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Time Travel in Utah's High Country

On a recent mountain bike ride near Richfield UT, they caught me sleeping. I was focusing on choosing a path between the rocks, when my herding group dog, Coffee Girl, took after a herd of sheep that we had almost stumbled into. But she was eventually scolded into returning to me, and the sheep weren't too rattled.

Hey wait a minute, weren't we only a couple seconds from an ambush by giant white dogs, screaming out of the sagebrush to protect their herd?

But none came. As we sidled up the ridge, the size of the herd became more apparent.


Where were the dogs and the human shepherd? Eventually we spotted him. But he seemed to only have a couple border collies to help him.


I waved at him so he'd notice that my dog was now on a leash, but he didn't respond. Maybe he didn't speak English, or even Spanish. Maybe he was a Vasco, that is, a Euskal from the Basque country. I'm a bit skeptical about Great Pyrenees dogs being hostile to humans, but I wasn't so sure what they would think of my "coyote," Coffee Girl, even on her leash. So we kept our distance from the shepherd, and he was spared a dozen questions from me.

We kept climbing on this rocky ATV trail. Half the time I had to dismount and push the mountain bike. You don't want to be naive about ridges. Why are they ridges in the first place? Because they are erosion-resistant volcanic rock, surrounded by easier-eroding sedimentary layers.

I was feeling inspired by the romance of the Basque High Country, and made a rare decision: to go for a loop route instead of the more typical out-and-back. Yes, loop routes are 10 times more likely to get you into trouble, especially since I don't bring a GPS or maps, or even study maps at home all that much.

We were helped by being on the Paiute ATV trail of central Utah. And I did find a loop back home, although it took 5 hours. But along the way there were those moments of Doubt and Foreboding Doom that make an outing interesting. I'm not being facetious. False summit after false summit. I yearned to hear a noisy ATV or to see the dusty contrail of a pickup truck, because that would signify that we had finally succeeded at finding the quick road back home!
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Back at camp around sunset, my dog and I heard the tinkling of a single bell. Sure enough, out on the road in front of camp, the herd of sheep was moving along, and rather briskly at that. I thought there were about 300 sheep in the herd, but was later to learn it was 1200! The herd moved almost noise-lessly as a dense pack, with barely a baah out of them. 

Was the bell on an "alpha" sheep? Was it meant to help the herd, shepherd, or the dogs follow the herd? Or was it meant to help on foggy nights?


Once again we saw the shepherd. Instead of only two border collies he had a small herd of border collies and blue heelers. Is that a walking stick in his hand? He certainly needs one. I guess they don't use those long shepherd's staffs with the rounded crook at the end, anymore.


And yes, three Great Pyrenees. How noble of Purpose they are!



This pastoral experience enriched a wonderful and difficult day of mountain biking. It made it about more than just eye-candy and aerobic exercise. It helped me appreciate, what?, 8000 years of anthropological changes: our development from hunter/gatherers to a pastoral phase with domesticated herds, to agriculture and settlements, then to cities and long-distance sea trade, to industry, and finally to our current phase, such as it is.  

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Let's do a movie quote from Sydney Pollack's 1994 remake of Bill Wilder's "Sabrina": the money-man, Linus (Harrison Ford), has taken Sabrina (Julia Ormond) to his "cottage" on Martha's Vineyard. They take in the view from the oceanside window. Sabrina hands Linus her camera:

Sabrina: "Don't take a picture. Just look."

Linus looks through the view finder and describes what he sees, "Ocean (yawn), ocean, ocean, quaint little fishing village...lighthouse. A guy is going into a lighthouse. There's a job for you. What must that be like? What kind of guy takes a job keeping a lighthouse?"


What kind of man, indeed. And what kind of man becomes a shepherd in the modern age? Is our shepherd (in the photo) out there all night? In the past they must have been. Imagine how cold it must have been, and how solitary. It is easy to see why there was a link between the religious and the poetical imaginations.

After a night of shivering, the shepherd awoke in the mountain fog upon hearing the tinkling of a single sheep's bell. He knew the herd was close and safe.

Comments

Bob said…
Great post, I need to get out of my comfort zone!
edlfrey said…
I don't think the Comment that I left early today made it.

What I think I said in it was that the shepherd that you saw may well have not been Basque. Since 9/11 immigration changes there have been fewer Basque and more shepherds from Peru and Chile. This may not have help with the communication however because of South American Spanish dialects.

Years ago I found this to be true while in the Dominican Republic. The troops from Chile could not understand the Dominicans nor the Dominicans understand the Chileans. I had equal problems with both but we 'talked'.

The 'alpha' sheep is a 'lead sheep' and where it goes the herd will follow. They will follow 'just like sheep'; sometimes a goat is used as the lead.
XXXXX said…
This is one of your best.
Methinks you are a lot like that shepherd. Perhaps the biggest difference is that you were there by choice; he may not have been.
I wonder if he appreciated the solitary and whether the experience gave him a sense of the religious, etc. or if it was just money to pay the bills.
The line "Don't take a picture. Just look." is a great one, quite pregnant with a greater meaning. Online I once ran into someone who said she had stopped taking pictures on her adventures when she realized that the scales had tipped and she found herself too involved in taking pictures to post online and that it totally detracted from the experience of being there.
Having emptied a few houses in my lifetime, all those pictures end up in the garbage anyway. When one takes them out later, they're a poor substitute for being there. Just look. Breathe it in and let it become a part of you.
It is quite a feeling to time warp in such a way. As I grow older, I find myself more and more interested in such things, usually in the form of geology and paleoanthropology, as there appears to be great comfort in realizing one's spot in the grand scheme of things. Now here's where pictures come in handy. Did you notice that your posted pictures started with the sheep in the distance and they got closer and closer? A bit like life....seeing a speck of something in the distance which catches our eye, zeroing in on it and trying to get a better look until finally it reveals itself to its fullest.
I will just add one more comment of which I don't expect you to agree with. This experience of time warping or solitary, however you might label it, is something that is available to anyone no matter where they are. Surely your experience creates an ideal birthplace but then it is something one can take with them, this same inner state. One can be physically surrounded by noise and much confusion but still able to experientially maintain an inner state of solitary and religious imagination.
That's the whole point about taking pictures. One has to stop and breathe it in, become a part of it in order to be able to do that and interrupting the process by taking pictures, in a vain attempt to materialize it, makes it an entirely inferior experience.
Thanks, Bob. Sometimes getting outside the comfort zone helps to bring on a memorable experience.
Indeed, you guessed right. I met the "pastor" (en Espanol) last evening. He WAS from Peru. He was short and dark skinned. He walked all day without a staff or pole. He didn't even carry a water bottle. (Consider that in contrast to gringo hikers with their expensive titanium poles and Camelbak water bladders.) His "ingles" was so bad that we communicated in my (decaying) Spanish. It's funny that I didn't know the words for grass ("pasto") and shepherd ("pastor").

We both enjoyed our muddled conversation. He taught me the names of his three border collies: Chica, Coco, and Kiku. They laid down and rested as we talked. I learned that the lambs sometimes munch on the sagebrush and get sick.
Thank you for a great comment, George. I too wonder if the "pastor" appreciated what was special about his job or whether it was, "This or starve." Perhaps he yearned for a comfy job in a corporate cubicle.

"as there appears to be great comfort in realizing one's spot in the grand scheme of things." Yes indeed, that is the subject of a post.
John V said…
MMMMMMM.......lamb........MMMMMMM!