Spring Sheep

Sheep season came and went in April and May here, though it will be back again in the fall when the shepherds are moving flocks down into the desert for winter grazing. I try to document the shepherds, their dogs and the sheep every year when they pass through — I think it’s such a beautiful way of life but I also genuinely care for my local ranching community and the surrounding ranching communities and to document their work and lifestyle is an ongoing personal project for me. I thought I had been photographing shepherds for nine years but Robert reminded me that I have actually been photographing shepherds for closer to thirteen or fourteen years! When we lived in Arizona there were Basque ranching outfits that hauled ewes down to lamb and graze on the alfalfa crops that surrounded the USFW satellite station we lived on, on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation in the lower desert of Arizona along the Colorado River. I don’t think I’ll ever grow tired of photographing this subject, it’s so pastoral and peaceful and Idahoan.

My Own Shepherd

7I9A37967I9A38157I9A38197I9A38237I9A38357I9A38597I9A3872
The sun is setting in the canyon now.  Basalt rubble is licked gold in the late light and the green fuzz of spring turns electric in the sweet, dark face of dusk.  We sit on the hood of our truck at the edge of a gravel road and watch as the ewes mutter at the lambs and shuffle hungrily from noxious weed patch to noxious weed patch under the omniscient gazes of five Great Pyrenees.

It is a wonderful, warm night with him by my side.  I feel the desert wind in my hair, gentle for the first time in weeks.  I squint at the sun.

I feel an itchy tickle on my neck and reach up with a suntanned hand to check if it’s a tick.  It’s not.  I lean back again on both of my palms, elbows locked against the small weight of my upper body, and I watch the shepherd on his horse in the distance, working in slow sweeps with the help of his herding dogs, leaving no lamb to fend for itself in this wild, inhospitable country.

All too soon, four hundred sheep have moved across the road and up the face of the mesa towards the sheep wagon for night, to sleep beneath a quilt of stars, lulled into dreams by a jittering mobile of ancient light.  I am not ready for sleep.  I am restless.  I feel the press of time rushing the infinite nature of my soul.  I feel the swing of the planet pulling on my skin and bones.

I need my own shepherd to tell me, “That’s enough for today.  Rest now.  Tomorrow will come and then we shall see what we shall see.