It is a dangerous business, farming. It is ranked as the fifth most deadly occupation in the country with 38.5 farm related deaths per population of one hundred thousand. I know of accidental deaths on farms on either side of the eighty acres I grew up on and had my share of close calls, as have most farm kids, just ask one.
One such close call came the day our barn caved in on me, my twin sister and boyhood pal.
Larry Cobb was my neighbor and best friend. We shared a love of hunting and outdoors and life without boundaries as most 13-year-old country boys do.
My twin sister and I were in the old barn counting pigeons when he joined us on the main floor of the barn. It was a broken backed, unpainted timber frame barn built over a basement at the turn of the century. The frame was hand hewn oak, shaped 12 inches square and cut to accept other bracing timbers. The roof was made of round cherry wood poles under tin sheeting, the barns’ second roof. The animals were sheltered in the basement that had doors facing west into the barnyard, while the rest of the foundation was built into the side of a hill using granite and other field stone. The second floor was actually the main floor. Our tractor would pull the hay wagons across part of our backyard, past the silo and into the barn from the east side, which was level with our backyard. The entrance was as large as any castle drawbridge opening and often took on that role as Larry and I would storm into it with our just made wooden swords.
On this day we were up to climbing to the top of the hay mow. Ladders had been built into the wooden wall trusses and Amy, Larry and I climbed one rising up the middle wall of the barn to near the roof and stepped onto the uppermost tier of bales. The summer’s harvest of hay bales were stacked almost to the ceiling in the northern part of the barn. The open window at the peak was the main source of light. The glass had been knocked from it long ago and now it was a gateway for the bats and pigeons to fly through. Pigeons would blast in from the light, across the hay into the opening of the entrance and roost in the other half of the barn.
We could almost reach the rusty, brown iron track rail hung just under the peak of the barn and running the length of the roofline. This rail and a pulley were used to move heavy bales up from the wagons or down to the floor. We didn’t use it for that, but the rail was just right to loop a rope over and make a swing. Amy went first. She backed up, lifted her feet and sailed
out and back. Larry and I elbowed each other for the next turn as Amy came back and let go just as she was about to reverse direction. She landed and was stock still. A perfect swing out and back.
Since we all had been swinging for years, we had developed a variety of techniques. Swinging back upside down was popular. One handed, catching something, throwing something, sitting on the knot and counting how long before having to let go were some of the ways we had fun swinging for hours.
The air was thick with the aroma of Timothy and alfalfa hay and the tang of horse manure. The barn had seen the passing of many generations of animals and their waste in its basement.
Moisture from these sources rose like an acrid cloud to the ceiling of the basement and permeated the oak beams and the main floor planks. All this caused the ceiling beams of the basement to slowly rot. After so many years, the tonnage of hay above was all they could bear.
When I had my turn, I swung out, let go and dropped. I fell only a few feet but had enough momentum to tilt the balance and the ancient oak and cherry floor beams thirty feet below gave way.
The haymow cracked open and I slid into the middle of the gaping maw. I felt the rough stems of Timothy scratch my upraised arms and my legs were twisted by bales that seemed to tumble in all directions. I kept my eyes open and fended off bales that came at me. I gathered my feet beneath me and drew my arms down and protected my face. The bales were falling with me and I easily made room for myself and managed to stay what I thought was upright.
I had to avoid the crush of hay coming from above. I fell to one side, pushing my airborne body out of the swirling chaos and landed on my back, outside of the cascading bales and fractured wood and into the summer dried manure of the basement floor. I rolled, stood up and tried to breathe. Seconds had barely passed.
My hands went to my face to adjust my glasses. I could see! I hadn’t lost them! That, and not being killed, a miracle- “thank you Lord!” I croaked from a dry throat.
I made my way over broken beams and bales to an eroded opening in the barn’s stone foundation near the silo on the east side. I scaled up and out and walked into a now unfamiliar barn filled with dust and silent. Tall, vertical rays of corn-yellow afternoon sun slashed between the wood planked barn siding, and cleaved through the settling dust.
Looking up I saw Amy and Larry. They were standing with their backs against the barn’s west wall and were inching sideways on a narrow horizontal wall support pole to a wooden access ladder 15 feet away. They were about 20 feet up and intensely focused on getting to that ladder and not falling into the abyss that gobbled up their friend and brother.
Larry grabbed the ladder and reached out his other hand to help Amy. They saw me and were relieved to see me alive. They couldn’t stop talking as they came down the ladder and made their way across the broken haystack to where I was standing, surrounded by dust motes and golden blades of sun. “I thought for sure you were a goner,” Larry blurted.
“There was no way you were gonna make it with the whole summer’s worth of hay bales falling on you, It looked like the hay mow was eating you” Amy declared.
We looked up to the rope hanging from the rail. It was out of reach now, being too far up and away from a wall.
There would be no more swinging from it – no way, no dare, no how and we went about finding something else to do that day, but I can’t remember what it was.
Over dinner, it was decided not to repair the old barn, but build a new, safer pole barn. Until then, we had to salvage what bales we could and stack them on the southern, stronger side of the barn.
Going to bed that night I thought how everything happened so slowly during the cave-in and how the rest of the day went by so fast.
I went to sleep trying to recite the Lord’s Prayer but I am sure I didn’t finish it. I drifted asleep right after I gave thanks for surviving another day on the farm.
