Burning Barn

One of the places I remember playing with my cousins was an old pole barn out behind my great grandparent's house. When I say old I mean it. That barn was about 100 years old. It was basically a corrugated tin roof supported on top of old telephone poles. At one point there was some hay stored on one side of it and an auger/spreader in the middle section and then the other side was open. At the back of the barn was a set of silos and and old feed storage area. All that was left was one silo, a little grain elevator, a large round cement foundation, and an old truck without a bed parked on the cement slab. I have 3 stories associated with this barn area.

Story 1.
One day Jake and I took Jake's little brother Joe and we went exploring this place. We were going all around the back and then we thought it would be fun to climb into the truck. When we opened the door to the truck we found it already inhabited by yellow jackets! The wasps came storming out and quickly stung Joe. Jake yelled RUN! but Joe couldn't run as fast as we could because he was smaller than we were. Anyway, we finally got away, but Joe was crying and hurt bad. Jake decided that Joe needed immediate adult first aid and so we headed in the most direct route to were the adults were. They were all at Mama Fawn's (my grandmother's) house which was across a corn field. I remember going crashing through the corn in a direct route, but I felt lost. Some how we made it to care and we didn't go back to the old barn for a long time. I still keep my distance from that truck.

Story 2.
A few years later a whole group of cousins, probably 10 of us, decided to turn the old barn into a war hospital. We had doctors and nurses. We had sick beds on top of the haystack. There was an ambulance (another old truck that was parked in the barn) and there was a surgery room. The surgery room was an old grain catch tire on a board. The grain delivery chute came down and aimed directly at the surgery table giving the effect of an overhead light like you see on TV. It took a little imagination, but we had quite the hospital. One of my older cousins and I went to work the control panel for the hospital (really it was a big electrical control board for the old grain silos). We decided that it would be a good idea to turn every switch to on and then press every green button. It took quite a while to accomplish the task but we finally reached the last button. When we pressed it, things came alive. This shocked all of us because we thought that there wasn't any power connected to the old stuff anymore. The auger began to turn and old black grain chunks poured out of the auger, right into the face of the surgery patient. Ahhhhhh! The alarm sounded and there was an emergency evacuation of he hospital. We were all scared. The cousin who was helping me turn everything on decided he would be brave and run back to turn it off. Whew! that was a close one.

Story 3.
A few years later the old pole barn collapsed in storm. It just blew down and crumpled on top of itself. My grandpa paid me and one of my cousins to disassemble it. We had to pull the old nails out of the roof and salvage the tin. Then the frame of the old barn had to be dismantled and hauled by tractor to the end of the dump. I was only able to stay and help for about a week, but we got most of the roof done in that time. We did have a couple run ins with snakes and carpenter bees, but nothing major. A couple months later, after the barn was completely torn down and moved, my cousins had a bonfire with the wood that was piled in the dump and I was able to go. A whole barn going up in flames is quite the site to behold. It was supper hot and we had contests to see who could handle standing within 20 feet the longest. Generally I just ran around and admired the huge fire I had helped create. Our proudest moment came when a police officer from the town (3 miles away) came out to see what the fire was. Awesome!