Fleeces and Pieces: A Map in Time
by Gowan Batist
The steel blue of Iris the sheep’s hip is revealed as shears pass across her, peeling the matted, dull, iron-tinged gray of her fleece away, a process uncannily like taking a grinder to rusted metal and leaving ridged circles of brightness behind with each swipe. I’m shearing her while we are out on a grazing contract. Mobile flocks, contained by solar-energized electric mesh fences, roam all around this county, reducing fire danger, clearing dense brush, increasing biodiversity, and adding fertility. For a few seasons our flock, primarily headquartered at Fortunate Farm, has participated in this trend.
It’s 85°, and I’m sweating beneath my tool belt, bits of wool clinging to my bare legs. The afternoon air is heavy and slow before the nightly down-canyon wind, and long after the morning chill. We are out in a field called Eagle Flat, because it contains two golden eagle nest trees. The flock is currently penned in the shade of a live oak, beside a pond and surrounded by the purple eyes of lupin. We are in an earthen baking dish that will soon be unendurable, but today is just warm. This ranch primarily serves as a bird sanctuary, and our mission is to reduce the invasive annual grasses, both to give the native perennial grasses a stronger start to the year, and also to improve habitat for burrowing owls, who prefer short grass.
The shears my cousin Wu gave me are wedged against the heel of my hand, and Iris is idly lipping at my side as I lean across her. She has enthusiastically played her part in the grazing project.
I remember the day she was born, stuck in a bad presentation with her head out of the ewe’s body but her legs trapped back behind her. Normally lambs found in this position are dead of asphyxiation, but when I found them in the icy rain, Chego the Great Pyrenees was curled protectively around the laboring ewe, anxiously licking the lamb’s half born face. He had cleared her nose and mouth enough to keep her alive. On that day, my friends rushed to help. We lay in the mud and the rain, mute with effort trying to reach her front knees so we could untangle her and also hold the poor ewe. Chego vibrated with worry over us like our own personal white rain cloud. Finally Iris slid into the world on a tide of blood.
In many traumatic births, the ewe will reject her lamb. No matter how strong the primal love, trauma can block the chemicals we need in order to feel it. The black Icelandic ewe who carried Iris tried to kill her repeatedly, resulting in Iris coming into the house as a bottle baby. We fed her in turns as she hopped confidently around us, slept in our laps, and ate our books right off the shelves. She was voted onto the Board of Directors of FlockWorks, a local nonprofit, after attending a meeting clad in a diaper with our good friend Clara, who had taken a day shift feeding her while I worked. That spring, when I seeded flats in the greenhouse, it was with a lamb and a border collie laying by my feet on the warm straw.
I sheared her first fleece with my cousin and felted it into a hat for my friend Erin’s soon-to-be-born baby, by combing the fibers out and forming them around the most convenient mold I had—a small round pumpkin we grew that year. The hat was soft and warm and lavender gray, and when my friend’s son was born, it fit his little head perfectly. For a moment, anyway.
With the next fleece the following season, I made something for myself, a woven cowl that kept my neck warm and fit under my canvas coat. I packed it away with winter clothes right before COVID, and before my stepdad’s illness intensified. A pandemic and wave of deaths followed, and I have no idea what happened, but I have never found that box again.
By the third fleece, we were hoping that the COVID situation would change and we would be able to host kids again for shearing lessons on the farm. As a bottle baby, Iris will stand for shearing without restraint of any kind, perfect for teaching. I put off shearing her, hoping we would be able to have a class, and her fleece felted on her back a bit. It was still usable, but that season I mostly felted small objects with it, like a small beaded bag for Ruthie, and regretted losing most of it. That winter my stepdad died, and then our friend died weeks later. Ruthie of Headwaters Grazing came and took the flock to a vineyard grazing contract to give me a grace period without sheep responsibilities to take care of my family. Vineyard grazing is a fantastic way to cycle carbon and make fat lambs on rich cover crops, and the flock did well there.
The sheep came back, having gotten into some poison oak, so for the first time someone else sheared Iris, a shearer friend who swore she was immune to poison oak. I used that fleece to mulch a small tree, and for ages when I would pass and see bits of it beneath the carpet of new grass I would think about that lost season, in which I was carried by my community and felt both grateful and desperately adrift without the anchor of my flock.
The following fall, I sheared her in a field at dusk on a different grazing contract, this one on the coast on land that formerly housed a railroad, used to haul redwoods to shipping docks. The grass was tall and blonde and hid occasional large rusty pieces of metal from the industrial past of the area. (The railroad is not the only former industrial site we’ve grazed; a few years prior we grazed on a land trust in Gualala on the site of the mill where my great-great-grandfather worked, died, and was buried. Not much was left of the mill itself but chunks of concrete and thick metal cables rusting into the soil. I visited his grave between sheep chore rounds.) In a photo my friend Amalia took, the fall of Iris’s fleece mirrors the fall of my hair as we lean towards each other like a double helix, always turning towards a shared center point. It was a cool plum colored evening with high streaky clouds and dry late season grass.
As I sheared Iris in the prickly heat, I thought longingly of that cool coastal grazing contract. Sometimes the rewards of shearing are abundant and the day is gloomy and intimate and perfect, and sometimes it’s hot and sticky and full of thorns. Iris will make two fleeces per year as long as she lives, maybe as long as fifteen years. This won’t be our hardest one, and our best thus far will be surpassed by some that are ahead.
Last summer I sheared Iris with interns from Oz farm who joined us to learn. Iris stood and wagged her tail, wiggling the blanket of fleece that I had rolled down as Hunter and I sheared. I was pregnant, and my belly rested across Iris’s back when I bent over her to follow the fleece down her thigh. That fleece was washed and combed by my friends Sarah and Kat at Mendocino Wool and Fiber. I spun it into yarn while I waited to go into labor. Amalia made that labor yarn into a warm hat to bring our newborn home in, and a fuzzy vest and booties that our baby is just growing into now. With the remaining combed roving, I sat and worked with felting needles while our baby slept, using the gray to create clouds behind a dark crooked oak tree made from Carlotta’s dark brown fiber. I spun endless yarn on my large Ashford wheel while our baby nursed in my lap. I also spun her fleece on the beach with a tiny drop spindle, watching my partners surf with the baby in a wrap on my chest, the little spindle whizzing near my knees as the thread grew longer, before being hauled back up to start again.
As a shepherd, hand shearer, and fiber artist, the fleeces and the pieces made from them become a map in time: of the fields we were in, the weather of the season, the people we worked with. They are an atlas of a disappearing world, charting the paths of relationships that take our species back in time at least ten thousand years, to times sheep were shaved with knapped stone razors, and even further back to a time when fleece was plucked from the communal scratching posts the wild flocks rubbed their winter coats off onto.
This is all great in the abstract, but today I still have to finish this hot and difficult job. I cut the fleece from her tail, across her back and down to the sides of her belly, and up to her neck. As I worked and she calmly stood, occasionally nibbling me with her velvet lips, the fleece fell down her sides and expanded under its own weight, growing far larger in area than the surface of the skin it was previously anchored to. The fleece is clean and soft and luminous where it touches her body, dull and full of dust on the outside. When I finished her neck and mighty mane—the longest and softest part of the fleece—I gently pulled the fleece away from where it was still connected by the invisible barbs of wool fibers to the fleece still attached to the skin. Having freed it, I bundled it, inside out, into a shiny package, unctuous with lanolin, and tossed it onto the wool sorting area on the other side of the fence.
There are far more thorns in it than I hoped. Maybe I can save something from it, maybe it will all mulch a baby oak tree. In spring of 2020, before things really got bad, when we still thought this would blow over in a few weeks, we did spring shearing on a different section of the same ranch, on a similar spring grazing contract, in an area where riparian restoration was taking place. We took the belly and leg cuts unfit to process for yarn and mulched the baby trees with them, wetting the soil and then the wool. The loose bits at the edges were quickly snatched by nesting birds, and we saw some of the birds flying into the nest boxes we had recently installed, trailing streamers of fiber.
Later that season, 80% of the ranch burned. The trees mulched with wool, which does not burn, survived the fire. The wool mulch held in moisture, it kept back grasses that could overshadow the trees, and it gave each of them a personal fire blanket. When the black paint of ash ran across the tan canvas of the fall, some of the only green left was those few little oak leaves.
Today I am here with my shears greasy, sliding across the blisters on my hand. I am alone with this animal whose first breaths I witnessed, the same pointer finger that’s rubbed raw today was once just barely hooked under her tiny knee and popped her loose into life.
Lifting Iris’s hard, compact little feet, I trim them mostly out of a sense of completion, not because she really needs it. In the absence of the rocks they evolved to leap and climb over, the hoof will keep growing past the point of utility and become dysfunctional, sometimes leading to lameness.
I have to insist that she’s done being sheared, because she would like me to keep going even after she has been relieved of her entire fleece. Iris presses her oily shorn body against my leg, lips at my shoes, and wags her tail when I scratch her. I find myself idly snipping areas that don’t really need to be touched up, just to stay in this space a bit longer. I have 14 more sheep to shear; I have work waiting at home.
Iris is self-congratulatory in her plumpness and her shine, her tail flicking when I scratch between her shoulder blades, her head arching up reproachfully when I stop. Chego comes over to us, sniffing over the haircut I gave to his baby, who is now his size. One of her first days in the pasture with the flock, I came to check on her and didn’t see her anywhere. My blood went cold. A million animals can snatch and run with a motherless lamb. Searching, I noticed that Chego hadn’t gotten up to greet me. I walked over to where he lay and found Iris, Chego’s bushy tail covering her where she lay against his side, her head thrown back, sound asleep.
She was a slim scrap of fluff and knobby legs then; she is a broad and sleek tank of a sheep now. Chego is still Chego, he was born one hundred years old and yet somehow hasn’t aged a day. I wonder if they notice the changes in me the way I mark the ones in them like the high tide lines of my life, defining each year by fleeces, commemorating it by their quality and weight—the years we made fine art, the years we made utilitarian warmth, and the years we could make nothing but a shelter against the fire.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.