I had high ambitions for my time in lockdown. Finally, with no restaurants to check out and no one to check them out with, I would have my nights to myself.
I was going to watch all of “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” and “The Sopranos” and “Parks and Recreation,” for starters. Proust and I would resume our decades-long game of Monopoly, paused by me years ago for what was supposed to be a bathroom break.
Between meals, I planned kitchen projects. I left towers of cookbooks around the house with Post-it flags marking some recipes that required days, other recipes that took weeks and assumed I had access to a root cellar, and a handful of recipes that had no end date because their object was to keep some microbiotic sludge in a dish in the back of the refrigerator alive forever and ever, hallelujah, hallelujah.
All those goals have gone out the window since I discovered a video that was posted on YouTube last week called “Relax with Sheep.” In it, a herd of sheep grazes below the vines of Shafer Vineyards outside Napa, Calif., for more than six hours. There are occasional shots of sheep resting their puffy round bodies between meals, and once in a while a flock will march slowly out of the frame on their way to what I imagine must be greener pastures. Mostly, though, the sheep stand and eat.
Their approach to food is methodical and impressively single-minded. Some of the taller grasses require a bite-and-tug motion, but in general the sheep direct their snouts toward the ground and munch. At first they appear to stand completely still, but in fact they are usually pushing ahead, moving about as gradually as the minute hand on a wristwatch, to engage with a fresh tuft of grass. Picking up on nuances like this is one of the rewards of watching all six hours and 13 minutes.
Not that I have seen “Relax with Sheep” all the way to the end. I tend to leave it running in an open browser tab. When things get to be too much, I’ll click over to see whether one of the small spring lambs is in the frame or, better yet, the impassive, cream-colored sheepdog. The rest of the time, I just listen while I work.
With its irregular rhythm of sheep vocalizations (some of them say baa, but not all of them) punctuated by calls from an occasional duck or crow, the documentary comes close to embodying Brian Eno’s description of ambient music: as ignorable as it is interesting.
Also like most ambient music, “Relax with Sheep” has not found a mass audience. It has been viewed slightly more than 6,000 times, far short of whatever number qualifies a video as viral. On the other hand, going viral doesn’t sound as much fun as it used to.
“Relax with Sheep” is actually a single, shorter documentary that loops around six times. The original video was shot in March and edited by Tim Kennedy, a filmmaker who is often commissioned by Napa Valley wineries, breweries and restaurants. Mr. Kennedy handed in his edit at a relatively taut one hour and change. Turning that into an epic longer than Matthew Barney’s “River of Fundament” was the idea of Douglas Shafer, the vineyard’s proprietor. Mr. Shafer said the goal was to create something like those never-ending yule-log videos, but with sheep.
When the longer version was complete, he asked Andy Demsky, who handles public relations for the winery, to put it on YouTube “to share the pastoral beauty” with viewers “during the upheaval and uncertainty in the world right now,” as the introductory text puts it. Uploading the file took three days.
Credit for wrangling the hundred or so sheep goes to a local firm called Wooly Weeders, which drove them to the 50-acre hillside property, packed inside a multilevel trailer, then set them loose to control the unwanted vegetation that grows in early spring, before the dry season sets in and Napa’s hills turn brown.
“You’d usually go in with tractors and mow,” Mr. Shafer said. “With the sheep we have to do that a lot less, so it’s less gas. On the hillsides we’ve got these terraces — that’s always a challenge. You have to use a machete or that type of thing, it’s tough. But the sheep can stand on any incline at all and munch away.”
It’s true. Nothing gets between the sheep and their grass. I’ve never given much thought to the mental capacity of sheep. I suppose if I had, I would have said they were not among the leading intellectual lights of the animal kingdom.
After watching “Relax with Sheep,” though, I am in awe of their attention spans. In awe, and a little jealous. The truth is I haven’t made any headway on Fassbinder or Proust or any of the other stuff because I can’t seem to concentrate lately. I spend my days talking to restaurant people who don’t have restaurants to go to. It’s been a month since they’ve seen a paycheck.
At night, when I could be reading a fat novel, I have the attention span of one of the bumblebees that you can hear on the soundtrack of “Relax with Sheep,” the pitch of their buzz Doppler-shifting down the way the ambulance sirens outside my windows do every few minutes.
The sheep from Wooly Weeders don’t have this problem. They focus. They get the job done. And they do it as a flock. You might see a stray who momentarily eluded the sheepdogs off by himself somewhere, but in general the sheep graze in groups. Hour after hour, they follow each other around, eating together. I’m a little envious of that, too.
