Review: A timeless life governed by seasons & animals

Review of: The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

Author: James Rebanks

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Source: Dallas Public Library

Grade: A

There’s nothing romantic about taking care of sheep, as James Rebanks describes it in his memoir, The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. Those who venture into livestock raising for the romance soon get weeded out – go extinct, if you will – by the day in, day out drudgery, by a life of hard work with relatively little financial reward. Does that mean, as one of Rebanks’ teachers implied, that “to want to leave school early and go and work with sheep was to be more or less an idiot”?

By the standards of the English educational system in which he grew up 30 years ago, Rebanks had early been cut out of the herd from the “smart” kids, the ones destined to go to universities, when a teacher made a final appeal to her students’ imaginations.

“. . . I was daydreaming through the windows into the rain, wondering what the men on our farm were doing, and what I should have been doing, when I realized the assembly was about the valleys of the (English) Lake District, where my grandfather and father farmed. I switched on. . . (But) the Lake District in her monologue was the playground for an itinerant band of climbers, poets, walkers, and daydreamers. . . people who, unlike our parents or us, had ‘really done something.’ She would utter the name Wordsworth in reverential tones and look in vain for us to respond with interest.

“I’d never heard of him. . . . The idea that we, our fathers, and mothers might be proud, hardworking, and intelligent people doing something worthwhile or even admirable was beyond her. . . The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn’t count for much.”

It was an idea actually antithetical to Wordsworth’s beliefs, as Rebanks would later learn. Because, after dropping out of school early to help his father and grandfather with work on the family sheep farm, he ended up graduating from Oxford University and working for UNESCO as a consultant on traditional cultures.

Working for an international organization, though, is not a job that keeps him from rising early each day (even on Christmas morning) to tend his flocks of hardy, mountain-bred Herdwick sheep. Of tramping through the snow to feed them, breed them, shear them and deliver their lambs.

His problem, as one of his children had no qualms telling him, is that he’s all about sheep. (The kids had come around by the time The Shepherd’s Life was published, even Rebanks’ young daughters vying for which of them could best help mother sheep birth their babies.)

How did a school dropout become a university graduate (with high honors), an international traveler, and yet find his greatest satisfaction in returning to a life of hard physical work in a tiny, insular community?

In language both poetic and prosaic, Rebanks tells us, leading readers through the seasons of life with sheep, a way of life little changed since the first settled agriculturalists took root in his corner of northern England thousands of years ago. Except that now a shepherd zips to the separate pastures of his farm on an ATV instead of by foot, uses electric wool shears instead of manual ones, and lives in a countryside much of which is protected as a national park. And since the book’s publication, and again partly due to Rebanks’ efforts, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The UNESCO designation recognizes both the Lake District’s natural and cultural importance. It’s a heritage recognized at least since the time of, and by the likes of poet William Wordsworth, the man a schoolboy named James Rebanks had never heard of until that school assembly he found so boring.

Rebanks would later learn, as he writes, that “. . . our landscape changed the rest of the world. It is where the idea of all of us having a direct sense of ownership (regardless of property rights) of some places or things because they are beautiful or stimulating or just special was first put into words. William Wordsworth proposed in 1810 that the Lake District should be ‘a sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.’

". . . What I didn’t know was that Wordsworth believed that the community of shepherds and small farmers of the Lake District formed a political and social idea of much wider significance and value. People here governed themselves, free of the aristocratic elites that dominated people’s lives elsewhere, and in Wordsworth’s eyes this provided a model for a good society.”

Quite a contribution to the world, for a group of people who only wanted to watch over their sheep.