Country Girl in the City

This week, we loaded up the last of the 2017 spring lambs for their trip to the local butcher. It’s a sad day, but a necessary one. If we kept every animal we’ve birthed on this farm, the place would be completely over-run! Instead, we maintain the best ewe lambs to become future mothers, a new ram from the group of boys, and took the rest. Not only will we replenish the stock of chops and shanks, but we also save the full-fleece skins and take them up to Duluth for tanning.

It reminds me of a tale I shared a few years ago that is worth retelling…

It was Kara’s first year taking the hides to the tannery. Normally, the hides are just thrown away with the entrails at the butcher—just more unwanted refuse in the process of getting meat. So if you want your hides, you have to wait outside and collect them fresh, laying them out to cool so the hair (wool) doesn’t slough off in the tanning process. It’s not fun hanging out at the butcher…but it’s heartbreaking to think of those beautiful skins being thrown away.

The weather hadn’t been cold enough to freeze the dozen or so pelts, which were still bloody and smelly. After a quick dash back to the farm for a bite to eat and printing out a map for proper directions, she headed off for Duluth while Mom and I held down Farmstead Creamery. I wasn’t there for this story, so this is based on Kara’s retelling.

Duluth is about a two-hour drive from the farm, so our trips to the area are extremely infrequent. So here’s Kara navigating the hills and one-way streets, looking for USAFoxx, the company that had agreed to tan her sheep hides. But as she neared the location, Kara realized that this storefront was going to be right in the middle of the downtown scene. One “15-minute” drop-off parking slot was posted, but it was full, and everything else was metered.

Kara pulled out her purse to check. One penny and one nickel. Well, that wasn’t going to work very well. So she turned off to go around the block and hope that the car in the drop-off station would leave. But just going around the block was not so easy. She couldn’t turn left immediately, because of the one-way streets, and then it took a while to find another to head back, and then she turned too soon and had to go around again.

Finally, she was back at the storefront, and the slot was open. But it was when she stepped from the aging red farm truck that the story really takes a strange twist. Now, remember, Kara had just been to the butcher and back, right after chores, and she was still dressed in chore boots and Carhartt coveralls, which had gotten so worn and torn that she had a second pair of overalls on top to hold it together. Everyone walking past on the sidewalk was wearing dress shoes, wool coats, and you can imagine the rest. It was country girl arrives in the city, equipped with pieces of dead critters. The surveillance camera operators must have had a heyday.

Up she stepped to the front door of USAFoxx, which required ringing a buzzer to even get in the door. Inside, luxurious fur coats and accessories in a 60’s style environment were both stunning and overwhelming. Kara felt like she didn’t want to move, for fear of touching anything with her farminess, even wondering if it might be better if she could hover than have her chore boots on the ground.

“Can I help you?” the lady at the counter in the back of the store enquired.

“I’m here to drop off my sheep pelts for tanning.”

“Oh great, want to bring them on in?”

Kara looked around at the splendid furs, the narrow walkways, the spotless floor. “No, I don’t think you’d want them in here. Could someone meet me outside with a cart?”

“Oh sure, we’ll have a guy right there.”

One of the male staff returned after carrying a woman’s new fur coat to her car, with his dress shoes, dress shirt, and vest. But he was just going to help with the paperwork, and Kara was happy to make her escape from the store when a backstage fellow arrived with the cart.

But it wasn’t a tub-style cart. More of that red-metal-dolly-made-of-pipes kind of structure. “Are you sure this will work for you?” Kara asked. “Do you have anything to put on the bottom?”

“Aw, nah, this will be fine. They’re frozen right?”

“Um, well, sort of.” But the fellow was not assuaged, so Kara strapped on her bright blue exam gloves and began unloading the contents of the back of the truck onto the dolly. By this time, the stately dressed attendant had carefully evacuated. As Kara and the cart man began to stack the pelts, two girls dressed in knee-high leather boots, tailored wool coats, and trendy hats and scarves came down the sidewalk towards their car, which happened to be parked right behind Kara’s truck. They took one look at the sheep hide transfer-in-process and gasped “Holy Sh*t!”

Kara was thinking about the same thing herself, between the frozen time bubble of the fur shop to the fancy downtown atmosphere, while she stood there bloodied by raw sheep pelts in worn-out Carhartts and bright blue exam gloves. Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore!

The hides were certainly not frozen, draping down the sides of the cart, raw and still rather bloody. Only half of them actually fit, so Kara waited at the truck while the worker wound his way down the sidewalk, into a glassed atrium of the skywalk, and disappeared into the elevator, leaving a dribbly blood trail behind. This was taking longer than fifteen minutes, but at least anyone worried about her use of the parking space could see that the unloading process wasn’t finished.

So here she was, waiting at the tailgate with her remaining pelts, right alongside the sidewalk. It was all Kara could do to look as nonchalant as possible, like having a truckload of raw sheep skins was something of an everyday occurrence. But heads turned anyway. One father and ten-year-old son strolled past, exchanged nods, passed the car, then doubled-back to have a second look.

“What is that?” the father inquired.

“They’re sheep pelts.”

“Cool!” the son exclaimed, and they stood and chatted for a while. Then a car with two ladies pulled up in the spot vacated by the fashion statement teenagers. Both doors opened, and they bee-lined over to check out this downtown mystery. “What’s that!?!”

“My sheep pelts.”

“What are you doing with them?”

“I’m here at USAFoxx to drop them off to be tanned.”

“Really, they tan here? Well, what are they going to do with them?”

“They’ll tan the pelts and then give them back to me.”

“Oh, well, what are you going to do with them then?” and on it went, with much chuckling at just how odd this was to have such a conversation on such a day and at such a place. Finally, the crowd dispersed as the ladies made their way into the skywalk, dodging the bloody trail towards the elevator. “You weren’t kidding they were fresh!”

Finally, the man with the cart returned, this time with a couple of blankets. One to lay on the bottom, for stacking the pelts, and one to drape on the top. Kara gave him a look as he bundled the arranged pile. “Ahem, well, there are some sensitive people around here.” Kara pointed out the blood trail, which had been a noticeable part of the kafuffle. “Yeah, I’ll clean it up” was his response.

Too bad she didn’t get to hear his side of the adventure! But it was time to get back to the farm, after ducking into an out-of-the-way parking space to shed her smelly, bloody Carhartts and gloves for the long drive back. Kara found herself laughing all the way home, and she certainly had us in bellylaughs as well upon her return, thinking of the adventures of the country girl gone to the city.

***

These days, we double-bag the pelts before taking them to the tannery and make certain their frozen through, but the folks in Duluth don’t have a problem remembering who we are! We’ll have the new pelts in stock this week, which make a beautiful cabin accent draped on a chair, as a rug, or we even turn some of them into foot stools! To feel one for yourself, we’ll have to see you down on the farm sometime.