The Barn

The Barn


The enterprise of finding "secret forts" and "hideouts" dominates the mind of a lad who just turned seven and has no siblings, and Al Botcher's farm near Hokah, Minnesota was so chock full of possibilities that I could have used a directory to keep track of them all.  The biggest of them all was the barn--imagine a secret hideout larger than most people's homes!

When school abruptly ended for the year, my mother engaged a young girl to babysit me during the day and do light housework to keep herself occupied.  She had the menial task of making lunch and providing kool-aid and snacks throughout the day and the impossible task of keeping an eye on me.

I think her name was Marna.

When Al and my mom rolled out the driveway and down the road, I finished my corn flakes and was out the door to explore my environment.  Marna would call out my name around midday and I would go eat lunch; then it was back out the door until the early evening when they returned.  I might show up once asking for kool-aid.

Kool-aid was so wonderful.  It came in a little packet like garden seeds do.  You dumped it into a pitcher of water, added about a cup of sugar and mixed it.  It came in multiple flavors but the deep red cherry ones were the best.  It was so cheap that you could have all you wanted.  No one cared.  The sugar was more expensive than the kool-aid, but it wasn't any good without it.

The barn could be entered from any number of places.  The easiest was a common door which opened into an ante room where milking equipment had once been stored.  But this entryway was entirely visible from the house.  Anyone studious of proper clandestine behavior would never enter this way.  It was more proper to walk absent-mindedly toward the fields beyond the end of the barn and then meander in and out of a small patch of dried nettle stems before darting out of sight.

It just was not an option to have anyone know where the heck you were!

The barn was built into a hillside on one end so that a hay wagon could be pulled in right through an enormous sliding door to unload the bales.  The door hung on a metal track and could be slid open wide enough to pass.  It was better, however to leave no trace of the entry point, so I had the option of pulling the door outward of the barn and cramming my tiny body through, letting it flap shut behind me with an echoing thud.

Once inside, the senses were overloaded with mysterious stimuli.  On the opposite side was another similar sliding door for the hay wagon to exit through and the floor was covered with about six inches of old, musty, dry, shredded hay.  The smell was wonderful.

Long vertical lines of sunlight came in through the cracks between the boards of the walls and scintillated across the walls and floor.  There was a reverberative hush inside the barn and if there was any breeze outside, it whistled through holes at the roof level far above and at each end, and through a boxy window right in the middle.

There was a metal track, much like the ones the sliding doors hung on, extending from one end of the highest point of the ceiling to the other.  In the old days, before hay was baled, this track extended outside one end of the barn and a huge metal fork hung from it.  The fork would have been lowered by a rope and hay was lifted from wagons and then brought into the loft, rolled down the track and lowered to the pile.

There was no fork anymore and it was all just so much rusty metal hanging way up there.

A wooden ladder was built right onto each end wall and went right up to the ceiling at the ends of the track.  If the loft was filled with bales of hay, I could climb the ladder to the track and hang from it, walking hand over hand feeling the thrill of danger as I encroached into the space over the abyss where hay was not stacked.

Another thrill of danger the barn afforded was walking the beams.  The barn had huge 10 x 10 beams running from side to side and similar posts holding their weight and the weight of the roof.  Beginning thrill-seekers could walk a beam where the hay bales had been stacked almost up to it.  Only advanced practitioners dared walk a beam over empty space with only a foot of loosely packed hay to break a potential fall.

The solitude of the hayloft was nearly overwhelming.  If one quieted one's breathing, one could then hear the "hoo-hoo-hoo" of pigeons perched along the track near the ceiling and in rude nests built in nearly inaccessible places near the ends of beams or in the V-shaped joints of their supports.

If you suddenly yelled out, the semi-darkness exploded into a cacophony of flapping and fluttering wings as seven or eight pigeons leaped from their nests or perches and fled, banging their wing tips on the boards as they exited, in absolute panic, the little ventilation holes at the ends of the ceiling track.

These delights were merely the introduction to the secrets of the barn.  I would learn over the course of time that the barn had seasons.  In the summer, after the first crop of alfalfa had been baled and stacked, it was imbued with the sweet smell of the aging green hay.  Even the baling twine exuded the spicy smell of sisal.  Burlap bags had their own peculiar smell as well.

New bales of hay were still quite heavy.  As they dried, they became lighter and they could be moved slightly from their neat arrays, to create a secret tunnel.  Some tunnels between bales occurred naturally as well since the bales didn't always completely fill the space available.

Marna must have been curious when I returned for Kool-Aid, covered with dust, with scratches all over me from cramming my stringy little body through cracks and tunnels in the hay.

There were also a couple of hay chutes in the loft.  One was covered with a wooden cowl to prevent falls but the other was a genuine trap door with no cover.  They led to the milking parlor on the lower floor of the barn and were once used to dump hay down for the cows below.  These chutes were dangers of the highest order and could be toyed with in a number of ways.  Aside from dropping objects into them, they could be jumped across in a display of arrogant, fearless conquest.

There was a safer way to access the lower part of the barn, however.  A ladder reached up from a small opening at the end opposite the drive-thru.  It led down into the ante-room where milking equipment had been kept.  On wooden shelves, a few artifacts of a bygone era remained.  Stacks of gunney-sacks and an odd assortment of rubber and stainless-steel milking machine fittings, worn out or broken, old pails, pitchforks, and scoop shovels adorned the little room along with a few more modern items like the paper cores that binder twine came on.

The milking parlor had rows of old, rusty stancions that once had clamped loosely around a cow's neck with a now-rusty water cup within reach as well as loose hay for munching.

The floor was poured concrete and the area at the rear of the stanchion rows was formed into a twelve inch trough which ran the length of the parlor on each side.  As the cows were milked, or waiting their turn, they drank, munched, mooed, defecated, urinated and created quite a mess in the troughs, and the troughs would have to be cleaned out with scoop shovels afterward, throwing the manure outside on a pile, to ferment while it awaited spreading upon the fields.

I gradually came to understand these dairy-farming procedures, not because Al Botcher tried milking cattle--he knew better than to give up his day job for that arduous lifestyle--but because there were active dairy-farmers in the valley that I could watch, including the bachelor on the next farm up the valley and the parents of the three other children in Pfeffer Valley that were to become my close friends.  It is not a routine that I would wish upon anyone, but it had an odd peacefulness, structure, and clearness of purpose that spoke of a simpler life in earlier times.

A large doorway led from the milking parlor right out into the cow yard.  The cow yard was a fenced in area with a large cement vat which was filled with drinking water for the cattle and for keeping filled milk cans cool until they could be picked up by the milk truck.

Al kept water in the cement vat because he did embark upon raising feed-cattle, heifers and steers that he raised for beef.  This necessitated planting and harvesting hay and other crops and he partnered with a man two farms down the road named Al Thompson.  Al Thompson had the necessary tractors and machinery and the two Als became close friends as did my mother with Al Thompson's wife Evelyn.

The men had years of farming adventures and all four became drinking partners at the pub, not to anyone's betterment.

I had years of adventures in that barn and in other people's barns, where I fought wars, displayed examples of exemplary valor and cowardice, swallowed entire universes and generally filled in the long summer days of being single digits of age and an only child.

A large, old-fashioned barn like that is becoming a real rarity.  Pole buildings have replaced them nearly everywhere.  Putting a new roof on a large, tall barn is an expensive and dangerous proposition and once the roof is compromised, the weather gets in and eventually everything falls apart.  Very sad.