Shawn: From Cow Boy To Soay Sheep Man

Once upon a time and long ago, 14 summers ago as best we can remember, a scrawny local teenager not yet old enough to drive began working on our farm, eventually becoming our full-time, resident ranch hand. It ended yesterday when that same young man, now 29 years old, married and the father of our beautiful little pseudo-granddaughter, packed up his family and their worldly goods and headed north to Lebanon, Oregon, to start a new chapter working in his brother-in-law’s irrigation gasket manufacturing company. I have mentioned Shawn here only occasionally. It is high time he had his fifteen minutes of Chronicles fame.

When he first came to work for us, Shawn had never seen a Soay sheep and he was openly disdainful of their small size. His preference was for working cattle, or at least a respectably large breed of commercial sheep. By the time I started taking pictures of our sheep operation, we had converted from a couple of huge Suffolks to the more easily manageable heritage Soay sheep. Considering how many hundreds of times Shawn held lambs while Steve “worked” them, I suspect that Shawn came to prefer Soay to Suffolks, if not to cattle.

Summer by summer Shawn came back, all through high school and college. As he departed for his senior year at OSU, he asked if he could work for us full time after he graduated. Well, yeah!

Over the years, Shawn and Steve became trusted colleagues. They developed a close personal relationship that was not quite father/son, but much more than arms-length boss/employee. Steve managed to pound a bit of genetics into Shawn’s “I don’t need to know science” brain and Shawn taught Steve a thing or two about how to deal with ovines. These are their stories.

HAYING

It takes an awfully lot of hay to feed a growing flock of sheep, even the diminutive Soay sheep, and hay was always a big part of Shawn’s work life at Saltmarsh Ranch. The earliest picture I can find of the Shawn Era shows him working with George Noyes, our hay broker, eight years ago. The rest of the hay pictures are from 2009, when George brought his buff daughter and her friend to “help.” After a full day of racing to stack the bales they tossed onto the elevator at increasingly and intentionally breakneck speed, Shawn begged off from evening chores, a little sheepish [sorry] at having been run ragged by two girls!

The upper half of our farm includes a steep grassy field that calls for what one of our neighbors dubbed “extreme haying.” After contracting out the haying for a couple of years, Steve and Shawn decided they could do it themselves with the help of an antique two-string baler and the other Boy Toys called for.

“PROJECTS”

Have two companionable males ever spent more than a ballgame’s worth of time together without coming up with projects? Not on our farm. We had the “set up the feeders” project, the “make lamb jugs” project, the seemingly endless new shelters, all in addition to the regular work of the farm: setting fence, hauling manure, hoof trimming, loading pipe, fixing pipe, a never-ending stream of “stuff” that needs doing. Disclaimer: I know there’s a lot more to it, but I never imagined having to write this post and I’ve only got the photos I’ve got!

SARTORIAL SPLENDOR

It never ceased to amaze me that a young fellow who professed to love dirt farming also cared so much about his appearance out in the fields or even while holding lambs. Shawn was by far the best dressed member of the Saltmarsh Ranch management team for 14 years. I failed to capture his silk bolo tie with sterling clasp to match his fanciest wide-brimmed hat, carefully angled on his head. But in looking through our thousands of lamb pictures, I realized I had accidentally memorialized a pretty good cross-section of Shawn’s wardrobe, especially the shirts.

There were stripes …

And plaids …

And camo …

And every so often a jacket …

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

We knew Shawn’s relationship with Amy was serious when she came south to visit for the first time. Not long after, or so it seemed to us, they became engaged and thus beganeth the mighty wedding preparations.

It doesn’t get much better than to have your ranch hand fall in love and ask if he can get married in his sheep pasture. We were honored, if somewhat taken aback. We felt like wet blankets pointing out to Shawn that our pastures are not (ahem) clean enough for a hundred people to walk in. Not to mention the logistics of getting several sets of octo- and nonagenarian grandparents into and out of the pastures safely. And there was the matter of parking, particularly the overabundance of really big pickups that Amy’s family favors. So the bridal couple settled for making relish and cold cut trays, gussying up, and filling our house with hair spray, perfume, country music and endless laughter, ending with the then-obligatory “first look” photo in our back yard. Then all and sundry decamped to Valley View Vineyards for the ceremony and reception. Our house has seldom absorbed so much happy chaos in one day!

ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL

The sheer delight in sharing a found creature does not end when little boys grow up, as I learned almost from the first day Shawn was here.

Nor does it have to be a small found creature; any resident animal will do. In the case of our livestock guardian dogs, “little” is, of course, a matter of degree.