The Truth About The Barn: A Voyage of Discovery and Contemplation

By David Elias

The Truth About The Barn offers answers to important questions about how barns came into being, why they look the way they do, why they're worth reflecting on,and what possible future they may have. Chapters investigate the barn's place in culture and religion, art and literature. Psychological and philosophical implications are explored.Readers are treated to an occasional recollection of the author's own experiences with barns.“Written with something of a stream-of-consciousness approach, the book engagingly drifts from one folksy rumination to the next...It's as if you're overhearing farmers chatting at the local feed store, and you're not too surprised when you discover they all have PhDs.” — Literary Review of Canada“It's a delightful book — funny, informative and full of the author's very obvious affection for the buildings and the animals that live in them.” — Winnipeg Free Press

• Language: English
• Publisher: Great Plains Publications
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781773370514

Book preview

The Truth About the Barn

Copyright © 2020 David Elias

Great Plains Publications

1173 Wolseley Avenue

Winnipeg,

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www.greatplains.mb.ca

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or in any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Great Plains Publications, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada,

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Great Plains Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for its publishing program by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program; and the Manitoba Arts Council.

Design & Typography by Relish New Brand Experience

Printed in Canada by Friesens

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The truth about the barn : a voyage of discovery and contemplation / David Elias.

Names: Elias, David, 1949- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200291815 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200291882 |

ISBN

9781773370507 (softcover) |

ISBN

9781773370514 (ebook)

Subjects:

LCSH

: Barns.

Classification:

LCC

NA

8230 .

E

45 2020 |

DDC

725/.372—dc23

For Autrey

(Meet you at the Pony Corral)

Table of Contents

Chapter One:

The Idea of the Barn

Chapter Two:

Barn as Cathedral

Chapter Three:

There’s No Place Like Barn

Chapter Four:

Scenes From a Barn

Chapter Five:

Pop Goes the Barn

Chapter Six:

Back in the Day

Chapter Seven:

The Repurposed Barn

Chapter Eight:

Out Behind the Barn

Chapter Nine:

Who Said Size Doesn’t Matter?

Chapter Ten:

Don’t Fence Me In

Chapter Eleven:

Raising a Stink

Chapter Twelve:

Barnyard Lexicon

Chapter Thirteen:

Danger in the Barn

Chapter Fourteen:

Good Barn Hunting

Chapter Fifteen:

Bits and Pieces

Chapter One

The Idea of the Barn

Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,

A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding,

And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away.

Walt Whitman

Everything Must Go, Except …

When Apple Corporation recently completed the construction of its new world headquarters, a stunning futuristic building in Cupertino, California, it marked the realization of a dream first envisioned by the late Steve Jobs. No expense had been spared. The price tag was a cool five billion, and the place evokes something of a gigantic circular spaceship, four stories high and almost a mile in circumference. Mr. Jobs had specified that before construction began everything on the site—old buildings, trees, asphalt—should be completely demolished and carted away, right down to the bare ground. The new facility would nestle amid an entirely re-imagined ecosystem, complete with thousands of drought-resistant trees and shrubs, and an abundance of water fountains. Everything new, everything gleaming—with one notable exception. Mr. Jobs had stipulated that one structure remain untouched. He had left strict instructions that the company should take whatever measures necessary to ensure its careful preservation.

But as planning for the construction of the new headquarters got underway, it soon became apparent that the building in question was going to be a problem. The only remedy was to take it apart, board by board, nail by nail, each item carefully numbered and labelled, and set it all aside until such time as the structure could be restored as near as possible to the place where it had originally stood. In the process, any boards that might show signs of rot or weakness would be replaced with the same kind of wood originally used in the construction.

To ensure authenticity, the trees scheduled to be taken down on the site—from which the structure had originally been built—would be milled and the planks preserved, in order to serve the needs of future restorations. The amount of effort and planning was formidable, not to mention expensive. What manner of aged, outdated building, you may rightly wonder, could possibly cause Apple Corporation to take such pains for its preservation—especially considering that absolutely everything else had to go? It was a humble barn.

It turns out the site Mr. Jobs chose for his new headquarters had at one time been part of a vibrant farming community that had almost entirely vanished, except for a single barn left standing and in remarkable condition. It had been built more than a century ago when the area bore little if any resemblance to its modern incarnation. When the incredibly high-tech building complex had at last been completed, the finishing touch required a careful and painstaking reconstruction of the unadorned barn. It stands there now, alongside one of the most sophisticated buildings ever constructed, its rough-hewn interior a place for the groundskeepers to store their equipment and supplies.

How had Mr. Jobs become so attached to it, especially considering he was not a man known to display a softer side? Those who knew him attested more to his difficult and abrasive nature than his sentimentality. It’s not a unique story. A barn that has been part of someone’s experience often manages to become integral to that person’s life, and invariably a strong bond is formed. But what is it about these unassuming places that they should wend their way so effectively into our hearts?

Outer Charm, Inner Bigness

There’s a certain mystique about a barn that lets you experience it in ways other buildings don’t allow. For me, it begins with a unique aesthetic: rough yet refined, humble yet haughty. The place has a certain smell to it. A certain sound. You can taste the inside of a barn. Allow yourself to wander through its dark and cavernous interior, run your hand along a rough-hewn timber, climb up into the hayloft, linger in the not-quite-silent gloom, and you feel yourself in the presence of a place with a soul. There’s a quiet dignity about it that cultivates contemplation, renders agitation indecorous. You feel yourself getting in touch with something. You can’t say just what it is, but its essence is within your grasp. Nestled in the bosom of the barn, you sense a wholesome presence, the calm reassurance of your own organic existence.

Part of has to do with all that natural wood, exposed rafters and beams lit up by a well-placed shaft of sunlight, a wagon wheel leaned against the far wall next to a few sacks of grain, a wooden ladder up along the wall, and in the alcove, a bucket hanging from a rope over the well. In the cow stall, a straw hat hangs on a peg over a pair of denim overalls, and on the rustic wooden floor, a milking stool alongside a couple of galvanized pails and some rubber boots. Through an open door, you enter a shop with old horse collars and harnesses on the wall, a workbench strewn with tools. There are shovels and axes and pitchforks leaned against the walls, a testament to the daily chores of milking and feeding and other simple labours.

Step into a barn like that and you can be transported to a place that’s not so much a storehouse of hay and livestock as a repository of memory and musing. That may be something of a sentimental notion, but if you doubt the nostalgia inherent in such an idea try a little experiment. Ask someone you suspect of having a barn in their past to share a recollection, then watch as a vivid memory comes flooding back, perhaps a carefully preserved childhood reminiscence accompanied by an elaborate anecdote that has an element of dreaminess to it. It is also possible that someone’s expression might cloud over with the memory of something less agreeable or even traumatic. You never quite know what you’re going to get.

Whether it’s a shiny new one (rare these days) all dressed in red and trimmed with glossy white windows, or a grey and ancient relic along a country road with its weathered roof sagging gracefully, the sight of a barn catches people’s attention in a way few other building do. Each one seems to possess a character and charm all its own. Perhaps that’s why we paint and photograph and draw them so eagerly. In many an art class the painting or sketching of a barn set against a rustic background is all but mandatory.

Mortality Close at Hand

When it comes to romanticizing the idyllic aspects of country life, what better symbol of the pastoral than a red barn with its white trim and inviting hayloft? It remains a time-honoured mainstay in books, movies, and other media, a popular setting that comes in many forms. There are sod barns, log barns, stone barns and straw barns; tobacco barns, dairy barns, and horse barns; bank barns, crib barns, round barns, and hexagonal barns. There’s even something known as a housebarn, which is exactly what it sounds like. A few of them can still be found in the Mennonite villages of southern Manitoba where I grew up. Watch for them as you make your way along the solitary tree-lined street: two buildings merged into one and nestled under a common roof, usually with the house nearest to the street and the attached barn in behind. I never got to live in one myself, but I would have welcomed the chance. There was something about the idea that always appealed to me, and still does. If that sounds odd, it’s only that there are a lot of barns in my past, in fact, in my youth I managed to develop a close personal relationship with a quite a number of them, mostly because I spent an inordinate amount of time there as a farm boy performing menial and often unpleasant tasks. I never imagined that in later years I’d come to think of them as places of quiet refuge and even spiritual reflection.

These days a certain element of gravitas often seems to accompany my entrance into a barn. The tides and currents of my own mortality, whose murky waters I tread awkwardly at the best of times, seem a little easier to navigate there. The atmosphere evokes something of the burial grave as I imagine it must be. It’s dark. I’m surrounded by earth and wood, the musty smell of age and decay. I hear water dripping someplace. Hums and echoes filter in that seem both near and far away, the muffled movements of possible machines or animals mixed in with the strangely muted voices of people I love.

Crossing Over

In many an older barn one of the first things you come across as you enter through the wide doors is the threshing floor. You find yourself walking across a platform of heavy wooden planks laid down before you, shiny from wear, edges rounded and smoothed, softened into something abstract Dali might have painted. This is where in times past countless stalks of barley and rye and wheat, bundled into sheaves and carried in from the fields, would have been brought to be beaten with a flail by people like my grandmother and her mother before her. Here was where the precious grain was gleaned and separated from the chaff.

The straw left behind would have been pitched up into the loft above my grandmother’s head, or it might have been taken outside to be burned or baled. It was the grain left on the threshing floor that mattered. Sometimes the women were so efficient in their flailing that the grain accumulated there on the floor until it threatened to spill out into the yard. But before that happened, one of the women would have taken notice and paused long enough from her labour to get hold of a sturdy plank kept on hand for just such an occasion and slide it across the doorway. Such a board would thereafter have been stepped over and referred to as the threshold, a term which today carries little of that original meaning.

It Starts with Colour

Ask a child to draw a barn and the result is likely to depict a building of generous size with a few windows along the side, a big set of doors at one end, and perhaps a rounded roof with a weathervane on top. Now ask that same child to colour in the picture and you are all but assured which crayon they will select for the job. As refreshing as the idea of a lemon yellow barn might be, or perhaps one that is forest green or cornflower blue, the likelihood is practically zero. So deeply ingrained is the idea of the red barn in our psyche that any alternative seems all but unthinkable. It’s understandable when you consider that we hardly ever see them painted any other colour. But how did it come to be that the owners of all those barns, from the Alberta foothills to the North Dakota prairie to the New England countryside, invariably felt compelled to paint them red? Was there some subliminal proclivity in the collective unconscious of early farmers toward this particular shade?

One popular and seemingly plausible explanation holds that red came to be the choice because farmers found it was the most effective at making their barns stand out from the surrounding landscape, so that when it came time for the cows to find their way home from the pasture they would have an easier time of it. The problem with this idea is that cows, being members of the bovine family, happen to be entirely red-green colour blind and unable to distinguish that particular hue as anything more than another shade of grey. Another theory proposes that early farmers, in an attempt to pass themselves off as prosperous, painted their barns red to give them the appearance from a distance of being constructed out of brick, a building material generally reserved for their wealthier neighbours. It has even been suggested that the practice dates back to a time when the secret sympathies of burgeoning twentieth-century agrarians leaned toward communism. In fact, the reasons turn out be more geological than political, and take us on a journey that goes all the way back to the origins of the Earth itself.

At first glance it might seem a lighter hue would have made more sense, white for instance, which absorbs less sunlight than red and offers a stronger barrier to the effects of ultraviolet light. White also seems to be one of the few colours with any chance of passing muster as an aesthetic alternative to