It was prominently featured on the front page, and the heading caught my attention immediately – since I am by vocation a shepherd or pastor. I offer it here for any readers who are pastors or parents or small group leaders – I see certain parallels from all three perspectives.
Except perhaps the castration of lambs with your teeth.
No wait, never mind – actually there are parallels there too. I don’t want to draw out the parallels and lessons. I’d rather leave that for you to discover and explore – perhaps after a reading of John 10.
And as you contemplate those shepherds 2,000 years ago outside Bethlehem, think of these in our own backyard right here in Canyon county.
Feliz Navidad!
Today's shepherds are alone on the range at Christmas
This Christmas they are out there still, watching their flocks at all hours, in snow, rain and fog, so we can eat our lamb and wear our wool. They are from places you might expect — the Peruvian and Chilean highlands, mostly — working in a place you might not, here in the USA. About 1,500 shepherds will spend Christmas in the deserts and valleys of the Mountain West, working and living in conditions not that different from those of first-century Judea. They will be on foot and in the open, alone except for a few dogs and 2,200 sheep. They will sleep in cramped, battered trailers lit by kerosene lantern or candle, without electricity, running water or toilets.
It has been a half-century since Americans were willing to trail sheep on the open range, a job the writer Robert Laxalt has called "the region's most denigrated occupation." So ranchers import men on guest visas to work three-year contracts and then leave the USA when their contract is up. Some shepherds return after signing up for another three years. Like the Spanish Basques who preceded them as shepherds, the Andeans are considered hard working, stoic and resourceful. Unlike the Basques — because of post-9/11 immigration policy — their toil will not earn them a "green card" and the right to stay in this country. So they come for the money, which ranges from $1,400 a month in California to at least $750 a month elsewhere. They get two weeks' vacation, which most take as pay; health and life insurance; and board and room — "big room," as the old sheepherder's joke has it, "200 miles wide."
Because these men are on call every hour of almost every day, the pay works out to far less than the minimum wage. But the $20,000 they can save over three years is far more than they could earn at home. It's enough to build a house or educate the children or start a small business. For that, they put up with the loneliness, the boredom, the occasional terror — a sudden blizzard, a pack of wolves. For that, the Peruvians who work for the Soulen Livestock ranch resign themselves to another Navidad amidst the sage brush and cheat grass of southwestern Idaho. It will be the fourth for Marino Llacua, 49, husband of Rebecca and father of six; the 10th for Ruben Santiago, 39, husband of Magda and father of eight, including a 4-month-old; the second for Walser Vilcampoma, 39, husband of Santa Anna and father of four. Despite their bosses' attempts to give them Christmas cheer, "It will be a normal day," Vilcampoma says in Spanish. He explains, with no apparent regret: "I have to be with the sheep."
Tough job, tough life
In popular imagination, the shepherd is a bucolic figure, leading contented, obedient sheep across the pastoral landscape. Reality is something else, according to Cesar Ayllon, the 41-year-old Peruvian émigré who is the Soulen ranch foreman: "There is so much that can go wrong." The good shepherd must study the sheep, worry about them, care about them. He must protect them from mountain lions and toxic plants, be sure they don't eat too much alfalfa or swallow a frozen apple. The good shepherd sleeps lightly and rises early. He talks to the border collies and listens to the guard dogs, 120-pound, white-coated Akbashes. An aggressive low bark means coyotes but a cry means wolves, and that is why the shepherd has a rifle.
The good shepherd knows how to castrate the lambs the old-fashioned way — with his teeth. On the open range without clean water "it's quicker, easier and more sanitary," says Margaret Soulen Hinson, co-owner of the third-generation family ranch business. The good shepherd notices when a ewe is limping, possibly from mud frozen in her hooves that must be cleaned out. He is oblivious to the job's most appealing benefit — the view.
Sheepherding in America has always been an immigrant's job, too dirty, too cold and too lonely for anyone with options. Today's shepherds are men with rough hands, jet black hair and brown, weathered faces. They wear layer upon layer of old faded clothes and thick rubber boots. They were subsistence farmers, miners, laborers, carpenters. They grew up around sheep, but many never even saw a band of 2,000, and none ever led one worth $300,000 on a year-long, 380-mile circuit from desert to city (Caldwell, pop. 43,000) to Alpine forest, an altitude change of 5,000 feet. The sheep are always moving — through federal, leased and ranch-owned land — because they are always eating, and seeking warmth in winter and cool in summer.
In the colder months, two men live together in a 7-by-14-foot trailer (called a sheep wagon or campito) that periodically is moved up the trail by a ranch pickup. It contains a platform bed for two; a pull-out table; a 5-gallon water container; two bench seats; and an ancient, cast-iron, wood-burning stove that vents through a pipe in the roof. In the mountainous summer range, herders move by horse and sleep in tents. They often work alone and might go a week without seeing another human being. They're able to take only sponge baths, and they bury their excrement with a shovel.
Christmas will find America's shepherds camped across the West, from the Mojave Desert in Southern California to Wyoming's Painted Desert. The Soulen flocks will be in the Snake River plain — "tranqulido," Llacua says, except for the coyotes. "I will do my job, and wait." Llacua says that when he's out with the sheep he feels closer to God…
-- Rick Hampson, USA Today
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