Barnyard Haiku

There's an old joke occasionally told around here... about a farmer who wins 10 million dollars in the lottery.

When the local reporter asks him what he's gonna do with all that money, he replies... "Well, I guess I'll just keep on farmin' 'til it's all gone."

So it was kinda nice to run across this.

-- NORRIS, Mont. -- It sounds like something a Zen master might ask: How does the wool come off a sheep? To shear a sheep is to touch a fading chord of Western culture.

There is poetry in watching any physical task done well.

But shearing is more like ballet. The sheep and the shearer must move as one. Each shift of the shearer’s feet into a new position for the next set of strokes also shifts the sheep’s posture and weight, presenting a new flank or angle for the blade’s pass.

That description puts me in mind of one of the first jobs I ever had... working in a factory that made surgical gloves.

I remember I had to work my way up, from loading racks of porcelain forms off large, heavy buggies onto the line that led to the curing furnace... to the exalted rank of crane operator.

It was also one of the most satisfying, purely physical jobs I ever had.

The crane, which lifted the double-sided, pivoting racks of porcelain forms... also traversed, under power, across 3 or 4 vats of liquid latex and water. Each side of the rack then had to be serially dipped... and then unlatched and spun manually to even out the thickness of the gloves.

It was an intricate ballet... and once you got good at it and found your rhythm, you could actually start unlocking and spinning the racks as the fingertips of the forms cleared the hot liquid... quickly traversing to the next tank as the rack spun around for the last time and you locked it into place with the hand that wasn't working the buttons and the brake... as the hundreds of pounds of steel & porcelain spun up at you.

We used to hit the traverse button as the rack was coming around for that last spin... and if you missed hammering home the locking pin, you machine-gunned off the porcelain forms as the still twirling rack slid to your left.

It was working without a net... for manual labourers.

I put on twenty pounds of muscle that summer and gained a physical confidence that went a ways towards making me who I am today.

And like shearing the sheep in the article above... it was art.

Life, its ownself.

*