Vanishing Fleece Read online

  Copyright © 2019 Clara Parkes

  Cover © 2019 Abrams

  Published in 2019 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958831

  ISBN: 978–1-4197–3531–8

  eISBN: 978–1-68335–682–0

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  for Eugene

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Girl Meets Bale

  CHAPTER 1

  Wool Harvest

  CHAPTER 2

  Double Bubble Bale and Trouble

  CHAPTER 3

  Infiltrating Big Wool

  CHAPTER 4

  Moving Bodies

  CHAPTER 5

  Ready to Roll

  CHAPTER 6

  Bartlett Bound

  CHAPTER 7

  The Stradivarius of Salvage

  CHAPTER 8

  Journey to the Heart of the Madder

  CHAPTER 9

  Rust Belt Revival

  CHAPTER 10

  Tree House Confessions

  CHAPTER 11

  Saved by the Ball

  CHAPTER 12

  Halloween Spooktacular at the Haunted Dyehouse

  CHAPTER 13

  Casting Off

  Acknowledgments

  Index of Searchable Terms

  INTRODUCTION

  GIRL MEETS BALE

  Rhinebeck, New York. A series of debacles had left me at a daylong signing at one of the country’s biggest sheep and wool festivals, all doped-up on migraine meds and with my underwear on backward. Let’s just say I was not at my best. Late in the afternoon, I noticed a tall, distinguished-looking man standing a few paces away from my table. I assumed he was waiting for one of the people in line, but when the line disappeared he still stood there, studying me with an inscrutable smile. Finally he approached and held out his hand. “My name is Eugene Wyatt,” he said. “I raise the largest flock of purebred Saxon Merino sheep in the United States.”

  My heart skipped a beat. I’d made a life out of traveling the world in search of noteworthy farms, flocks, and people to write about. Here I’d hit the jackpot. Eugene had eyes the color of a Swiss lake, crisp and piercing. He wore a barn jacket that had clearly seen the inside of a barn, with scratches and stains that added to his rugged mystique. He could’ve easily been Robert Redford’s older brother. He had that presence about him.

  We immediately got to talking. Talk turned to correspondence, which turned to a friendship of mutual respect that endured for years. When I began investigating making a line of yarn for a national company, Eugene was the first person I asked for fiber. He asked smart, tough questions that made it clear the business move wasn’t in my best interest. I canceled the yarn line, but I kept Eugene’s wool in the back of my mind. Surely there had to be a way we could work together?

  About a year later, the email came. He filled me in on how shearing and lambing had gone and how his wool had performed at the lab. Every year he sent samples to the Yocom-McColl Wool Testing Lab in Denver for analysis. It’s the last independent commercial lab of its kind in the United States, still operated by its founder and now-octogenarian Angus McColl. Using high-tech equipment, Angus’s team measures things like average fiber length, strength, curvature, cleanliness, and diameter. That last one is measured in microns, or millionths of a meter. Most “fine” Merino wool falls between 18.6 and 19.5 microns, while human hair averages 75 microns and cashmere ranges from 14 to 19 microns. That year, Eugene’s clip was trending between 17.4 and 18.7 microns—on the finest end of Merino and squarely in the range of cashmere. He was pleased.

  I’d gotten similar emails from him before, but this time, he added a curious paragraph at the end:

  “Also, I wonder where you are concerning the yarn project we spoke about a year or so ago. The reason I’m asking is that I have a 676-pound bale of scoured Saxon Merino wool. Right now it’s more than I need . . .”

  Eugene always chose his words very carefully. He didn’t leave an ellipsis because he’d forgotten what else he wanted to say. He’d left me an invitation. Could I think of any fitting use for that bale? Such an amount of wool, 676 pounds, is tricky. It’s not enough to start a yarn company or even, for that matter, a yarn line. But it’s way more than any reasonable human being needs for her own personal pleasure. (I’ll let you debate what constitutes “reasonable.”)

  Still, the question remained: What could I do with it?

  A crazy idea began to form in my head. An epic, exciting, terrifying idea. Before I could stop it, all the details were there. I knew exactly what I could do with that bale.

  The entire project landed in my lap like a fully decorated cake tossed from a moving car. I grabbed it instinctively before my brain had a chance to talk me out of it. But instead of a cake, it was a 676-pound bale of wool. I spent the next ten months trying to persuade myself it was a bad idea, trying to avoid thinking about it, trying to pretend I had a choice in the matter. But in my heart of hearts I’d already committed. My fate was sealed; the bale was a done deal.

  As crude oil ships by the barrel and apples by the peck, wool moves about in bales. Measuring the approximate size of a claw-foot bathtub and weighing two-thirds the weight of a grand piano, a bale contains billions of tightly compressed wool fibers held in place with taut steel wires and wrapped with a thick coat of plastic. You can’t move one without the aid of a pallet jack, a forklift, or at least three professional weight lifters. A bale is a presence and a commitment.

  Most normal people would, upon being offered a chance to purchase an entire bale of wool, likely respond with a polite, if not somewhat confused, “No thank you.” Unless you operate your own ready-to-wear clothing line, you probably don’t need enough wool to make 170 blankets, or 650 sweaters, or 1,500 pairs of socks. Especially if the wool hasn’t even been spun into yarn yet.

  But this was no ordinary bale. Eugene had spent more than thirty years tirelessly breeding and culling his flock to refine the bloodline of this rare, prized strain of Merino sheep whose wool is as fine as cashmere. That single bale represented a year’s worth of work for my farmer friend. He could have easily sold it for twice what he was quoting me. Or he could’ve used it to make more of his own yarn that he sold at New York’s Union Square Greenmarket every Saturday. But for reasons unknown to me at the time, Eugene wanted me—a person who only writes about yarn and has no manufacturing experience whatsoever—to have it.

  Since 2000, I’d had a successful career as the world’s first and probably only professional yarn critic. I got to teach and write articles, to be on the radio and TV, and to write books. By the time Eugene’s bale came into my life, I’d been doing the same thing, chewing the same cud, for thirteen years. Maybe Eugene saw it first, but I soon realized it myself: My interest was starting to wane. Everything began to look the same; every story seemed to be repetitive. I was having a harder and harder time summoning enthusiasm for my subject. I felt like I was on the verge of coasting, just slicing and dicing the same bit of knowledge in as many permutations as possible to make it interesting to me again, as well as to my reade
rs. Turn passion into a profession and the spark inevitably fades, I figured. I plodded on.

  It didn’t help that nine-tenths of the world already thought my job was a joke. Knitting is laden with so many cultural stereotypes that the notion of someone making a full-time career out of reviewing yarn made most people laugh and say, “No, seriously, what do you do?” When I’d say I’d been doing it for more than a decade, they usually backed away.

  But as soon as the bale appeared, I had a vision for something completely different—and it filled me with excitement and fear. Since the whole thing felt as outlandishly epic as Ahab’s quest for the great white whale in Moby-Dick, I began calling this my “great white bale.” Only I was Ishmael, the book’s narrator who’d never been on a whaling ship before. I’d sailed the seven seas of yarn, but never as a manufacturer.

  I would buy that bale and use it to walk through the steps that commercial yarn companies take every time they make yarn in the United States. Not just any yarn, but good yarn—and I would do this not as a critic, but as a customer. How better to appreciate other people’s work than by walking in their shoes?

  After some calculations based on very little actual fact, I figured I could divvy up the bale into four batches. Each batch would go to a different kind of mill, with its own processing technique and equipment. I could even bring color into the equation and try out the fibers on different types of dyes and dyers. I’d been wanting to go back to school, and here it was, an accelerated master’s degree program in yarn making. I’d give it a year.

  My curriculum would follow the life cycle of wool yarn, from shearing and scouring to spinning and dyeing. I’d find the weak spots, the places where things tend to go wrong—and I’d learn how to avoid them. And perhaps, just perhaps, I’d have more understanding and appreciation for the people who are trying to do this for a living.

  I looked into whether I could expand the curriculum higher in the food chain and manufacture actual goods with my wool. But I quickly learned that what seemed daunting to me (my 676 pounds of wool) wasn’t nearly enough fiber for any manufacturing endeavor beyond, say, hand-crocheted amigurumi kitten key chains. And it certainly wouldn’t be enough to launch my own ready-to-wear line. (Which is good because I never know what to wear anyway.) I’d take it as far as yarn and let others make of it what they may.

  Even at the price Eugene quoted me, this yarn degree would not come cheap. Lacking a conventional student loan option for my self-made master’s degree, I had another idea: What if I opened up this project to other people, for both the risks and the rewards? What if I sold them a seat on my bus? Adventures are far more fun in the company of good people, and these would be my people. I’d share every step of the process in words and photos and videos in a password-protected bunker online called, fittingly, the Great White Bale.

  I gave people two “seating” options on this adventure. The Armchair Travelers got the most affordable seats with great big windows so they could follow along online. A smaller group of Explorers paid more and received souvenirs, by which I mean the skeins of yarn from each mill adventure. This option added a sort of scratch-and-sniff component to the program, and it kept me from ending up with more yarn than I could ever use in my lifetime. By the end of the year, we’d all emerge with newly minted Master’s of Yarn-Making degrees. It was crowdfunded education at its very best.

  I suspect part of me knew I needed other people to keep me accountable, lest I chicken out at the very first phone call and end up with an unused bale of wool in my barn—right next to the boxes of knitting-themed notecards I used to sell, the exercise bike I used to ride, and the sign from my store (Clara’s Window) that I ran for three years and that, in actual fact, had two windows. I am nothing if not full of ideas. It’s the maintenance that trips me up. But perhaps if I knew a thousand people were watching my every move, it wouldn’t.

  My timing was good. Curiosity about the American textiles industry was on the rise, and small-batch, breed-specific yarns-with-stories were gaining greater acceptance. Knitters were starting to sniff out yarns from smaller sources, even if they cost more—and consumers, too, were gladly adding a few bucks to the bill for a pair of wool socks entirely grown in this country. After so many years of fetishizing farmers’ markets and free-range everything, the general public was finally catching on that what we put on our bodies is just as important as what we put in them.

  Within a matter of hours of announcing it, all of the Explorer spots in my Great White Bale project were taken and hundreds of Armchair Travelers had signed up. Like that, the project was funded. I was stunned. It seemed that many people were eager to follow along and learn something new. They trusted me not to disappear with their money halfway through the project, as a few others had already done in the knitting world. Or maybe they were betting on a ringside seat to a catastrophic failure that would force me to fake my own death on social media just to escape the pitchforks? I’ll never be sure. All I knew was that this crazy thing was really happening.

  Everything about this was miles beyond my comfort zone, and I liked the degree of fear it sparked in me. I’d never actually seen a bale of wool up close, much less approached a commercial mill about making yarn. I didn’t even know how I’d get the bale shipped to me, or where I’d store it. (My long-suffering partner, Clare, had already declared the barn off-limits.) I just knew that if I didn’t give this a try, if I didn’t scratch this itch, I was on the fast track to becoming that bored restaurant critic who can’t even boil an egg at home.

  Over the next twelve months, the journey would take me on thirty-four takeoffs and landings and along 1,590 miles driven in eight rental cars. I traveled from Maine to California, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia. The actual order of events didn’t always follow a straight line, so, for the sake of clarity, I’ve adjusted the chronology here to match the natural life cycle of wool fibers. We go from shearing on the farm to washing at a steamy scouring plant, from opening the bale to shipping batches of wool to four different mills that had agreed to take on what I didn’t realize until later was an absurdly demanding proposition. Color entered the picture too, with explorations in natural dye, hand-dyeing with acid dyes, and large-scale commercial dyeing.

  More than just admiring the machinery and fondling the finished product, I met the people doing this work. And that turned out to be the most important aspect of the whole experience. Their stories ran the gamut from heartbreaking to life-affirming, and they painted an overarching picture of an industry and way of life that have been hard-hit but refuse to die. I witnessed, on a profound level, what’s at stake and how much all of this matters.

  At a time when other industries seem eager to build walls around their work to keep prying eyes out, I encountered nothing but generosity and kindness. People were hungry to tell me about their work, to explain things as many times as it took, and to help me along on my way. I learned the power of asking for help—and accepting it—and I emerged with a keen appreciation not just for the work, but for the people still doing it.

  What follows isn’t a manual on how to make yarn, although you’ll certainly get some pointers. I like to think of it as a portrait of an extraordinary slice of American life. It’s a tribute to the skill, energy, sacrifice, and optimism of the few people who are still moving forward a domestic industry that globalization has done its best to destroy. And it’s the story of what can happen when you take a risk and try something new.

  The story belongs as much to America’s sheep ranchers and shearers and textile workers as it does me. May it inspire you to think about wool a little differently, and to step outside of your own comfort zone and catch a few cakes yourself.

  CHAPTER 1

  WOOL HARVEST

  Check Eugene Wyatt’s calendar on any given year and you’ll find a giant X on the first Monday in March. That’s when a crew arrives to this sheep farm in New York State for the annual rite of shearing. Depending on the year,
Eugene will have upward of five hundred sheep to be shorn. The whole process takes as long as three days to complete. Eugene times everything else in his year around this date, and it’s one that cannot be missed. Just a few weeks later, the ewes will begin delivering their lambs, and all coats must be off before that happens.

  I’m here to touch raw Saxon Merino wool on the hoof and meet the sheep and people behind it. This is my Michael Pollan moment, but instead of partaking in, say, the slaughter of a pig, I’m visiting the farm where the wool in my bale came from, watching the sheep get shorn, and better getting to know Eugene, the remarkable shepherd of this equally remarkable flock.

  Sheep didn’t always need our help removing their coats. They used to shed each spring, leaving tufts of wool snagged on bushes and fence posts and in the grabby hands of the humans tending them (the latter being a process called “rooing”). For more than ten thousand years, sheep offered a one-stop haberdashery for all our needs. Lacking the distraction of cell phones or social media, we had plenty of time to separate out each kind of fiber by hand for its optimal application. Short tender fibers went in the next-to-skin pile while long pointy ones went in the durable goods basket, not to mention all the various shades of brown, tan, gray, and black that were further sorted for colorwork.

  All that came to a halt at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, which conveniently coincided with the rise of selective breeding as a scientific practice. You’d think we would’ve caught on sooner, but it wasn’t until the mid-1700s, boosted by a British agriculturalist named Robert Bakewell, that we realized we could change what was born by simply choosing which animals were allowed to breed. Random tendencies, if carefully bred from generation to generation, could eventually become the norm. We were rolling up our sleeves and playing Darwin (who was inspired by Bakewell), but it wasn’t always the fittest that ended up surviving. Often, it was the most desirable.