A Quick Course in Sheep Shearing

With his right hand, Bill Lander has a firm grip on the sheep’s stumpy little tail. His left, under the ewe’s chin, tilts her head up. “That way,” Joe Ortiz says, “she won’t feel like running. Sheep are like bulls. They lower their heads; it means they’re going to charge.”

A semicircle of grammar-school children sit enthralled, watching Pierce College’s annual shearing demonstration and asking questions that are right on the mark.

“Funny you should ask,” says Ortiz, a student-worker (paid for his labor on the Pierce farm) and a bursary of ovine lore. “Yes, sheared sheep do get sunburned, but only for a day or two. They’re happier this way though. They’re a lot cooler.”

Lander and Harry Petretti have propped their charges into sitting positions to clip the belly wool, and they do seem to be enjoying the process. “Shear ecstasy,” says a teacher, who understandably requests anonymity.

Off to one side, J. D. Rich feeds strands of raw yarn into a brand-new, old-fashioned spinning wheel. A Pierce graduate, J. D. once took a lamb home and grew so fond of it that she now runs her own sheep farm in Canyon Country.

“Graduates always come back, to teach or to work on the farm,” says Ortiz, who professes no affection for his wards but still plans a career in breeding, wool, cheese, whatever the market may bring.

“I came back to Pierce one night after a banquet,” he recalls. “It was raining like hell. I grabbed a flashlight to check out the flock. Way off in a corner was a ewe lambing. The lambs were real cold, so I heated up some ewes’ milk (drawn earlier for emergencies) and fed them, rubbed the circulation back into them, talked to them.

“Ruined my best suit. But, hey, they lived.”

Reaching for the Himalayan High--Sans Oxygen

“It’s a reaction to modern Western society, to a civilization that’s over-controlling.” Or so says Jim McEachen, explaining the urge to climb mountains.

McEachen, Santa Monica-born UCLA graduate, has been selected as one of only four “amateurs” to join the Colorado Expedition in an autumn attempt to make the first U.S. ascent of Manaslu, at 26,726 feet the world’s seventh-highest peak. A Japanese group was first to scale the Himalayan peak in 1956, he says, but few have followed.

“It’s in a remote part of Nepal,” the climber explains, “populated by the Bhotia people, who’ve lived in the valley for centuries and recognize no geopolitical boundaries.”

Manaslu--”Mountain of the Spirit”--is sacred to the Bhotia, and only slightly less so to its would-be conquerors, who will climb without aid of oxygen--although the initial base camp is at a point (14,500 feet) higher than any in the U.S. “Bottled oxygen is heavy, bulky,” McEachin says, “and part of the challenge is acclimating to the extreme altitude.

“Living at high altitude is hard, hard, hard work,” says the free-lance lighting director, 31. “It’s often very unpleasant. You think long and carefully about just walking three or four steps across your tent: ‘Do I really need that thing?’ For every thousand feet you gain, you also gain two years of age. Up there, you feel 80.”

So why do it? “Along with the hardship,” McEachen says, “there are those brief, transcendent moments of absolute, glorious beauty. The moments are few and far between, but when they do come they’re almost overpowering.

“That’s what you go back to the mountains for.”

Queen of Lighter-Than-Air Matzo Balls

The subject was matzo balls. “There’s the floaters, and then there’s the sinkers,” Joann Roth said. The Tarzana caterer (Someone’s in the Kitchen) had just rolled out thousands of the little devils, post-Passover, and was claiming that 2,500 of her own special matzo balls weighed a mere 2 1/2 pounds. Sure.

“I’m not kidding,” she insisted. “They’re made out of shortening or chicken fat, eggs, matzo meal, seasoning, a little soup stock--but the biggest secret is, when you pick it up to roll it, you transfer to your hand all the love that you can muster. Gently put them in the water; simmer; as you lift them out, you again transfer that famous Jewish Mother’s Love. They come out lighter than air. And the lighter the balls, the more heavenly the taste.”

Sinkers, Roth adds, “can be like lead. They can go in soup, but you should use them for knaydl , dumplings. My grandmother and my mother made floaters; my mother-in-law made sinkers.”

OK, already, but 2,500 balls weighing only 2 1/2 pounds? That calculates to .001 a pound per matzo.

“Well,” Roth hedges, “you weigh it in the soup. It’s floating. It’s like in immersion, when they weigh you under the water. You know?” Sure.