Their old flat dryers took longer because the heat covered less surface area. Now the fibers move through a series of drums, allowing for faster and more even air circulation and surface drying.

  We walked around to the other side of the dryer, where gorgeous white fluffiness puffed out of a chute and onto a long table. Two people (“those are the pickers,” Ladd said) were pulling the wool open, fluffing it, and moving it forward. Every once in a while they’d pull something out and throw it into a barrel, presumably a contaminant that the scour didn’t get.

  Three flat metal bars protruded from the top opening of the dryer chute. Ladd explained that they were moisture monitors. “We’ve gotta have at least twelve percent moisture in the wool as it comes out of the dryer, or else it’ll build up static in the blower tubes and we’ll get a jam in the ducts.” Based on what those monitors sense, the whole line can be sped up or slowed down.

  “The tricky part,” he said, “is that we can’t go higher than fourteen percent moisture or we’ll get a wet spot in the wool, and once it’s baled, it’ll rot.”

  From here, wool was pushed into a large tube that sucked it into a series of ducts running up and across the ceiling. It reminded me of the old vacuum tube systems department stores used to have. Soon enough, one of the pickers left his station and climbed a ladder up high onto a catwalk. He opened a little door along the chute, and the inside was packed with fluffy white wool. He gave it a push, then another push, and the wool moved along again. Ladd had stepped in to help with fluffing and sorting but kept an eagle eye on the man until he got back down safely.

  Up high I saw that the chutes ran through a big noisy metal box. “Those are the dusters,” Ladd explained. Inside were two chambers with a flat piece of mesh lining the bottom and a powerful vacuum sucking out residual dust from below as the fibers moved past. Like a turbocharged winnower.

  At long last, the clean wool tumbled down into the bale feeder. Through a little glass window I could see fibers landing inside a chamber like microwave popcorn. Once they reached capacity—they try for 630 to 650 pounds—the top was closed, fibers pressed, bale secured with four bands of baling wire, and popped out the other end, where it was wrapped in thick blue plastic and loaded on a forklift.

  They were midway through a job for Pendleton, which runs some 1.5 million pounds of wool through the line every year. A wall of bales was already stacked floor to ceiling, marking that morning’s work. Suddenly my 676-pound bale felt a little silly, and yet that’s why I was here.

  “Can I see my bale?” I asked.

  Ladd gave an amused smile and said, “Sure.”

  He walked us over to a vast area that was mostly empty, just a few dozen bales stacked in various piles. “It’s usually very full,” he explained, “but we’re just waiting for wool season.” As soon as shearing picked up in earnest, the eighteen-wheelers would be pulling in fast and furious. Everything about wool—its harvesting, its processing, even its wearing—is seasonal.

  My bale sat in a cluster with the other small-run customers. Another bale of Eugene’s wool sat on top of it (aha, so he’d been holding out on me!), and to its left were two other bales marked “Elsa.” In addition to being a friend and mentor, Elsa Hallowell is a path-breaker in the yarn world. She’s one of the first people to successfully market and sell breed-specific wool to the craft market. I loved that our bales got to sit next to each other. It felt like good luck.

  Having seen the true scale of their operations, I was trying to play it cool with Ladd. But as soon as he stepped aside to take a phone call, Jen snapped a quick picture of me hugging my bale. Here it was, both my vehicle for learning and the instrument of my potential downfall. Only time would tell. I wondered if this was how people in arranged marriages felt when they finally met their new spouse. Or was I taking things a little too seriously?

  We were admiring a bale of dark wool when Ladd returned. It belonged to the wool buyer for the clothing company Ramblers Way, he explained. Begun by the founder of Tom’s of Maine, Tom Chappell, Ramblers Way was manufacturing wool clothing sourced entirely in the United States.

  “I just can’t understand why anyone would want to buy wool that couldn’t be dyed,” Ladd said. While knitters and spinners prize colored fibers like these, the commercial market—the kind that sends Ladd 1.5 million pounds of wool a year—sees them not only as undesirable but downright dangerous. Just a few dark hairs in a batch of brilliant white Merino could ruin an Armani suit and all the fabric that had been made for it.

  They’re an expensive liability, nothing more. Jen asked Ladd what kind of wool it was, by which she meant maybe Rambouillet or Merino or even Targhee, and he kept answering, “black.” Though even he agreed it was of excellent quality.

  Just as I was getting comfortable with the noise and the smell and the machinery and the bales of wool, Ladd was opening a door back to the outside. A massive wind tunnel from the ventilation system did its best to keep us inside, but alas, it failed. That was too fast, I thought. I wanted to run back to the first door, hold up a ticket, and beg, “Can I go again? Please?”

  Walking to my car, I was struck by the tenuousness of it all. By the unstoppable tide of globalization, by what once was and what now remains, by how much an entire country and industry depend on this one operation.

  I asked Ladd if there were any hope for wool, in the face of everything he’d told me.

  “Oh sure,” he said with a smile. “People using it.”

  CHAPTER 3

  INFILTRATING BIG WOOL

  American naturalist John Burroughs gave us the optimistic adage, “Leap, and the net will appear.” On the day I reached out to Ladd about my visit to his scouring plant in Texas, the ghost of Burroughs (who grew up on a farm just two hours north of Eugene’s) did me a favor. Ladd said he was free every day the week I’d proposed except Friday, when he’d be in San Antonio for the ASI convention. The very same San Antonio that I was flying in and out of, and where I’d be staying.

  ASI is shorthand for the American Sheep Industry Association, the chief advocacy group for more than 88,000 sheep producers around the country. Launched in 1865 as the National Wool Growers Association, it was the first national livestock association in the country. Before cattle, before pigs or poultry, it was all about sheep. Correction: It was all about wool.

  If you’re producing wool in any significant quantity in the United States, if you run a mill or manufacture woolen products, if you operate a wool-testing lab or a scouring plant or are a broker, chances are you belong to ASI or have a very good reason why you don’t. Anyone who belongs to one of the forty-five state sheep associations is also automatically a member of ASI.

  It feels odd to call farmers “producers,” but it’s their preferred term. I once made the mistake of saying “sheep farms” in a talk out west. A woman who’d spent years on a giant ranch in Montana pulled me aside afterward and whispered a warning. They don’t like it when you call them “farms” out here, she said. Charlotte’s Web took place on a “farm.” Cute little East Coast hobby flocks like Eugene’s, those are “sheep farms.” West of the Mississippi—where the big money is, where most of ASI’s energy is focused, where most of our wool comes from—you’d better call them “ranches” and “sheep producers” if you want them to do business with you.

  Once a year, all these card-carrying sheep ranchers and producers and professors and chemists and veterinarians and scientists and brokers and mill managers and dyers and
, yes, even some farmers, all come together for four days of meetings and roundtables and keynotes and cocktail parties.

  Until now, my familiarity with ASI had been from a polite if somewhat intimidated distance, like a Hollywood extra might view the Academy. This is Big Wool, the domain of giant mills and factories and ranches with tens of thousands of animals. I was just a yarn reviewer and an occasional knitter, a consumer of wool yarn so far downstream from their universe that I might as well be from another planet. But the timing was too perfect to pass up.

  First, I had to crack ASI. Most trade groups I’ve tried to join required everything but a DNA sample and a reference from my fifth-grade teacher. But all I had to do for ASI was fill out a form, send money, and book an extra night at the hotel. I think they figured that only serious people who were in the business would willingly spend four days listening to talks on mycoplasma ovis research, crop insurance for ranchers, or the objective measurement industry. It’s not a show the public generally wants to crash.

  The event took place at a hotel along San Antonio’s River Walk, a sort of Mexican colonial-style subterranean Pirates of the Caribbean complex with tourist-filled boats and roaming mariachi bands. On street level, your view of San Antonio is rather blank, with lots of sidewalks and buildings, but if you find stairs and trot on down, you’re in a completely different world.

  The conference schedule looked daunting. There were no lectures or classes, just mostly council and board meetings and roundtables. What I could and could not do was a mystery. My plan, therefore, was to keep it simple. I would slip into the hotel, get my name badge, and wander through what was advertised as a show floor. I would do a few laps, take notes, perhaps snap some pictures for everyone. I’d pick up a pamphlet or two if I was feeling brave, and then I’d reward myself with a margarita down by the river.

  All the other trade shows I’d attended had giant screens blaring glitzy tech ads or colorful walls of yarn and needlepoint canvases. I didn’t really know what to expect from ASI: sheep-related things? Hopefully I could blend into the crowd and nobody would notice me. That isn’t the healthiest attitude, I’ll give you that. But it’s where I was at the time.

  An escalator brought me down to a mezzanine level where people were milling about. Mostly men, and a few women. The first thing I noticed was the cowboy hats. Then the shoes—cowboy boots mostly. And the jackets—casual wool blazers, often plaid. The men stood in clusters, staring at their feet while they talked, their fingertips tucked precariously into the tops of their jeans pockets.

  It brought to mind something Eugene had told me during the shearing. He said it’s rude to stare a sheep directly in the eyes. Sustained eye contact will make them nervous. They much prefer to stand close and occasionally let their gaze graze the side of a neighbor’s face before turning back to the ground. I don’t know who got the habit from whom, but that’s exactly what the ASI people were doing.

  I collected my badge and swag bag with “Eat American Lamb” emblazoned on the side and went to find the show floor. It turned out that I was standing right in it. This was the extent of the show floor. Not even a dozen exhibitors. They were pitching things like ear tags, fencing, and polypropylene-free bale bags. Fine exhibitors, all. But I was done in ten minutes.

  It quickly became clear that the real activity was happening behind closed doors, or in those impenetrable conversation clusters in the mezzanine during breaks.

  An extreme case of shyness overtook me. I couldn’t figure out a way to break in. I kept circling the mezzanine, snapping pictures, smiling like I knew what I was doing, while growing more convinced that this was going to be the extent of my experience at the ASI conference. I dreaded having to admit my failure to the people back home. Would it cost me my Master’s of Yarn-Making degree?

  Then I spotted a sign for a meeting: “Wool Council Producer Session.”

  The room was small, with a band of tables down the middle and name cards at each seat. To the left, a row of chairs had been set up for onlookers.

  It was the annual meeting of the Wool Council, a fourteen-member group whose ultimate mission is to improve the American wool industry and promote the use of American wool worldwide. They oversee the research, quality control, and marketing activities made possible by the federally funded Wool Trust.

  I desperately wanted in this room.

  Like a stray dog at a kitchen door, I kept circling back, peeking in, hoping for an opening, and then retreating.

  At a certain point I began to annoy even myself, so I went to the registration desk and asked the kind woman what, exactly, my badge enabled me to do. Could I, for example, attend the Wool Council meeting?

  “That’s an open meeting,” the woman said with a smile. “Just go on in!”

  By the time I went back, a full thirty minutes after the meeting was scheduled to start, they’d put several more rows of chairs around the perimeter of the room and people were finally starting to sit down. I slipped inside and grabbed a seat just as they called the meeting to order.

  My plan to remain invisible was immediately thwarted as we were asked to go around the room and give our names and where we were from. I recognized nobody by sight, but some of the names were quite familiar. I’d read their books and articles and reports when I was researching for The Knitter’s Book of Wool. Here they were, in the flesh, sitting with me in this room. I marveled at the prospect of getting to spend hours listening to these people.

  Everybody was here—the professors, the farmers (excuse me, ranchers), the wool buyers, the mill managers, the wool graders and testers, everyone involved in large-scale wool production in this country. They came mostly from western states, such as Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Texas, and the like, with one person from Massachusetts. My own “Maine” got a few curious glances, but nothing more.

  They did meeting-ish things, approving minutes and going over financials that made no sense to me. Then we met the winners of that year’s Make It with Wool contest, a youth-centered competition sponsored by the same groups that had organized the Miss Wool of America contest all those years ago. People came and went, and proceedings were frequently interrupted by a symphony of cell phone ringtones.

  But when Bob Stobart stood up and began talking, we hushed. In the world of wool research, this man is a legend. He is the last wool faculty member in the University of Wyoming’s animal science department, and he was retiring. For reasons both budgetary and, some suggested, political, the university had chosen not to refill his post. In fact, they’d condemned the entire wool research lab and were forcing him to dismantle all the equipment and dispose of its library.

  In 1923, when American wool was in its heyday, the university established an entire department dedicated to wool research. It was nationally renowned, even helping the USDA develop federal standards for wool fiber. When Stobart came on the scene, he taught three classes on wool each semester. “I haven’t done that in fifteen years,” he told me during the break, after I’d mustered the courage to introduce myself. “Now we’re lucky if we have one class per semester. Not on wool, even, but on sheep rearing.” There’s just not enough money in it anymore, he said. Agriculture isn’t profitable like an MBA program or football team. “Plus, the next generation just doesn’t want to do the work.”

  The wool library is no small thing. Stobart’s predecessor, and the first to head the department, was an even greater legend named Robert Burns. During his tenure, Burns cataloged every single publication dealing with wool, with physical fiber samples dating back to the 1800s. Before I could pull a Norma Rae and hop onto a table with a big “SAVE WOOL” sign, he reassured me that the library would be preserved by the university’s special collections department. Eventually they plan to digitize it and make it available online, which will be a gold mine for wool geeks.

  But the equipment? The mini scouring train, the carding and processing machine, and the French combs? They all had to go. If Stobart didn’t find a home for t
hem, they’d be sold for scrap. In the meeting, Stobart walked us through all the prospects that had come and gone. Currently a minimum-security prison was his most viable option for the equipment. The prison administrators liked the idea of being able to train inmates to run equipment and generate revenue. “On a positive note,” he said, “I suppose they do have a captive workforce.”

  Talk of the Wyoming wool lab underlined a deeper fundamental reality that was becoming all too clear: The American wool industry is not growing. No significant new money is being invested. The infrastructure is aging, the workforce is retiring, university programs are being shuttered. Nobody will be there to train the next generation, and the next generation doesn’t seem to have any desire to be trained.

  Talk turned to ASI finances, and suddenly Big Wool became . . . not quite so big. Every year, ASI receives $2.25 million from the Wool Trust, formally known as the Wool Research, Development, and Promotion Trust Fund. Authorized by Congress in 2000, the Wool Trust is funded from tariffs charged on imported wool and wool textile products. While ASI receives some additional funds from membership dues and the government, it would fold if the Wool Trust disappeared. Imports hurt the American wool industry. Yet, ironically, without them, the American wool industry’s only advocacy group would not be able to operate. How’s that for a catch-22?

  With a little digging, I discovered that this import tariff system has been funding the wool industry for quite some time. In 1954, just as synthetics were really beginning to punch a hole in the wool market, Congress passed the National Wool Act. It created a price support program for domestic wool and mohair producers, and it was funded by, you guessed it, tariffs on foreign imports—but back then it was to the tune of more than $200 million a year. According to Eugene, ranchers had little incentive to improve the quality of their wool since they were paid for it no matter what. When the incentive payments ended in 1995, they were gutted. Wool production soon plummeted.