Organic farmer Gretchen Green woke early in the morning on Friday, January 6th to tend to her herd of organically raised sheep, used for both their wool and their meat. As she exited her small, reclaimed wood barn to head out into the fields she stopped in her tracks, caught off-guard by a totally unfamiliar sight. Out front all of her 75 sheep were completely covered in random alphabet letters, Times New Roman font, 18pt, English language. At first she thought that someone had played a practical joke and spray painted the fleece, but on closer inspection she realized the letters were embedded in the fleece fibers, as if the sheep had grown new coats since she had tended to them the night before. Gretchen, stunned and speechless, inched over to grab her horse’s currycomb, began to brush the fleece, first slowly and then with intensity, but the letters would not budge.
Five miles up the road another sheep farmer, Sam Shepherd, rose early and was confronted by his 200 sheep covered in the same English alphabet letters. Echo Sky and her two teenage children lived two miles from Gretchen Green. When they woke to find their four 4-H sheep covered in letters, the teenagers immediately sent twitter messages to their friends down in Pt. Reyes Station. By 10am cars were pulling up to their yard and friends and a few strangers were out in the field inspecting the sheep. By days end, most of the small community had learned of the alphabet sheep and most were scratching their heads in utter confusion as all the sheep in this rural area were infected by this unusual condition.
Early on Saturday morning, local TV crews in vans plowed down the dirt road to Gretchen Green’s farm and by day’s end, NBC, CNN, FOX, and all the major radio and TV stations had crews in Pt. Reyes Station. While listening to the various interviews with experts one could hear words like: “mysterious, unfathomable, incomprehensible.”
By Sunday it was world news and semiotic specialists, livestock experts, archeologists, psychics, religious leaders, linguists, and the editors of Wikipedia, the Oxford English dictionary, and Webster’s online were planning travel to this hamlet in northern California in order to be onsite to try and decipher the meaning of the letters. By Tuesday numerous theories were spreading around the globe, Christians were convinced that these letters were messages from God, much like the ten plagues in the Bible. Semiotic specialists were working on complicated algorithms (with software engineers sent by Google) to see if a message was decipherable in all of the random letters. The folks from Oxford Dictionary were convinced that Times New Roman type was being used for a reason, since it was developed in the 1930’s in England. The French sent a letter of outrage to the U.S. President, sparked by comments in the American and British media, which had clearly identified English as the dominant language of global discourse. American “gypsies” in tie-dyed t-shirts and dreadlocked Rastafarians began to set up tents near the sheep, convinced that this was the first concrete sign of the Age of Aquarius since Jerry Garcia’s memorial in Golden Gate Park back in 1995. Everyone and anyone weighed-in with opinions and many tried to benefit from the alphabet sheep. T-shirt vendors, printed shirts with varied alphabet sheep images accompanied by slogans like, “Woolenium,” “Got Wool?” “Cotton’s Revenge,” and best of all, an image of a hangman sheep, left hanging, with all the letters in the alphabet placed on the line below. Mark Jacobs and his team quickly launched a new wool handbag with alphabet leather letters to help bolster the downward sales of Luis Vuitton brand experienced as part of the economic downturn.
As with all modern phenomena, attention began to shift away from the alphabet sheep in less than a month’s time and on to other world events, some major, most minor, yet demanding of our momentary attention as new flashes swam across twitter and the bottom of our TV sets, or caught our eye as we scanned our favorite blog with morning coffee. (Had the president of a former Eastern Bloc country made a deal with the Chinese minister of finance to fix prices on the manufacture of hard plastic?).
Months passed and daily life in West Marin began to settle back to some semblance of normalcy, with only an occasional film crew rumbling down rural roads.
Over in the East Bay, Jane Plant was searching the Internet for activities to do locally with her two children, 8-year-old Spike and 10-year-old Clara. Clara was on summer break from her residential program for autistic children and Jane wanted to create a memorable first summer back home for her. Knowing her daughter’s love for the natural world, Jane searched for information on kayaking in the San Francisco Bay and stumbled across an article mentioning West Marin and the sheep phenomenon she had only been peripherally aware of ten months ago. Reading the article prompted her to locate a supportive kayak teacher at a school on Tomales Bay and before she knew it, with the click of her laptop, a weekend was booked for all four members of her family. On the drive to West Marin she began to casually tell her children about Woolenium. Spike was only mildly interested, but Clara asked a hundred questions, exasperating Jane and causing her to turn up the car radio so they could pass the golden hills of Nicasio in relative silence.
At the first sight of the alphabet sheep, Clara implored her father to stop the car and as soon at it was safe he pulled the older Prius off the road and onto the narrow dirt shoulder. The family lumbered out and Clara began to search the fields studying the sheep with a quiet intensity. A few family photos were taken with their iPhone, complete with the alphabet sheep in the background and the family car headed for their kayaking destination. Two days later, on the ride home Clara asked her mother to stop the car (the parents equally shared in the chores of family life and it was her turn to drive) in order to gaze at the sheep. As the family posed once again for a departing picture, Clara began to recite what she believed was the message imbedded in the sheep’s wool coat: “…take care, take care…, take care of the earth.” As it turns out, every ninth sheep had the word earth scrambled into the alphabet letters and it took 9 sheep clustered together in just the right way to see the message clearly. That very evening Jane Plant posted Clara’s decoded message on every related website and blog about the alphabet sheep she could find. A few readers replied with interest and support; most ignored the message.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LeeAnn Bartolini is a professor of psychology at Dominican University of California, engaged in numerous creative endeavors including prose and poetry writing. She currently resides in west Marin County.