Sheepish Read online

  For thousands of years, shepherds feared the presence of black sheep living nearby, since an accidental crossbreeding could contaminate their pure white fleece. That’s the source of the phrase, “the black sheep in the family.” As Jacob said to Laban in the Book of Genesis, “Let me pass through all your flock today, removing from it every speckled and spotted sheep and every black lamb.” Yet as Ernest Lehman said, the wool of a black sheep is just as warm.

  Wool—black or white—is a natural insulator, keeping you warm in winter and cooling you down in summer. Because it’s made of those overlapping scales, it easily repels water. Wool breathes by wicking away moisture from the skin and releasing it into the air, leaving dry air and warmth near the skin. Polartec might keep you warm, but it doesn’t breathe easily. Wool can absorb up to 30 percent of its weight in moisture without feeling heavy or damp, whereas cotton gets damp at 15 percent. Neither cotton nor polar fleece is warm when wet. Also, wool naturally repels mold and mildew.

  And here’s another thing I learn: Wool repels body odors. A cotton or polyester T-shirt will suck those smelly little molecules up like a sponge, but wool prefers not to be associated with those odors so it doesn’t hook up with them. I will later put this property to the test.

  Wool is durable. Lab tests show wool fibers can be bent back on themselves more than 20,000 times without breaking, Cotton breaks after 3,200 bends, silk after 1,800, and rayon (a synthetic) totally collapses after only 75. Wool resists wrinkles, and because of its natural crimp will retain its shape. It’s fire retardant, unlike synthetic fabric, which happily burns when ignited because it’s made from oil.

  I read something amazing: The baseball gets its bounce, its distance, its life, from wool. Each professional baseball contains three layers of wool, called windings because the wool is wound around a rubber core. There are 220 yards of wool in one baseball.

  I’ve played the piano since I was a kid—not well, but I still play. And now I learn that the lovely resonance of a piano happens because the hammers don’t hit the piano wires directly (that would be a harpsichord). Each hammer is covered with a thick pad of felted wool. The Bacon Felt Company, near Boston, has been making the wool felt for pianos for over 175 years. They know which sheep produce the best wool for piano felts and know how to blend the fibers for an even better product. They build layers of fibers, then subject these layers to pressure, heat, and moisture. Because there are over 2,000 overlapping scales in each 25 mm of wool fiber, those scales lock together to create felt. And in case you think that there’s just one kind of felt, it’s clear from the Bacon Felt Company’s Web site that it’s more complex than that. They sell upper felts, under felts, knuckle felts, backcheck felts, key rest cushion felts, under lever frame felts, and upright piano understory felts. I have no idea what a “knuckle felt” is, but I love saying the name out loud.

  Wool fills niche markets that few of us know about. There’s a company less than 100 miles from me that sells skeins of wool yarn used to wick lubrication into the axle bearings of vintage (pre–World War II) railroad cars. A small company in England’s Lake District mixes wool and bracken to form compost. The wool helps trap water to keep the plants hydrated, releasing a stream of nutrients over the growing season. The compost is like peat, only without the peat.

  Wool insulates, breathes, absorbs, repels odors, and lasts. Suddenly I begin to regret owning anything that isn’t wool. Unfortunately, after learning so much about this fiber, I move up higher on the Sheepishness Scale.

  Turquoise Treasure

  I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colors. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am gen- uinely sorry for the poor browns.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  Sherry from Colorado returns to Minnesota for another round of medical appointments, this time bringing with her the yarn and roving she’d made out of our fleece. I once again meet her in Rochester.

  “Feel this amazing yarn,” she says, running her hands over a skein of our white yarn. I do the same, but I have no idea what she’s talking about. It’s yarn. Big deal.

  “And this roving? I spun it up and it was a wonderful experience.” It’s a ball of wool. I squeeze the fuzzy roving and struggle to understand Sherry’s enthusiasm. Besides, everything she says flies in the face of what we know about our wool. We’ve been told it’s of medium quality, only good for carpeting or some other nonclothing-related use. Why does Sherry speak so highly of its crimp and its elasticity and its softness?

  Might we be able to find a better market for our yarn than bagging it up and selling it wholesale? Encouraged by Sherry’s enthusiasm, I find a local fiber mill and bring three bags to be converted from greasy, smelly fleece into balls of white and brown-gray roving and yarn.

  The roving and yarn come back a few months later. It seems nice, but not being a knitter or spinner, what do I know? Our friend Jan knits some of the naturally colored yarn into a hat to show me what the yarn looks like. The white roving is in big round balls, so I post photos on my blog under the heading “Nice Orbs” and offer both roving and yarn up for sale. I blink, and it’s gone. Huh.

  The next month, a box arrives in the mail from Karen on the East Coast. Inside are two thick braids of dyed roving. I pick them up, turn them around and around, and nearly weep from the pure, raw color.

  Some people are moved by Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or a choir’s rendition of Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus. Others can be sent heavenward by the smell of a lug of fresh peaches. My sensory drug of choice is color. I’ve been known to stand in the paint aisle of an art supply store, too mesmerized by the colors to move. One year I get so thirsty for bright yellow that I paint both the guest bathroom and guest bedroom such a bright yellow it makes people laugh when they enter. I consume turquoise, teal, royal blue, hot pink, and fuchsia like normal people consume coffee. I study Victoria Findlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette. I keep my boxes of Crayola Crayons close by, even though I’ve pretty much moved beyond my coloring book phase.

  Karen has dyed my roving blue and turquoise. I cradle the braids in my arms, lost in the turquoise. I take the braids apart, amazed at how deeply the wool has taken the dye. I want to spend time with these colors. I want to eat these colors. It takes a few days for a radical voice in my head to be heard, but I finally listen: I want to knit these colors into something, even though I don’t knit.

  Knitting. The activity I consider a waste of time. And even worse news? Before I can knit, I must spin the roving into yarn.

  Crap. Spinning again.

  I curl the braids into a basket and set them on the table. But no amount of longing looks and tender pats turns the roving into yarn.

  So I dust off my spinning wheel and sign up for a two-day spinning class in the Twin Cities. I learn that yarn spun from Merino fleece is wonderfully soft but can’t take much abrasion, so it doesn’t wear well. I learn how to “skirt” a fleece, meaning how to take out all the bad stuff, like brittle tips and short pieces, and fleece bound up with dried manure. I learn that sheep’s wool has thirteen different oils and waxes in it. I learn about Z twists and S twists, and how to fix too much of each.

  I learn how to prepare a sheep’s fleece for spinning. The first step is washing it. Washing wool has always been called scouring, which doesn’t mean what it means today. We think of “scour” as using hard chemicals or lots of pressure to clean something, but when it comes to wool, “scour” means to wash it, not to rub hard with a Brillo pad. This would be bad, because if you apply too much pressure, you’ve got yourself a nice wad of felt. To clean the fleece, you use either gentle soap or stale urine, depending upon the century in which you live.

  The next step is to card the wool into roving, the stuff that spinners stretch out and spin into yarn. Carding means fluffing the fleece up using wooden paddles, or cards, embedded with little metal teeth. All the students in the spinning class are provided with a pair of carders. You put a little piece of washed fleece on the t
eeth, then drag the cards against each other. You pull the fluff off, put it back on the teeth, then repeat the process three or four times. After a grueling hour of carding, I have a pile of carded fleece the size of a baby rabbit.

  Finally it’s time to spin. Even though I’d been ready to throw my wheel through the window when Kim had tried to teach me, my fingers somehow remember what to do, only this time they do it better. My yarn is thinner and not twisted as tightly. It breaks less often. The yarn is still irregular, but the thumb-sized stuff is gone. I become fascinated with how quickly the pile of roving in my lap ends up as yarn on the bobbin. I learn to take two bobbins of yarn and ply them together to create something called, not surprisingly, two-ply yarn. I spend the two days happily spinning the white roving provided in the class, but my thoughts are on the blue and turquoise.

  I think about naming this turquoise yarn. When I research fiber, I learn that dyers group their dyed yarn or roving into “colorways.” One Web site has a creative colorway of fairy tales, with color names like the Evil Stepmother, the Frog Prince, the Wicked Witch. Another has an entire colorway called Revenge. Each color represents a different reason for leaving your spouse, “for taking your stash and hitting the road.” Another has a colorway called the Seven Deadly Skeins. Not surprisingly, the best-seller is Lust.

  Fairy tales and revenge aren’t working for me when it comes to this blue and turquoise roving. Of course, given my changing personality, the yarn names Cranky Bitch or Exhausted Shepherd come to mind, but the yarn is too pretty for such negativity. How about Ocean Paradise? No. Melting Mountain Stream. On a train trip west through the snowy Rockies years ago, at dusk I’d looked out of my window down into a mountain stream running right alongside the track. The water was so clean it was pure turquoise, and so deeply touched me that I teared up. Elvis was still dead.

  I return home from the spinning class, set my wheel up in the living room, and begin spinning the Melting Mountain Stream. I have to stop often, not to rethread the spinning wheel or cuss at myself, but to admire what I’ve done. Spinning is oddly soothing, and almost mesmerizing as I watch the roving disappear into the orifice and come out yarn on the other side.

  I find the idea of actually making something out of wool a little intimidating, but that’s probably the fear talking. I search for easy things to make from wool and find online instructions for making wool dryer balls. Instead of using dryer sheets full of chemicals, toss the balls into the dryer and “let them bounce around to soften clothes and absorb static cling.” Cool.

  I keep spinning. Something weird happens. When I hold the skein of my hand-spun yarn, with all its lumps and imperfections, I’m immensely proud of our sheep.

  Super Sheep

  It wasn’t the Exxon Valdez captain’s driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.

  —GREENPEACE ADVERTISEMENT, NEW YORK TIMES, 1990

  I wonder what role wool plays in the environment. Since wool comes from sheep, and sheep are supposedly bad for the environment, it’s not looking good for wool. Ever since that UN report came out, I’ve been under a discouraged cloud. Yes, it’s just one report, but because of it I not only feel guilty as a livestock farmer, but also as a carnivore.

  Then my online news service sends me the breaking news: “UN Admits Error in Report on Global Warming.” What? It turns out that an American scientist from the University of California at Davis found an error. He said that meat and milk production generate less greenhouse gas than most environmentalists claim and that the UN emissions figures were calculated differently than the transportation figures, resulting in an “apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue.”

  One of the authors of the UN report agreed. “I must say honestly that he has a point—we factored in everything for meat emissions, and we didn’t do the same thing with transport.”

  It turns out that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions attributed to livestock production result from deforestation and converting rain forests to grow crops or use as pasture. In the United States, only 2.8 percent of emissions come from animal agriculture, and this number has remained constant since 1990. So when it comes to greenhouse gases, we can stop pointing fingers at livestock. Sheep aren’t the culprit. Hey! I’m not destroying the planet.

  Yes, there are still many problems with livestock production. We eat more meat than we should, basically because we’re not paying all the costs associated with it. Intensive livestock production creates more manure than the local environment can absorb. It consumes ridiculous amounts of water, something that a pasturebased system doesn’t do. There are animal welfare issues.

  But the animals themselves aren’t the problem—it’s how they’re raised. Raising livestock on pasture can actually help the environment. Nicolette Niman wrote in the New York Times that “many smaller traditional farms and ranches in the United States have scant connection to carbon dioxide emissions because they keep their animals outdoors on pasture and make little use of machinery.” And here’s that carbon sink idea again: “Pasture and grassland areas used for livestock reduce global warming by acting as carbon sinks. Converting cropland to pasture, which reduces erosion, effectively sequesters significant amounts of carbon.”

  But how do you manage plants used as a carbon sink? Why not keep thousands of acres of land in grass to soak up carbon dioxide, then keep the grass under control using sheep? The meat and wool will be a by-product of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

  An example of what sheep mean to the landscape can be found in England’s Lake District, a verdant area with lakes and breathtakingly steep green hills grazed by sheep. Experts predict profits on the sheep and cattle farms are likely to drop by up to 40 percent in the next five years. What will happen if the sheep farms disappear from northern England? Scrub and trees will replace the grass, so the land will no longer be accessible to walkers. The birds that thrive on the moors will vanish. The peatland moors also work as a carbon sink, acting as the single largest carbon reserve in the United Kingdom, storing more carbon than the woods of Britain and France combined. Without grazing sheep, shrubby vegetation will appear, dry out the peat, and release more CO2 into the atmosphere.

  After my recycling debacle, which I must confess I have repeated twice more, at least now I can take sheep off my planetharming activities. This is a relief. If it weren’t for my chronic insomnia, I’d totally be able to sleep now.

  Sheep have been a good idea for 10,000 years, and they remain so because sheep (and goats) are the planet’s self-propelled lawn mowers. Whether you believe God designed the sheep or that the sheep evolved over the millennia, it’s still a darned smart design. The sheep is one of the most efficient machines for converting sun and water and nutrients into protein and energy, which we use in the form of meat, milk, leather, and wool. Sheep are ruminants, which means they have four chambers to their stomachs. (In case you’re burning to know, other ruminants include cattle, goats, giraffes, bison, yaks, water buffalo, deer, camels, alpacas, llamas, wildebeest, antelope, pronghorns, and something called a nilgai.)

  When a sheep chews a mouthful of grass and swallows it, that grass heads for the chamber called the rumen. After it’s hung out there for a while and softened a bit, the sheep burps it back up and chews it a second time. That’s what she’s doing when she’s chewing her cud. Then she swallows it again and it moves through the other three chambers where special bacteria break it down even farther. Why all the need for digestion? Many green, growing things contain lots of cellulose, which isn’t digestible by humans and other monogastrics. But a ruminant’s four-stage process can handle it.

  Sheep are used in the United States to control invasive exotic weeds, reduce the fire risks around urban areas, and control weeds on farms without using chemicals. They eat weeds in Christmas tree farms, vineyards, national parks, along power lines, irrigation canals, and roadsides, and in forest plantations. They can be herded into roadless areas. They leave no chem
ical residue, just manure that breaks down and fertilizes the soil. They improve biodiversity, for if a noxious non-native weed is set back, then the native plants have the chance to recover.

  Cattle won’t eat leafy spurge, which crowds out all other plants and forms a monoculture. Sheep, on the other hand, love leafy spurge. When Montana and North Dakota used sheep to control leafy spurge, it cost as little as 60 cents per acre, compared to $35 per acre to spray herbicides from a helicopter.

  Sheep happily munch on the kudzu taking over the southeastern United States. I love that the quiet, unassuming, nearly forgotten sheep can be Super Weeder, able to conquer kudzu in a single bite, or nearly so.

  Alfalfa growers in California’s Imperial County use 200,000 to 300,000 lambs every winter for weed control, creating the largest concentration of sheep in the nation for those months. The lambs provide both weed and insect control, cutting down on pesticide use and improving water quality.

  Many urban areas are surrounded by wild brushland, a fire waiting for a spark. Sheep and goats to the rescue. California uses them to graze down highly flammable shrubs, basically creating firebreaks. In Carson City, Nevada, sheep removed 75 percent of the “fuels” around the city, and 90 percent of the citizens surveyed preferred the sheep over applying herbicides or mowing the fuel breaks. As the Carson City program proclaimed, “Only Ewes Can Prevent Wildfire.”

  One summer we had rain, and more rain, and more rain. Our lawn went crazy. I tried to mow, but the blade clogged so often that the mower came to a sad end and flipped over on its back, wheels pointing straight up, its headlights now little Xs.