Vanishing Fleece Read online

  “We’ll do it the lazy farmer way,” he said, opening the door and letting Poem out. With a single leap she was over the electric fence and into the field. A few bellowed commands from Eugene, and Poem had those sheep lined up and trotting single-file toward the far end of the field. They passed through a gate, which Eugene closed behind them, and ambled back home. It was the most graceful thing I’d ever seen. Mission accomplished, panting and tail wagging, Poem leapt into the truck for the ride back to the barn.

  “Good dog,” he said, patting her head.

  Unlike Stanley Sobkowiak, Eugene has no enterprising grandson in the wings, no clear succession plans for his farm. Both his parents are gone. His younger brother, with whom he was closest, died of cancer six years ago. He has a sister, as well as another brother in California whose wife’s politics differ from Eugene’s. (“I’m a left-leaning contrarian.”) The problem with treating your flock like family is that they can’t inherit themselves. They need a human.

  “I’m the only one with the memories,” he said. “Nobody else remembers the story about the Studebaker, or . . .” His voice trailed off, and we bounced through more muddy ruts. “When you get to this age, you realize just how alone you are. Bettina is probably the person I’ve known the longest now.”

  By the time we got back to the barn, most of the light was gone from the sky. The sausage packs were now two rows deep, and the shearers were finishing up their last ewes for the day, squinting under bare light bulbs while Air Supply sang “I’m All Out of Love.” More ewes stood quietly outside, their shorn figures looking awkward and small. They chewed and gazed at me. A few were already on the ground, their legs folded up beneath them for the night.

  At this pace they’d be done with the ewes by the next afternoon and ready to bring up the rams. They’d seemed mild enough when I met them, but, when challenged, rams are chock-full of testosterone and very reluctant to be undressed. Shearing them involves a much more basic goal: Get off whatever wool you can. Once shorn, they stomp outside for a brief tussle to reestablish dominance before returning to their respective sunbeams. But by the time any of that happened, I would be on the road heading home.

  Dominique followed me out to my car.

  “The sheep and I just wanted to give you a little parting gift,” she said, reaching into her pocket. “It’s traveled on my dashboard for years, and now it can travel with you.”

  Smiling, she held out a tiny plastic lamb for my own dashboard.

  CHAPTER 2

  DOUBLE BUBBLE BALE AND TROUBLE

  Did you know that, for twenty glorious years, the city of San Angelo, Texas, hosted the Miss Wool of America Pageant? It was a national competition. They flew in twenty-eight Miss Wools from around the country and paraded them throughout the surrounding region in a long caravan of white Oldsmobile convertibles. The crowned winner was given use of a new car for the year, a wardrobe of no fewer than forty woolen garments, luggage in which to carry that wardrobe, and the honor of touring the country in said wardrobe as an ambassador for the American wool industry. Criteria for competing: must be between nineteen and twenty-five years old, have completed at least one year of college, and be able to wear a size ten.

  The pageant ended in 1972, but San Angelo is still very much a wool town. Open an edition of the San Angelo Standard-Times and you’re likely to find news of wool yields and warehouse reports for the season. Once called the Inland Wool Capital of the World, San Angelo is now home to the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers Association, the Bill Sims Wool and Mohair Research Laboratory at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center, and the Producers Livestock Auction, considered the nation’s largest for sheep and lambs. San Angelo is also home to one of the two remaining commercial scouring plants in this country—which is a big deal.

  If you plan on doing anything with your wool, whether it’s making carpets or long underwear or coffins (yes, they make wool coffins now), the very first thing you have to do is get that wool clean. Straight off the sheep, wool is many things, but “clean” is not one of them. It’s full of grease, vegetable matter, dirt, sweat, manure, and anything else the sheep may have rubbed up against over the past year. Once squeaky clean and dry, the wool can be baled and set aside until the carpet factory is ready for you.

  When Eugene first began raising sheep, he sent his wool to Adamstown, Pennsylvania, where the Bollman Hat Company—the oldest hat maker in this country—operated a wool scouring and carbonizing facility. (Carbonizing is the process of treating wool with acids to remove vegetable matter. Nobody offers this in the United States anymore.) Bollman closed that line and moved its processing to Texas, and Eugene was left with little choice but to move with them. He had no other viable option on the East Coast. Depending on the year, shipping wool to and from San Angelo can cost up to five times the cost of the scouring itself. Yet even that is still less expensive and more reliable than any smaller-scale scouring operation Eugene has yet to find, although he’s always looking.

  The region around San Angelo used to produce the largest supply of short, fine wool in this country—the very kind of wool Bollman needed for its hats. Since at least half the weight of dirty wool is lost during scouring, it made economic sense to locate scouring as close to the source as possible. Why pay to ship dirt? (A question Eugene often asks himself.)

  Bollman had operated a scour in San Saba, known as the Pecan Capital of the World, before buying the San Angelo plant and moving operations there. It sits on the site of a cottonseed extract plant that was built in 1898 and converted to wool scouring and top-making in the 1940s. Top-making involves an additional step of carding and combing clean long-staple wool into “top” for worsted spinning. That and the carbonizing were both cut for lack of business. Now there is only one top-maker left in the country, which also happens to be the only other commercial scouring plant in the United States: Chargeurs in Jamestown, South Carolina.

  I’d never spoken to anyone at Bollman, but Eugene knew them well and volunteered to do the initial heavy lifting. “You should go to San Angelo,” he insisted. “It’s a place so foreign to Yankees like us.” Introductions were made, and a date was set for a visit. Feigning concern for the safety of a single woman driving through the wilds of Texas, my friend Jennifer insisted on flying in from Virginia to keep me company and play Thelma to my Louise.

  We headed out of San Antonio at first light, driving northwest into a decidedly flat and scrubby West Texas cattle country. Empty fields were dotted with tufts of cotton as if someone had scattered a box of packing peanuts into the wind. Ornate gates announced ranch after ranch on either side of a long, straight road bleached white by the sun.

  San Angelo (pronounced “s’nangelo”) sits along the Concho River and has a population of just a little more than one hundred thousand people. It’s the county seat of Tom Green County and home to the Goodfellow Air Force Base. A friend of mine was stationed here in the eighties and tells me the whole place stank of wool, especially in the summer. (I would’ve called it “the fragrance of wool,” but, hey, to each his own.)

  Bollman Industries sits on a large tract of industrial land just north of town, right next to the train tracks and between Bethel Baptist Church and Acme Iron and Metal. The letters on the sign by the road are faded and peeling, and the only clue to what happens here might be the tall silver water tower.

  We parked under ancient pecan trees next to a small brown house marked “office.” While I waited for the general manager, Ladd Hughes, I scanned an office whose decor dated back to the days of Starsky & Hutch or Murder, She Wrote. A sagging, wood-veneer bookshelf had back issues of publications with names like Lab Supplies, Facility Supplies, and Thermal something-or-other, and several prized copies of a magazine with “Armstrong” in the name. Framed photos hung on the wall: an aerial shot of all the buildings; a black-and-white photo of a man holding a clipboard and standing amid heaps of wool; another of four men in shirtsleeves seated among bales of wool while an older
gentleman in a plaid shirt appears to have just said something funny.

  Ladd emerged and held out a friendly hand. Eugene had described him as “a soft-spoken and polite Texan,” which proved to be entirely accurate. He was tall and slender, with kind eyes. He wore a sweatshirt, old tennis shoes, and jeans with a giant silver belt buckle.

  “Shall we?”

  He put on a faded baseball cap and led us back outside and toward the scouring plant. As we walked across the dirt yard, Ladd put his hands in his pockets and explained that they’d been having skunk problems.

  “It’s the pecans they’re after,” he said, kicking at a nutshell. “Do you have pecans where you’re from?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s a shame. Anyway, we took care of the biggest problem this morning.” Why did I suspect the solution did not involve a Havahart trap?

  The new scouring building is just a huge metal barn on a concrete slab, with a few small doors and a loading dock at the end. It sits in front of the old scouring building, whose guts were replaced in 2001. That structure is now used for warehousing wool.

  The minute we stepped inside, the scent of dirty wool hit me. Then came the sound of massive machines at work, humming, whirring, clanking.

  Near us, two men were opening bales of raw wool, pulling out the fibers, and putting them in piles. To one side, I noticed a heap of yellowed wool with green paint on it that was being pulled out of the lot. While ear tags are commonly used, many of the larger Western ranchers will also use paint or chalk branding, especially to identify which newborn lamb goes with which ewe. In theory the paint and chalk are temporary, but traces can still remain in shorn fleece. Paint is one of the main reasons American wool generally sells at about 85 percent of Australian prices.

  “They don’t do it in Australia, and they don’t do it in New Zealand, and they get a higher price at market,” Ladd said. “Go figure.”

  Being from a smaller “flock” farm, Eugene’s sheep had no paint, only ear tags, which pose no threat to the wool.

  Fibers were being fed into an enormous green metal contraption that looked like the back of a World War II transport truck. It was actually the tail end of what Ladd called the “openers.” Everything was concealed behind green metal walls, but inside he said there were two sets of large metal teeth that teased open the fibers and blended them together.

  “Shakers” jiggle the wool so that much of the residual dirt falls through a grate at the bottom. The more dirt they can get out of the fibers before they ever hit the water, Ladd said, the less water they need to use. Before they upgraded the whole system and added the shakers, they were using up to three gallons to scour each pound of wool. Now, that number has dropped to between three-quarters and one gallon of water. At three million pounds of wool a year, that’s a significant change in water use.

  The openers and shakers spanned a few car lengths before making a sharp left and running another few car lengths. At the end, fibers were being mechanically measured and fed onto a conveyor belt leading up to the scouring line. (You’ll sometimes also hear them referred to as scouring “trains” because the series of giant metal bowls could, with the right degree of imagination, look like train cars.)

  From where I stood, all I could see was a maze of pipes, pumps, and valves. Hidden behind them and running the length of the line were giant inverted steel pyramids, pointing downward but never actually touching the ground, like angular udders. With all the commotion above, you had the feeling of standing under a ride at an amusement park, complete with occasional splatterings and drizzles of mystery liquids. But step back and you’d see thick wisps of steam wafting lazily upward, as if someone just lifted all the lids on an industrial-sized restaurant steam table—but instead of chicken cacciatore or broccoli in cheddar sauce, the six giant stainless-steel tanks were filled with hot, wet wool.

  Until 2001, Bollman had been operating with 1940s equipment (Ladd kept referring to it as “the old Sargent line,” and I nodded sagely as if I knew what that was). The new Andar system they imported from New Zealand (another approving nod) allows them to run up to three times more wool with less labor and less water. The plant employs thirteen people.

  While they prefer to scour at two thousand pounds per hour, the system can be cranked up to as high as twenty-five hundred pounds per hour if needed—which translates into being able to wash and dry up to twenty-five thousand pounds of wool per workday. Eugene’s entire clip would take just an hour to scour.

  “Of course we can dial it down to a thousand pounds per hour if we need to,” Ladd said. I gave another knowing nod, pretending we all knew one thousand pounds was the magic number. It is, however, the minimum amount they can accept. “Without at least one thousand pounds,” Ladd explained, “you don’t have the critical mass to keep the wool moving forward.” At last, I could give a nod of genuine understanding.

  He led us up metal open-mesh steps to the top of the scouring line. Before me unfolded the most glorious mechanical contraption I’d ever seen. It was indeed a long train-like structure of six car-sized stainless-steel tanks filled with very hot water. The first three had soap for the wash, and the second three ran clear for the rinse. Like food being digested by an earthworm, the wool moved from bowl to bowl as one nonstop mass.

  As it marched forward, it passed through a pair of roller pressers that squeezed out as much liquid as possible. “It’s set for twenty tons of pressure after the first wash and the last rinse,” Ladd explained. “All the others are set at ten tons.” I’d given up nodding and was just trying to keep up with my notes. (I’d asked Jen to do the same, but she was too distracted by Ladd’s belt buckle.) The roller pressers help prevent dirty water from moving with the wool into the next tank, allowing Ladd to run the system longer before having to drain and refill. While the old Sargent system had to be drained every day, this one has a series of self-cleaning mechanisms and can go a whole week before needing to be drained.

  Every once in a while Ladd would lean away to spit—into one of the open runoff tubs, toward the wool making its way to the dryer, over the edge of the train, anywhere. I assumed it was chewing tobacco. His aim was impressive.

  Waste water is disposed of in the San Angelo sewer system following strict EPA guidelines, and Bollman pays the city a pretty penny for the privilege of doing so. I sensed that this was a source of frustration for Ladd—not that they had to play by the rules but that foreign competition didn’t.

  “Eighty percent of U.S. wool goes to China or India for scouring,” Ladd said. “They have no labor or environmental regulations like we do here.” He shook his head. “Some plant in India could run their pipe down the middle of a street and nobody would say a thing. They can scour and comb for less than half of my wash cost. You can’t compete with that.”

  Ironically, at $0.55 per pound, Bollman is by far the cheapest option for Eugene. Boutique scouring operations in New England, the kind smaller fiber farms must use, run upward of $5 per pound. For a thousand pounds of wool, that’s the difference between $550 and $5,000—or, for Eugene, it’s the difference between a viable business and a nonviable one.

  As busy as Bollman seems now, it used to be busier. As recently as 2005, they ran in twenty-hour shifts processing eight million pounds of wool. A devastating draught in 2011, declining wool prices, and global competition from China and India have more than halved that number. Today, Bollman operates in ten-hour shifts and processes three million pounds a year—of which only one hundred thousand pounds goes toward Bollman hats. Now that Mohawk Industries (the second largest carpet manufacturer in this country) has moved everything overseas, the plant is kept afloat primarily by Pendleton, Crescent, and Woolrich—all of whom still need to import wool because the United States doesn’t produce enough of what they need.

  Ladd kept walking us down the line. At each tank I noticed little bowls with gurgling streams of runoff being funneled into more pipes below, presumably part of the system’s self-cle
aning function. The first stream looked like bubbly dark coffee, whereas by the last bowl it had lightened into diluted iced tea. Ladd explained that the fiber spent about seven minutes in each bowl, and the majority of the dirt and grease was caught in that very first bowl.

  Meanwhile, the wool was constantly pushed forward by the most mesmerizing part of the whole system: fierce-looking metal claws called “harrow rakes.” They dipped into the woolly water at a perfect ninety-degree angle, pushed the contents forward, and then lifted out of the water to return to their original position for another dip, and another, and another. Since back-and-forth agitation felts wool, the rakes never reversed direction—they only dipped in, pushed forward, and then lifted out. It was hypnotic, like watching the taffy pull at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

  We were still standing on the raised catwalk running alongside the tanks. Glancing back on the floor below, I noticed a tall green thing that looked like a beer keg. It was their newest toy: a lanolin extractor from France. It had been in operation for only a few weeks. Water from the first tank was constantly pumped into the extractor, where centrifugal force caused much of the grease to rise to the top and the residual grease to cling to the dirt and sink to the bottom. Thus cleaned, the water in the middle was pumped back into the scouring system. Their goal was to achieve 5 percent lanolin extraction from that first wash. So far, they’ve been able to fill one 420-pound barrel with wool grease every day, which they sell to companies that further refine it into lanolin for the cosmetics and nutritional supplement industries. That income helps them keep scouring prices as low as possible.