Vanishing Fleece

by Clara Parkes

  Soon I’d be back to repackage the fiber in four bundles so they’d be ready to go when I had decided what my four mills would be. But for today, for now, both the bale and I were exhausted. I tucked it in and bid it good night.

  CHAPTER 5

  READY TO ROLL

  My little bale had gained a fair amount of notoriety in the knitting world by now, and people were eager for a peek at The Bale. Here it is! Reach in, have a touch!

  During a dyehouse tour, one woman did reach in and help herself to a touch, which she then stuffed in her pocket. This she admitted to me a few days later after cornering me at a local event. “I took it to my spinning group.” She narrowed her eyes and leaned in as I inched backward. “It’s not that good.”

  She stood back and eyed me proudly, as if she’d figured out the answer to a puzzle and was waiting for the prize.

  I took an instant dislike to this woman. Not because she’d stolen from me, and not because she’d insulted my wool, but because she’d managed to hit me in a vulnerable spot. I have no memory of what I actually said to her, but “you’re right” wasn’t it. I just knew it was time to repackage that bale and get the wool in motion. Once I saw how it performed at the mill, I’d be able to judge its quality for myself.

  Luckily, Claudia at the dyehouse was no stranger to shipping fiber. She had the bags, the manpower, and the shipping connections. In fact, she’d just shipped four hundred pounds of alpaca to Tennessee.

  “Believe me,” she said the next time I was at the dyehouse, “I’ve been trying to get my mind around this shipping business for some time now.”

  She promptly produced an enormous rectangular cloth bag with flaps at the top. Aha, so this was a bale bag. I remembered Eugene telling me about these during shearing, how the bigger ranches used pneumatic bale pressers to pack hundreds of pounds of wool into perfectly shaped blocks. Up close, it just looked like a big square sack. She set it out on the floor, and while I contemplated exactly how we were going to do this, people from the dyehouse began to appear.

  Brian, a new hire who grew up in the mill and was thrilled to be back in it, brought over a tall cardboard box into which they could put the bale bag, like a frame, so that it’d stand up and stay open while we filled it.

  I lifted the drop cloth and tenderly pulled aside the plastic on the opened end of the bale, like a doctor examining a patient. Brian and Claudia looked at me, and then at each other.

  Brian stepped in with a box cutter and made two broad, fearless slashes in the plastic. While I gasped, he ripped it open so they could get at the fiber. Easy there! Too fast! Slow down!

  Then I noticed a brown area in the fibers, like copper, or rust. An alarm sounded in my brain. Was that . . . water damage? Was my bale not only bad wool, but rotten too? It wasn’t a big spot, and the fiber around it still looked and felt fine. I decided to pretend I hadn’t seen it.

  Claudia called over two more people from her crew, who introduced themselves as Jeanne and Whitney.

  “What do you need?” Jeanne asked, rolling up her sleeves.

  “You want this in there?” Whitney asked.

  Not even questioning what we were doing or why, they jumped right in and started helping. They stuffed and stuffed and stuffed that bag with armfuls of wool until they thought we’d reached 168 pounds—my bale, more or less divided by four. Brian rolled over a small scale, and they dragged the box onto it. The verdict? Nowhere near.

  By now the bag was able to stand up on its own, so they removed the cardboard box and kept stuffing.

  During a lull in the conversation, Jeanne told me how she had worked in the office of this very mill for thirty years, back when WestPoint Home manufactured Vellux blankets here. For everyone at the dyehouse, this building was a lucky find. Most of the other mill buildings they’d looked at hadn’t been upgraded or improved in decades, while this one had been maintained until WestPoint Home shut it down in 2009.

  “So you must remember the carding machines and the spinning frames,” I said wistfully, but she shook her head.

  “Oh no, that was long gone. These were all synthetic.”

  She marveled that we were standing in the same spot where they used to dye the blankets. I asked if it was hard for her to be back in a place that had so much history for her, and she shook her head. “I’m just so happy to be back here and see the space being used.” She paused. “It’s home.”

  By now we were sure we’d reached our weight, so they pulled over an even bigger, ancient Toledo scale that normally stands in the back loading area next to the women’s restroom.

  Bingo! One bag done.

  While our backs were turned, however, the bale appeared to have replenished itself. For all that we’d removed, we hadn’t made a dent in this thing.

  “You want us to do another one?” Brian asked.

  The conversation shifted, and then Jeanne chimed in, “So are we doing another one?”

  Not until they’d asked three times did I realize that they actually wanted to do more. So we got out a second bag and began stuffing it. They got faster.

  We did a third bag in what seemed like no time at all. I felt bad telling them to stop before the bale was empty, but I needed to keep some wool accessible in case mills asked for samples. Plus, it was all going too fast. At this rate the whole project would be done in a month, and then where would I be? We stopped there, and I thanked Brian and Jeanne for their time.

  The adventure wasn’t over. I had to seal the bale bags shut and get them ready for shipping. How do you keep bale bags closed, pray tell? Do you use a staple gun, or perhaps duct tape? Nope. You use bale fasteners, of course. Because such things exist. Made of galvanized wire by Maspro in Australia, they’re a bit like a half-open paperclip but with viciously sharp edges. They have to be sharp so they can puncture the bale bag and hold it snug.

  Claudia and Whitney set to work folding over the top flaps, inserting a fastener into the edges, pulling the top taut, and then slipping the other end of the fastener into the body of the bag. They added two more fasteners along the flap, and along its sides, to keep everything snug.

  This particular bale was going freight, so it’d need to be further secured. “I have just the thing,” Claudia said, and then disappeared. A few minutes later she returned, pushing a new contraption in front of her. They had stocked up on all sorts of gizmos for the dyehouse but hadn’t even opened the wrapping on this one yet. It was a strapping machine.

  I was suddenly overcome with a wave of joy at the utterly fresh, unknown adventure of it all. This was already such fun, so random, and it was entirely of my own creation. I loved not knowing and then walking through the process of learning, of finding out how things are done. And I loved that fate had placed me here, standing with two smart, strong women, learning how to master a machine we had just encountered.

  As if reading my thoughts, Claudia smiled and said, “If I’d asked you a year ago if you’d be standing here trying to figure out a strapping machine . . .?” I laughed and replied, “If I’d asked you a year ago if you’d have a dyehouse?”

  We pulled out the instructions, read them multiple times, considered the matter carefully, and proceeded to wrap our first wool bag with two rounds of sturdy black strapping. It would then be placed on a wooden pallet, tightly wrapped in plastic, and shipped off to a mill far away—a mill whose identity was still undecided.

  This whole letting-other-people-into-my-business thing was new territory for me. I’d been a fiercely solo operator for the past thirteen years, defending my editorial independence and rejecting anyone’s attempts to attach strings to my work. But here, I had to accept that I couldn’t do it all myself. I’d already hired my trusted friend Jane Cochran to manage the master spreadsheet of all my Great White Bale Explorers and Armchair Travelers, and to respond to their emails in a timely manner. Which she did beautifully, although we never did get the spreadsheet quite right.

  Today I really needed help again, and Claudia wa
s happy to offer it. The deal we struck was this: She would help me ship my wool (this and the other bags), and in return I would spread the word about a grant campaign she was working on. She needed help getting people to vote, and I had access to tens of thousands of people through my online writing. I’d never made such a tit-for-tat bargain before, but I justified it by telling myself I didn’t agree to promote her campaign; I just said I’d help publicize it.

  But watching the genuine entertainment my bale had given the people in the dyehouse that day made me realize something else I’d never considered before: Asking for help doesn’t always mean making other people miserable. In fact, if you’re doing something really fun, it’s almost selfish not to share.

  CHAPTER 6

  BARTLETT BOUND

  My work would have been much easier if this project had taken place before 1775. I would have handed my bale to a farm family and watched them turn it into fabric. The children would tease open the fibers and prepare them for spinning. The women would spin the fibers into yarn, and the men would weave that yarn into fabric. That’s how textiles were made. By hand.

  Things changed dramatically in the 1770s, with the invention of the water frame and the spinning jenny—two devices that automated some of the yarn-spinning process. Then in 1779, Samuel Crompton, a weaver who was frustrated by the limitations of those two inventions, took what he did like—the moving carriage of the water frame and the drafting rollers of the jenny—and incorporated them into a new invention he called the spinning mule.

  He gave it that name not because it looked like a mule or was powered by mules or because a mule once saved Crompton’s life and he wanted to show his gratitude, but because the machine was a hybrid of two others, just as the mule is the hybrid offspring of a female horse and a male donkey. It quickly became the standard, and by the time Richard Roberts patented further improvements in 1825 that made the mule fully automatic, the industrial revolution was off to the races. Eventually the mule was replaced by something that gets the job done twice as fast. Today, the spinning mule is a rarity. Only one remains in commercial operation in the United States. Lucky for me, it is in Maine, just a few hours from where the bale was sitting.

  In 1821, Ozias Bartlett opened a mill along Higgins Brook in the tiny town of Harmony. It was powered by a single water wheel. By 1907, the mill was listed as a maker of knitting yarns with two sets of cards, two looms (marked “idle”), and 144 spools (mills advertised their capacity by the total number of spools on all their spinning equipment). The mill also offered dye services and sold direct to the public. Even as late as the 1940s, the mill operated in two shifts with a staff of twenty in constant production. Today, Bartlett spins just 140 pounds of yarn a day and employs seven people.

  I knew I wanted to get inside this mill. Rumor had it that Bartlett was a very tough nut to crack for custom work. The owner had a reputation for being gruff, if not downright curmudgeonly. I’d always imagined a crotchety Old Man Bartlett standing in the mill doorway waving a rusty Civil War musket and yelling, “You get off my property!” This is rural Maine, after all.

  It turns out, Old Man Bartlett (whose real name was Russell Pierce and who was a perfectly fine person, I’m told) had since sold the mill to a retired New Hampshire firefighter named Lindsey Rice. Lindsey and his wife, Susan, had for decades operated a farm, raised sheep, and brought their wool to Bartlett for spinning. On more than one occasion, Lindsey had helped Russell fix a rope drive band that had broken and needed splicing. After a particularly urgent rescue run to the mill with his wife—on their wedding anniversary, no less—Lindsey asked Russell if he’d ever thought of retiring. Talk turned to numbers, and Lindsey and his wife found themselves the proud new owners of a very old mill.

  There was only one problem: They lived in New Hampshire, and his wife had no desire to abandon her proximity to Boston and New York for life in a tiny Maine town in the middle of what could easily seem like the epicenter of nowhere. They put their farm on the market anyway, the idea being to downsize. For the seven years it took them to sell, Lindsey trekked up to the mill and back every week, sleeping on a cot in his office. Though they still maintain roots in New Hampshire, they have since bought a little place in the area. But at the time of my project, Lindsey was still commuting—and his weekly commute took him right past the dyehouse in Biddeford.

  Being extremely phone-averse, I emailed Lindsey my pitch for the project. I told him that I had 168 pounds of scoured Saxon Merino to be spun into a heavy fingering-weight two-ply yarn, delivered either on cones or weighed hanks, depending on their preference. (I’d been told this was the kind of information mills liked to see, and I wanted to impress him with my professionalism.) As for timeframe, I said, “as soon as you have an opening in your schedule,” praying it wouldn’t be autumn of 2036. And then I added the potentially prickly part: I needed to be at the mill for some portion of the project. I went on to explain the bale, the journey, the goals, the people who would be reading along and getting the yarn. The number of witnesses to any potential failures or shortcomings on his part. Oh, and there was no practice wool; this was it. Mess it up, and the project is toast.

  I’d been warned about timing. My wool mentor, Elsa Hallowell, who has been creating Cormo yarn for decades, put it best: “The textile industry has taught me to be persistent in nudging people, and has also taught me that the nudging may accomplish nothing. Mostly I just float along at whatever speed the river is flowing.”

  On the day I contacted Lindsey, though, the river was running fast. He called me right away and said yes. I believe, “Sure we can!” were the exact words. I’d caught them just as they were finishing up with “the naturals,” and they could get it done in two weeks. I was stunned.

  Just as Bollman scours from fine to rough each week, mills also tend to run in color and fineness cycles. Dark green crunchy wool fibers would be an obvious and undesirable contaminant in a fine white run, while a fine white fiber would disappear and pose few problems in a darker blend. The more colors you have, the longer the whole cycle from light to dark takes. With sixty-five shades total in Bartlett’s line of house yarns, the wait could have been very long indeed. Considering that some people have waited months bordering on years to get their colors, I was very lucky.

  Besides having the last commercially operating mule in this country, Bartlett is unique for another reason. While many mills spin wool that has come from thousands of miles away, Bartlett has remained local to the core. Its farm program lets sheep farmers in the Northeast drop off their annual clip and receive a percentage of that amount back in spun yarn. Farmers pay nothing out of pocket and get yarn that, while not 100 percent “theirs,” is distinctly local. Some families have kept a running tab at the mill for years, dropping by whenever they need something—like $20 bills from an ATM, only they’re skeins from the yarn bank. Those who don’t want any yarn in return get a set price for their wool instead. Working this way, the mill gets some sixty thousand pounds of local wool each year. Some of the spun yarn goes into sweaters and blankets Bartlett manufactures in New England; the rest goes into the yarn.

  This clever wool-sourcing arrangement comes at only one price: fineness. The sheep breeds that thrive in the cold, damp climate of the Northeast tend to grow longer, stronger fibers—hefty British-style ones that some might call “crunchy” or “crisp” or “robust.” Merino and other super-soft premium breeds struggle the farther north you raise them. For Eugene to have such a fine flock in New York is a rarity, and it’s largely due to his adherence to the original breeding standards for Saxon Merino—ones for sheep that also thrived in Saxony before their move to Australia.

  Another special thing about Bartlett is the range of colored yarn they sell under their own name. Every year, Lindsey takes advantage of discounted shipping rates on empty trucks leaving Maine to send his wool to Chargeurs in South Carolina for scouring. That wool is then shipped to Philadelphia, where G. J. Littlewood & Sons dyes it into fou
rteen base colors. (Littlewood is equipped to dye wool before it’s spun into yarn, a process called “stock dyeing.”)

  Back in Maine, using color-blending recipes that have been handed down for generations, Lindsey and crew artfully combine those fourteen base colors into the sixty-five shades of Bartlett’s own yarn. These heathered colors and rugged New England fibers combine to form an exquisitely old-school yarn. While the equipment could, in theory, spin anything from cotton to asbestos, it’s been perfectly calibrated to suit the fibers of New England. This meant that my wool—my shorter, much more fragile fiber—was in for a challenge.

  “I have to warn you,” Lindsey said on our first call, “it might be a little neppy.”

  Neps are like little pills or lumps. In yarn as in life, there are good neps and bad neps. There’s a time for cream of rice cereal that you could drink through a straw, and there’s a time for lumpy, wholesome, steel-cut oatmeal. Accidental neppy yarn is a tragedy, but done on purpose, the results can be a very good kind of lumpy and wholesome. I needed to see what the wool from my bale would do.

  Within a week, a green pickup with YARN vanity plates backed up to the dyehouse loading dock. Claudia emailed me a blurry cell phone picture of the bale bag, the truck, and a beaming Lindsey. A few days later, I headed up to Harmony, a place I’d never been, to watch my very first yarn be made.

  It’s a fun drive, the kind of time-travel experience that’s harder and harder to come by. Past Augusta, I left the Maine Turnpike behind, then the strip malls and Starbucks drive-throughs. Soon enough I was bouncing north on a two-lane road that ended in Canada. I was seeing real New England now. A Breezy Acres Motel advertising air-conditioned rooms, a trout pond, and paddleboats. A vinyl-clad American Legion building where you could take your state driver’s license exam. The back side of a drive-in movie theater with a “no hunting” sign in the ticket booth window.