Featured in the New Yorker, May 4, 1987
From a young woman vacationing in New Zealand:
My friend Sharon and I are having a wonderful time. We’re crazy about New Zealand! It’s got everything: alps and tropical beaches and rain forests and fjords and the most wonderful, complicated hills, which look as though someone had draped a crazy quilt over a pile of oranges and rocks—the hills are very irregular, that is. The borders of the pastures on the hills are planted with “shelter belts,” which are double rows of trees where sheep can huddle when it rains. I’ll come back to the sheep in a minute.
The climate is temperate. It’s fall now, and the leaves are turning. The people are very friendly, and they speak a fast, very British sort of English. Everyone in New Zealand says, “Ah, yeah!” Sometimes we can’t understand them at all. Yesterday, when we were flying over Mt. Cook (12,349 feet, and New Zealand’s highest mountain), I thought the flight attendant said there was a tea shop on Mt. Asparagus. Maybe she was talking about Mt. Aspiring, somewhere to the southwest. And Sharon thought a woman referring to the motorway said “mud whoopee.” We keep getting the giggles—the giddiness of travel. We can’t believe we’re so far away. Did you know the moon is all turned around here? (Technically, I guess, we’re turned around, in relation to you folks back home.) And a lot of other things here are turned around, too. The north is warm and the south is cold. They drive on the left. The racetracks go clockwise. (Our Maori guide took us to the speedway—he races sprint cars.) Even the numbers on the telephone dials are in reverse order. The hot and cold faucets are reversed (not always, though). And salt and pepper shakers are backward—one hole for salt, three holes for pepper.
I bought a sweatshirt depicting a mob of curious sheep surrounding a nonplussed kiwi bird. Sharon bought a T-shirt that said “New Zealand, Land of 70,000,000 Nuclear Free Sheep.” I bought some “Footrot Flats” books. “Footrot Flats” is a national craze in New Zealand. It’s a comic strip about a sheep farm, with a nameless dog and a farmer named Wal’ and a neighbor and a possum and other animals. “Footrot Flats” is in all the stores—on coffee mugs, games, T-shirts—and there is even a “Footrot Flats” leisure park and a “Footrot Flats” movie. The line was too long at the movie.
The other day, we went to an amazing place called the Agrodome to see performing sheep. The stage had raised platforms for two rows of sheep to stand on. Each place had a nameplate below it and a feed cup on a stem. One by one, nineteen rams were let loose from the sidelines to trot up onto the platform and find their places while a taped voice lectured on sheep. When the sheep were all chained in place, they resembled two chorus lines, but they kept bumping into each other and stealing each other’s feed. Of course, if the Rockettes had to wear heavy wool carpets they might have similar problems.
Up close, sheep look considerably different from the way they look scattered out on the hillsides. They come in assorted sizes and shapes and coat styles. The Merino, the largest in the mob at the Agrodome, occupied the star spot in the center of the stage. He had enormous curled horns, and his name was Prince. The English Leicester was very shaggy, with what seemed to be a kitchen mop hanging in his eyes. The bangs on the curly-fleeced Lincoln spilled down the center of his nose. The Corriedale, however, had short, neat bangs. The Suffolk had a black head and black legs, and the Hampshire had a black nose and black ears and black circles around his eyes. All the sheep were excited. The Border Leicester knocked down his feeding cup. The Perendale seemed to be doing a cha-cha-cha. The Dorset Horn broke his chain and had to be led back to his place. His horns curled around in front of his eyes like gigantic spit curls, and probably blocked his vision. Then the Merino folded his legs and sat down, front first. After licking their feeding cups clean, most of the others sat down, too. During the rest of the show, they sat there and chewed gum, it seemed.
While they watched, a man in a black wool singlet (traditional shearing garb) sheared a sheep—a female extra, not one of the stars. The shearer sat her down and pinned her by holding one of her forelegs between his knees. She was frightened, but he showed how you could touch certain pressure points to keep her in position, and she seemed relaxed. (I can do exactly the same with my cat.) The sheep got into the rhythm of shearing and allowed herself to be turned and twisted. The fleece came off in one piece, as if it had been unzipped. In seconds, the sheep was naked, and, looking embarrassed and sad, she scrambled off the stage.
Next, two sheep dogs hurled themselves onstage. Quickly and precisely, they responded to the man in the singlet as he whistled and spoke certain words (“Right,” “Left,” etc.) in a low tone. They were champions bred from border-collie mixes, and they were frisky and likable. They had short hair, shaggy tails, wide noses, and were much smaller than Lassie-style collies. They loved licking the sheep’s faces. I used to have a collie, and these dogs reminded me so much of him it made me feel very sad but thrilled, too. I don’t know why it always seemed an important point to me, but my dog was a full-blooded collie. His mother was the Lassie type, and his father was a border collie. People didn’t believe my dog was a collie, though, because he had short hair and a wide nose, but those were his border-collie traits. He was never so happy as when he had the whole family rounded up, all in the same room. When one of the sheep dogs barked, it sounded just like my dog’s welcome-home bark. There are two kinds of working sheep dogs: the huntaway dog, who drives sheep from behind with his strong bark, and the heading dog, or eye dog, who stalks the sheep and controls them with his eyes. My dog was definitely the huntaway sort. The dog in “Footrot Flats” is an eye dog.
Suddenly, the dogs onstage bounded across the backs of the sheep, using them for steps. The sheep shearer said that dogs often get from one side of the mob to the other in this manner. And Sharon said, “Hey, I just realized the joke at the end of ‘Crocodile Dundee’! Remember when Crocodile Dundee is trying to get to the woman across the crowded subway platform after she’s said she loves him? He walks right on top of the people—like a sheep dog! I bet nobody at home got that joke.”
And then the man in the singlet invited people in the audience to come onstage and pat the big Drysdale sheep, the most huggable-looking sheep in the mob. (Sheep, you may have gathered by now, travel in mobs.) He had large, curled horns and long, shaggy wool that seemed to have been treated with mousse. Sharon and I took turns going onstage and photographing each other with this funny sheep. The sheep didn’t move, but he sort of smiled. He felt like a big couch.