To an outsider, life in Spring City looked idyllic. Spring City was the type of sleepy pastoral town that people talked about when they talked about getting away from it all. Artists of all kinds took up residence there for its obvious charm and the views of Horseshoe mountain, whose foothills started somewhere east, or possibly in the middle of town, depending on who you asked, were nothing short of inspirational.

            We were outsiders. My dad wasn’t. My dad was raised in Manti, only 14 miles away. He knew everybody. He knew their parents and in most cases, their parent’s parents. He knew why the Strates didn’t get along with the Allreds and why the Coxes didn’t get along with, well, anybody. My mother on the other hand, was raised in steel country in Pennsylvania. She was brought up around Italians and Germans and Irish, and Protestant schools and everything else that meant nothing to anyone in Sanpete County. In short, my mother was brought up about as far away from life in Spring City as you could without falling into the ocean.  To Sanpete’s old timers, there was no cure for outsiderness, so we would always be outsiders.

            Spring City’s long-time residents also know that life in a small agricultural town in central Utah, at an elevation high enough in the Rocky Mountains that the first snowfall usually stuck around all winter could be hard, even brutal. A few years ago, my mom and I were both talking about how we were totally addicted to a show on PBS called “Frontier House.” On the show, modern families had to put aside all the trappings of modern life for three or four months and live exactly as they would in Montana in the 1880s. They hauled their own water, built their own outhouse and heated their homes with wood. We both couldn’t help but notice how much Montana, 1886 looked like Spring City, 1976. In many ways, Spring City was still the Wild West.

            Sheep herding was the main occupation in Spring City. Please, if you are ever in Sanpete County, don’t ever refer to it as shepherding, or to a sheepherder as a shepherd for that matter. The difference? A shepherd walks in front of the sheep, and apparently in another country, while a sheepherder walks behind them. Shepherds have staffs; sheepherders have border collies. I’ve spent enough time walking behind sheep to know that maybe the shepherd could teach a sheepherder a thing or two about keeping your boots clean, not to mention the shepherd has a better view, but I was never going to mention that to a sheepherder.

            The best part about living in Spring City was that we had space. We owned five acres on the southwest corner of town and had plenty of room for a small menagerie of animals. We had chickens, a few turkeys, dogs, cats, rabbits a couple of calves I got as payment for helping out at the dairy up the road, a few sheep and a Shetland pony named Joker.

            Joker was ancient as ponies go and he looked his age. His mane was pure white, and even the colored patches on his back that were probably once more a brownish color had turned a slate gray. He had one silvery-blue eye that made him look like a wizard that had been cursed to live in a horse’s body by some evil witch.

            With his age came a kindness that typically eludes young animals much like it does people. I once fell to sleep on the back of Joker. I was lying on his back in the summer sun near a creek, a few fields away from our house. When I woke up, Joker had carefully crossed the creek and headed home, never moving suddenly enough to wake me up. I awoke to the sound of his hooves on the street near our house.

            We bought Joker from someone else who was looking to get rid of him for about $10.  That’s how we got most of our animals. I don’t think we ever paid full price for any animal on our farm. Our dogs and cats were all strays, the chickens came from neighbors and the sheep were bummer lambs – the ones the ewe abandons so she can take care of the healthier ones. My brother worked on a sheepherder’s farm, so he was partially paid in lambs, much like I got my calves from the dairy.

            All of our animals had names, even the ones we were going to eat. I don’t remember that ever being a dilemma for me, but I do remember my parents telling me that one of my cows was “moving to a bigger farm” just before our freezer mysteriously filled up with beef. I can’t say for sure that there was a connection.

            Of all the sheep we raised I only remember the name of one of them: Blue Eyes.

 Blue Eyes was no ordinary sheep, and maybe that’s why we liked her so much. As a bummer, she had already proven herself to be of genuine outsider stock, but she was more than that, she was a survivor. She survived an attack by the worst pet I have ever had, a Doberman pincer that jumped a six-foot wooden fence to get at her. In a Karmic twist of fate, the Doberman later hanged itself trying to jump the fence when the chain got caught between the slats, leaving it just short of getting its front legs on the ground.

            Blue Eyes outlived all the other sheep we owned, I think because she won my mother over with her personality. At some point she became more valuable to us as a pet than she ever would be as mutton stew.

            From day one, Blue Eyes believed she was a horse. She followed Joker everywhere he went. At one point we had a tether for her so we could take her on walks when we went riding with Joker – a sight that no sheepherder in town could ever accept, I’m sure – but we soon realized that if Joker was there, Blue Eyes would follow, tether or not, so she became a free-range sheep. I’d ride the pony to a friend’s house and Joker would say put because he was old and didn’t want to move unless he had to, but Blue Eyes stayed put because she was there with Joker. Around Spring City, the sheep that thinks she’s a horse became a regular fixture.

            Like all old things, Joker died. Just before we moved to Manti, I walked out to the back pasture one morning and he was lying in the back corner, by the ditch that passed under the fence from Mr. Hansen’s yard. Any other family would have done whatever you usually do with a dead horse – to this day, I’m not sure what that is, really. You don’t realize how big they are until you have to move one. Our family decided to bury Joker in the underground hut my brothers and I had dug years earlier in the back pasture. We pulled the boards off the roof of the hut and cleared it out enough to fit the old pony in and held a nice funeral for him.

            Blue Eyes was devastated. For a few days afterwards, she sat in the back pasture baying for her companion. It was enough to break your heart.

            Barely a month later, we had moved to Manti and unlike most of the other animals, Blue Eyes came with us. We had less property, but Blue Eyes was content to have the small lot next to a few old chicken coops as her new home. She was even happier to find a horse just over the fence.

            The horse belonged to Mr. Mackey. He was a grizzled old rancher who looked like they just pulled him straight off the Marlboro ad. A true sheepherder if there ever was one. Time and time again Mr. Mackey would call over the fence “Your damn sheep is over here bugging my horse again!” whenever Blue Eyes escaped. Of course the horse didn’t care a bit. It was Mr. Mackey who couldn’t come to terms with the sheep who thinks she’s a horse. Anywhere Mr. Mackey’s horse went, Blue eyes wanted to be right behind him, which was fine with the horse, but Mr. Mackey couldn’t ride anywhere with his head up with a sheep following him around like a dog.

            No one would have believed it was possible, but Blue Eyes eventually won over Mr. Mackey, too. After Blue Eyes escaped into Mackey’s pasture for the umteenth time, we caught them all out for a ride - Mackey, the horse and Blue Eyes bouncing right behind them.

            “I’ll be back in an hour or two,” he yelled to us in passing. “After that, you can come over and get your damn sheep.”

Maybe the difference between a shepherd and a sheepherder all depends on the sheep.