Sheepish

by Catherine Friend

  I like the philosophy of the company. The farm is powered by geothermal and solar energy. The wool is washed in a chlorine-free process. The packaging is made from recycled materials. Their trucks and tractors run on biofuels.

  I order a pair of underwear. The price is ridiculously high, but I want to know if it’s possible to make comfortable underwear out of wool.

  Meanwhile, in our never-ending search to find relief for Melissa’s headaches, we try an orthopedic surgeon. An MRI reveals she has the neck of a much older person, with blown discs and arthritic vertebrae. He proposes relieving Melissa’s headaches by fusing several vertebrae. Here we are, facing another fall surgery. I will once again be Backup Farmer, as well as facing the deadlines of two writing contracts and caring for Melissa. Her recovery from this surgery will be much longer than from the hysterectomy.

  The farm suddenly feels very large to both of us. The steers are at their market weight, so Melissa takes them to the processor. We’re sad to see them go but excited about getting more calves in the spring after Melissa has recovered. That I must feed and care for seventeen sheep and three llamas feels complex. What if an animal gets sick? Treating a sick animal isn’t one of my skills and having a vet come out will be expensive. So on the cusp of this early winter surgery of Melissa’s, I’m faced with doing all of the farming tasks—feeding grain, feeding hay, moving panels to fresh bales in the snow, battling ice and frozen water hydrants, taking care of the chickens, cats, and dogs, getting the driveway plowed, feeding us, running all the errands, paying bills, taking care of Melissa, and writing two books due early the next spring. Even though I’m more hormonally balanced now, I have my limits, and the above list has just exceeded them. I regret that I’m not really Super Shepherd. No one’s more disappointed in me than I am. We must sell all the sheep.

  In early December, Melissa and I stand in the pasture looking at our animals. One sheep is the daughter of No. 39, a big, healthy sheep who’d been an excellent mother. Another ewe’s cocoa brown fleece would make lovely yarn. There’s No. 75/101, our big friendly bottle lamb. There’s White Girl, who somehow ended up back here after lambing at Paul and Lela’s; she has udder problems as well. Our dear old girl, No. 66, died quietly a month earlier.

  We should sell all the sheep. Stop farming. Get real jobs. Take control of our lives again. But when we race up to that point of no return, both of us hesitate, even me. If we sell our sheep, we will never have this precise crossbreed again. Stepping over that line and selling all the sheep feels so final. We’d worked so hard to get this farm going, and yes, the last few years have been fraught with physical and family and financial and emotional troubles, but is letting go really what I want after fifteen years here?

  We can walk away. We already have some off-farm income, so it’s not as if we’ll suddenly be out of money. We could rent the North Pasture to a local hay man. We could rent the south pastures to someone who needs grass for cattle or sheep. We could quietly take down our farm Web site. My blog could join the millions of other blogs without current postings. Letting go at this point would be the easiest thing in the world.

  And the hardest.

  “I can’t sell them all,” Melissa says. “I just can’t.”

  And I’m thinking about fleece and yarn and making more turquoise, and about the oxytocin we get from touching animals and how much people enjoy visiting the farm, and about how important it is to raise livestock animals humanely to give people alternatives to factory-raised meat. “I can’t either,” I finally say.

  What? What have I just said? The only explanation is my sheepishness. It’s obviously terminal.

  We look at our small barn and decide it can hold the three llamas, and seven sheep. We will only keep those sheep that can be bred to make more. This doesn’t include the pet sheep with mastitis problems, like No. 75/101 and White Girl. The day before those two leave, I visit them, scratching behind an ear, sneaking them each a nibble of corn from my pocket. The next day Melissa faces things squarely and loads them onto the trailer. We sell Erik to two men excited about his genetics. Hearts heavy, we have now sold all the sheep but seven.

  Seven sheep. Yain, tain, eddero, peddero, pitts, tayter, later.

  We are now below the average flock size in Minnesota, which is ten. Seven sheep isn’t a flock of sheep; it’s just seven. What will we do with seven sheep? Are we going to build the flock back up, or are these seven just a temporary transition from fifty to zero? When people ask how many sheep we own, I say “our numbers are down a bit.” I don’t tell them what’s happened. I don’t tell them the number of sheep in our flock.

  I can reveal my underwear size to thousands of readers in Hit by a Farm. I can tell a room full of total strangers that I’m gay. But to admit we only have seven sheep? That information is much too personal.

  PART FIVE

  The Love of You Sings

  Real, Not Virtual

  Yes, there is Nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

  —KAHLIL GIBRAN

  In today’s modern society, a small farm is considered by the rest of the country to be little more than a quaint throwback to an earlier era. But small farms benefit society and the environment in ways that can never be recovered in the price we charge for our lamb or for our wool. Farming continues because, as retired professor John Ikerd maintains, every farm has a purpose:The primary purpose of many small farms is to provide an opportunity for open spaces, fresh air, scenic landscape, privacy, peacefulness, or other unique qualities of rural life. Others are looking for a good place to raise a family ... Others farm because they want to live close to nature; many are stewards of the land by choice, because stewardship gives purpose and meaning to their lives. For them, farming is an expression of spirituality.

  Spirituality? This stops me in my tracks. But then, I’ve seen Melissa drop to her knees in awe over a tiny pink wildflower blooming in a grassy pasture. Time stops. Nothing is more important to her than admiring this little miracle among the grass and clover. Because she lives in the moment, Melissa’s days are full of spirituality.

  My own heart has beat faster to witness a lamb, looking deathly ill one evening, standing on her feet bawling for breakfast the next morning. It’s a gift we are sometimes given. And on a windy day, when the breeze carries sound away from the flock, I can walk up to a sleeping lamb and gently pick him up before he knows what is happening. Usually the lamb stays quiet, a bit unnerved to find himself levitating four feet above the ground but held safely against a warm body. The best way to hold a lamb is by supporting the underside of its body with your hand and arm. This means that I am basically holding his small pounding heart in my hand. The lamb is warm and heavy and round and muscular and it seems to me a miracle that he is so healthy and so alive.

  One day during a recent summer the humidity must have been 200 percent. For every molecule of oxygen in the air, there are two molecules of water. Step outside, walk ten feet, and you’re drenched. Thunderclouds build gray to the west, and I want to get the mail at the end of our 600-foot driveway. So I walk slowly, admiring the approaching storm, and listening to the silence. The moisture has muffled all sound: no cars, no people, no dogs, only birds. I smell something as I walk down the driveway, but my brain’s too focused on helping my current editing client choose a better title for his novel.

  I retrieve the mail and start back to the house. That’s when I begin to breathe more deeply. I inhale again and stop. My sense of smell isn’t that great, thanks to a long season of allergies. But this? This is incredible.

  After a few more deep breaths, I choke up, and for the first time in a long time, it has nothing to do with Elvis.

  It’s the scent. Nature has finally gotten my attention and I look down into our neighbor’s alfalfa field, which runs along our driveway. The alfalfa is in bloom, the dark blue-purple flowers sending out bursts of scent. The smell doesn’t
blow away, but hangs there, captured by the humid air. The entire planet must smell this way.

  My life is full of colorful surprises, thanks to Melissa. The morning glories she has planted along the nearby fence now bloom a rich purple. Across the driveway the cardinal creeper has climbed the legs of the fuel tank and produced delicate, bright red flowers. Melissa has a “thing” for flowers, so all summer long she distributes blossoms in small bud vases throughout the house. I often sit down at my computer to find a tiny vase with a single black-eyed susan in it, or a bright pink cosmos. There are times when living with a detail-oriented person is sweet indeed.

  Then there’s the day I’m wearing clean clothes (non-barn clothes) so we can attend the current film showing at our town’s 1921 movie theater. We’ve been trying for two weeks, failing every night because of some farming issue, but tonight’s the night. Then I remember I haven’t fed the lamb in the barn. The ewe doesn’t have enough milk for both twins, so I’m feeding one.

  I stand in the barn in my clean clothes, trying not to touch anything as the lamb drinks enthusiastically from the bottle. Suddenly the heavens open up and rain pounds the roof. Oh, great.

  But when the rain lets up a bit, I look out the barn door, and see the most incredible double rainbow arching across the sky. It’s perfect, and I wish I could tell Melissa about it but she’s in the house. By the time the lamb finishes the bottle, the rainbow has faded away and the rain has stopped. I walk back to the house, miraculously still clean and dry.

  Inside Melissa is pacing. “Where were you? I wanted to show you the double rainbow.” I love that after so many years, we still want to show each other the beautiful things we see.

  Wave of the Future

  Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  Americans are ruthless when it comes to discarding the obsolete, or the perceived obsolete, and sheep certainly fall into this category. But then I stumble upon a paper called “Livestock, Ethics, and Quality of Life” in the Journal of Animal Science that describes the Five Eras of Agriculture. When I combine what I’ve learned about the history of sheep with the Five Eras of Agriculture, I realize that Melissa and I are part of the Fifth Era, the wave of the future. Cool.

  According to the article, written by J. Hodges, the First Era of Agriculture was hunting and gathering. I think this era must have been rough on our hominid ancestors because they hunted animals that ran faster and had sharper teeth and actual claws. This made staying alive a bit of a struggle, but luckily early humans realized that hanging out with other humans made more sense than the “every hominid for himself” approach. Because we lacked the skills to bring down large game ourselves, we’d gather in groups, wait until the lions and leopards abandoned the carcasses and then we’d eat the bones, which were full of fatty acids very good for growing better brains. (Stealing the food killed by other predators was a useful little survival technique our ancestors practiced, known as kleptoparasitism.)

  Second came the Domestication Era, when nomads settled down and domesticated a number of species, using them to provide power, food, manure, and milk. The sheep, I’m pleased to say, was one of the first mammals to be domesticated. As a result, life got better for both humans and sheep. The livestock received food and water, and protection from scary wild animals. In return, humans had milk and meat and hides for huts and clothing. They learned to collect water by leaving fleece out overnight, then wringing out the dew the next morning. They figured out that sheepskin, if stretched really thin, made a great writing surface, so it was used for stationery and books. Humans ate better, dressed better, and wore warmer clothes, which enabled them to expand into colder regions of the world.

  Things continued this way for 10,000 years or so, then in the eighteenth century came the Third Era: Steam Power and Fossil Fuel. Livestock were needed less for power, and more for meat. Nearly everything having to do with sheep and wool and textiles became automated. Working with our hands became a sign of class, not of skill. Farming and sheep were so last century, or more accurately, so last ten centuries.

  The twentieth century ushered in the Fourth Era: Intensification. What characterizes this era? As Hodges wrote, “Animals [are] increasingly seen as disposable resources in large scale specialized food production systems.” This era has led to lower meat costs, increased meat production, and less consideration for the lives of the animals.

  Hodges is predicting that the next transition will be to the Fifth Era: The Quality of Life Era, in which the price of meat is no longer the only factor driving agriculture. In the twenty-first century, U.S. consumers are paying attention to food safety, nutritional value, local production, sustainable farming, the environment, and animal welfare, which means ensuring a decent life for those animals we eat.

  What does life look like for a sheep in the Fifth Era? It might look like life on our farm, which, whether it survives or not, is part of a complex tapestry of farms, a weaving of human and livestock lives that goes back centuries. But we’re part of a disappearing life. The number of U.S. farms peaked in 1935 at 6.8 million. Today there are a little over 2.2 million, a drop of about 70 percent. The 1980s were particularly bleak, as thousands of farms were crushed between high debt and low prices. In The Fate of Family Farming: Variations on an American Ideal, Ronald Jager writes of an industrial food “juggernaut” able to “swallow up entire midwestern family farm communities in a single gulp.”

  Jager also writes that there is good news in the struggle for the soul of agriculture. As the industrial system has increased beyond comprehension, what he calls a “countervailing resistance” has developed. “There are powerful and subversive forms of aggressive resistance stirring almost everywhere within American agriculture.” It seems that Jager sees us moving toward Hodges’s Quality of Life Era as well.

  Sustainable farming is part of that resistance, as is its subset, organic farming. Add to that food co-ops, farmers’ markets, farms that sell member subscriptions, beginning farming networks, and women’s farming networks.

  Women farmers, young farmers, and innovative resistance to industrial farming have, at least in the short run, slowed the rate of small farm decline. According to the 2007 Census of Agriculture, the number of farms increased between 2002 and 2007 by 4 percent. Although it’s true that most of the new farms are very small, and either aren’t producing a product or aren’t producing much volume, at least the idea of farming continues to burn in people’s minds and souls. And here’s some good news: That same census shows that the number of sheep and goat farms are increasing. The secret’s out.

  In his book A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature, James William Gibson writes that the future of this planet depends on how humans feel when they interact with it. So many people in the United States are estranged from nature, having lost their connection to the natural world other than through brief vacations into it. But if people can find some way to connect, some way to experience the enchantment of nature, the planet may have a chance.

  Farm animals are often called “domestic” to differentiate them from “nature.” But cows, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, and ducks are part of nature. Even though on small farms their lives are mostly under our control (on factory farms their lives are totally controlled), farm animals still provide a rich connection to the natural world.

  Smalls farms like ours represent tiny pockets of enchantment, places where you can marvel at the perfect, warm eggs chickens lay. You can watch a newborn lamb stagger over to the udder and discover it for the first time. You can watch adolescent steers kick up their heels in excitement because you’ve come to visit them. People appreciate nature and how everything fits together when we care for it responsibly.

  I would hate to give that up.

  Farmer and
writer Gene Logsdon touches on why people from the city, including Melissa and me, move to rural areas and begin farms:Many people in farming are unhappy and don’t belong there. But there are likely thousands, perhaps millions of people in urban situations who are unhappy because they belong in farming and do not know it. They have the true farmer’s spirit in them—that blend of creative artistry, independence, manual skill, and love of nurturing that marks a true farmer.

  Melissa was born with that spirit. I wasn’t. But even though I enjoy calling myself a backup farmer and highlighting my distaste for birthing and manure, after fifteen years on the farm I begin to think that, much as a plant absorbs the flavor of the soil in which it lives, I might have absorbed a bit of this spirit myself.

  Listening to Sheep

  Shepherding is an ancient scientific culture and teaches people more than they intended to learn and brings out qualities in them they might not attain directly through moral ambition.

  —GARRISON KEILLOR

  I keep reading about middles, hoping to glean some advice I can use. I don’t find much. Then I wonder if I have any wisdom myself to share, since I’ve made it through many middles. Sadly, I don’t, proving it’s entirely possible to reach an age without having a clue how you got there.

  Where else to turn for wisdom? Memoirs just aren’t helping.

  But then I head for the pasture. Sit next to a sheep on a summer day and you will experience a weird sort of envy. You’ll want to be a sheep, if only for a few days, to get some relief from the stress of your own life. Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, believes that the only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there. This may be true, but at least in the quiet of the mountaintop—or the sheep pasture—you can actually hear your Zen. In the chaos and clattering of our lives, the voice we should be listening to is too quiet to be heard. It’s the voice of a sheep.