The Old Barn

An email to Rob, October 30, 2001  — 

Rob, That stay in Woodstock sounds really lovely.  You have an interesting variety of good friends.

I can see you’re having fun with the show. Sounds like a powerful show in the making. I get a vicarious charge hearing about it — the realization you’re involved in something that’s very promising, being in an interesting performance space that going to come alive around you.

I’ve never read Spinoza, but he was frequently mentioned in books I read during college. I heard the name so much I always felt I could swagger a little when using it. Guess I won’t be able to show off around you in that particular way anymore. Am intrigued by what you say about him.

A number of things going well. Planning to head back to NY in about a week — approx. Nov. 8. Excited about getting back. Meanwhile getting things accomplished here.

Have been emailing two to four resumes a day. It involves finding a job listing on the web then composing a cover letter that targets me to the particular job description. It feels good to have finally gotten the resume in shape and be sending it out there.

Dad’s walking without his walker again. The effects of removing more medications and giving him encouragement. Other evening I had supper with him at his place. He’d had me bring him some cans of Steak and Shake Chili (available from stores now), one of his favorites, and then he invited me to join him for the meal. He was tickled to have a guest in the dining room, to entertain me. I think he’s feeling more at home in the facility.

Had a good day trip with Dad on Sunday. Drove down to Caledonia, really old town near Elephant Rock and Johnson Shut-ins. Visited a friend/neighbor of ours from when I was 10 or so, Bob Ryan. Bob was so glad to see Dad he cried. When it was just he and I for a moment, he told me, “I always loved your Dad like my own father.” Looking at Bob for the first time in 35 years and hearing him talk, I thought, “I actually knew this man, knew the shape of those eyes, the sound of that voice, it all comes back to me now, strong impressions I didn’t know I was even having back then, I had forgotten him except as a name.”

I’ve decided to rent a big storage unit so that I have a place to store the old family things. For the past couple years I’ve been slowly sifting through the heaps of stuff in Dad’s barn and other junk collections, building a collection of choice bits of mail, household objects, tools I grew up using, on and on. Deciding to just go ahead and spend the $70 a month on storage has given me a feeling of relief. The stuff will be safe, and I don’t have to store it in three different family basements, and I’ve got enough room to save some of the bigger things, too.

Yesterday I went out to the barn to get some stuff ready for hauling into storage. It was a very windy day, sweath-shirt cool, and I went to work in that derelict barn that I’ve been using like a time machine ever since I started college.  I get in there among the familiar masses of Dad’s metal junk and  the household stuff we stored after Mom died and Dad sold the home, and time is at a standstill.

Every visit to the barn feels like a rare, last opportunity. It’s the way I felt when I stood on top of a boulder on top of Pike’s Peak before heading back down in my car. Life being so short, the world having so many places you want to go to, I would probably never be in that particular amazing place again. On some visits home there wasn’t time to go to the barn, or it was just too cold, but I went whenever I could swing it, never getting enough of that family museum and mausoleum. I would poke around among things I grew up with. A tin drinking cup from when I was just learning to drink from one. The family dining table. The unfinished water wheel Dad tried to make of masonite and aluminum. Two stories of this stuff, thousands of little stories of stuff, most of it trash to anyone outside the family and, to be honest, trash to most of the family, too. I the only person in the world to get such a strong charge from it. There’s the old family TV, the screen cracked, pure rusting junk. I remember exactly how much resistance and sound that dial would make as you changed the channel — different from the other TVs we had. If only those other broken TVs were here, too.

Sometimes during each of those visits I would just stand, taking it in, not recalling anything specific or poking through the piles: just experiencing the fact of being there. My skin would have taken on an almost visual sensitivity. My inside would be soaked with emotion.

Not just the contents of the barn brought that on, but the barn itself. I remember when we bought it from Alvin Borgmann, the old bachelor farmer, a smelly livestock barn, old-days red on the outside, furred brown dusty timbers on the inside. I remember when we built the big storage addition onto the front with particle board and factory-painted sheetmetal. It became a working barn for us. Throughout my adolescence, we were in and out of the Red Barn all the time, accessing tools and vehicles. Hundreds of times I must have been in there in some sweat of summer heat and fierce hormones, grabbing this or that tool, needing to get back out to the job, rejoin the carpenters, get back on the tractor to mow a field or haul timber or rocks from some place to another place, and I would enjoy procrastinating a little, hiding out for a few minutes in the comparative coolness of the barn and letting myself stop thinking temporarily about everything my family and the world needed me to think about. In the summer there would be a fine mind-like hum of wasps and flies. You would be in the semi-darkness looking out the bright windows and feel like you were in some machine designed to keep out anxiety. The tin walls repelled that kind of radiation.

When Mom died and Dad sold the house, we filled the upstairs half of the original barn with the our household. During my first years in New York, additional things were put into the barn by my Dad and brother. Periodically something would be removed, by Bill and Dad or by thieves. Things got re-arranged. A box of old radio tubes and other treasures of that sort from when I was a young inventor used to be sitting in a certain place. Then for years they were gone — forever, I feared. Two weeks ago I found the collection again when I was shifting piles around. It was only a few feet from their old spot after all. and the various pieces just the way I remembered them. Tubes, transformers, wires, dials, screws and other such things.  I used to pick through them like a coin collection, feeling rich.

Still, for the longest time, most of my New York life, the contents of the barn didn’t change much or move much. When stuff did start getting taken away or shuffled around, the barn took on an additional interest for me — the mystery of an archaeological dig.

But the outside of the barn has been steadily deteriorating all this time. Although the original core, built maybe a hundred years ago, is solid as ever, the roof on the “new” section leaked, rotting the subfloor upstairs and the floor joists and the 2x4 wall studs. Sections of the floor became risky to walk on. Sheet metal began to lift away from the outside walls. A few years ago that deterioration, along with a lifelong desire to dismantle Dad in various ways, prompted my brother to start “cleaning things up.” He burned a lot of the things, threw other stuff into piles. Then I got involved. Started sorting through his piles, rescuing old family artifacts — books, mail, photographs, glassware, too many kinds of things to mention — and putting them in plastic crates for storage, preserving them from destruction by time and my brother.

I’ve known that the day is coming when the barn will belong to someone else. In a hurry we’ll have to get what we want from the barn, walk away from the rest. I’ve been preparing for that especially hard during the past year, filling the plastic crates,  getting a little used to the idea that some day the barn will be another one of the buildings we used to own but can’t go into anymore. Like our family house on the hill, which I look at with heartache and love every time I return from New York and drive for the first time again down the Road D hill. The house angled, as always, as if watching the traffic coming down into the valley, at the cars coming around “the curve” on “the hill,” as if the house like everyone in it knows the approximate hour I’m due to arrive from my trip and is waiting for me impatiently, something special cooked, people taking turns looking out the big picture window, even the dachshund in the house nervous knowing that something good about is to happen. I always have the feeling I could slow down at the bottom of the blacktop hill and make that turn onto the gravel driveway, my tires making that sound on that gravel, and I could drive right up that particular curving little road to that house and go in without knocking. After everything that’s happened, despite the accumulations of years and changes, by walking boldly into that house now owned by strangers I could change not everything but something fundamental about how the universe works. I would walk to the top of the stairs, smelling food that no other food smells like, greet with my hands the dachshund fishtailing with excitement at my ankles. And then I would stand up straight because a lady like no other lady to me is coming out of her kitchen with a dishtowel on her arm. She is smiling as if my standing there has made the day better than Christmas.

It may not be long before the barn, which I can go into as often as I like, will be as off limits to me as that house I grew up in. But for now the magic is open to me.

TODO: COntinue polishing from here

Well, yesterday as I was getting things ready to take off into a rental storage unit,  I suddenly found myself just standing still. As still as everything else in the barn, all the upright posts and the leaning tools and the sphinxes of iron machines and the heaps and lean-tos of things I couldn’t even name.

There was some subtle distinction of odor, the smell of that time of year in that valley in Missouri. The surrounding hillsides of trees sounded like an ocean, the wind working up one massive hiss of leaves after another, one wave fading down as another started started working up. The loose tin of the barn scraped and banged.

The sounds of a barn and a forest in a fall wind, that quality of air, the company of that familiar junk,  being in a sweatshirt with brown work gloves on my hands, the same kind of outfit I used to work in as a teenager, had taken me back to when I was a teenager.

It felt just like it felt on a Saturday in fall in the early 1970s, on an afternoon when I would be doing some job for hourly pay for my Dad and would for some reason stop the clock just to be motionless and aware of myself for a few minutes. My heart and little tickles of my pulse would be the only thing moving in the whole barn. I was like the needle of an instrument made to register the existence of space and time. I listened. I observed the stillness of things in the barn twilight. Outside, the barn’s tin skin fended off the leafy-smelling cool wind.

It made me remember all the way through my body how I had felt every fall as a high school boy, aware I was traveling forward into another long winter hunkered down with my family in the valley, cut off from the glorious hustle-bustle and sophistication of Washington, St. Louis and Marthasville, the fabulous scariness of girls, cut off from everything I wanted to grow up and start doing.

Those fall days had been lonesome, and almost ecstatic. I was full of hormones and possibility in those days. I could do all kinds of things in the huge world. And I was old enough to be doing some of them right then. Asking girls out, joining clubs, being outspoken, grabbing the spotlight. The possibilities for my life were so good it scared me.

If only I could postpone adulthood awhile.

Well, I could. Winter was my excuse. No matter how badly I wanted to start really growing up, it would be hard with winter closing in like a barricade, booby trapping the roads, trying to kill your skin, driving us indoors to the fireplace and television and air that almost always smelled like the next meal. I practically had no choice but to keep to the valley and my family and my books and typewriter and my box of radio parts and my oil paints for one more enormous, time-halting winter.

Forty five years old and needing to go out into another kind of scary world, hibernating was looking like a good idea again.

I was standing on “overburden,” the stange white clay-mine byproduct I had helped to shovel and spread 30 years ago, not really believing it would ever harden into a floor like Dad said it would.  Time had made it hard as cement. My Italian boots, bought and almost worn to nothing in New York City, had come with me back to this bedrock-like familiar soil.

Outside, the almost savage wind was crashing against the loose tin walls, prying at them. The barn wasn’t nearly as solid as it had once been. Hard weather was blowing through it and harder weather was coming. But the old building, despite the rotting parts, was still there trying to fulfill its purpose. Still deflecting anxiety. Still keeping time out pretty well.

The way the world is, it felt like one of the safest places on earth to be.

I shook myself out of it and got back to work. I wanted to get some more collecting done while there was light. I penetrated into a section of the old barn I hadn’t entered since I was in college. Someone had thrown a lot of big, sharp-edged junk in the way, car fenders, a kitchen cabinet, farm tools, thing after thing. I worked my way through, taking pains not to get my legs or neck sliced open, and when I finally straightened my back I was back in time.

It was the farthest, least accessible chamber of the whole building, a little toolroom. From the contents, it looked as if no one, not even my brother or thieves, had been back there since the time I left home 25 years ago to take part in the bigger world.

It was like finally discovering the place in the cave where the outlaws from last century had put the treasure. I was looking at some of the shovels and pitchforks my Dad, my brother and I used to work with in the earliest days. And there was the self-propelled gray lawnmower Dad used to tether to a stake in the middle of the big yard when we first moved to the country, when I was four or five years old. We would watch it go round and round in smaller and smaller circles, winding it’s rope for easy storage until next time the grass needed cutting, doubly doing Dad’s work for him . There were the heaps of snow-tire chains we would put on the tractors and cars during winter. Worthless, broken, rusting odds and ends that had been part of my everyday life for awhile and then gotten buried behind other accumulations of life.

These were objects I hadn’t even thought to wonder about, had stopped being aware of so long ago they weren’t even memories. But seeing them made them memories again. And the memories stirred up surges of emotions, a buttefly-flock of them, some flashingly specific but most of them a blur, too many all at once to catch. I remembered being me at four years old, seven years old, twelve. Those memories just like the tools and other junk had been kept fresh back there in that sealed tomb.

The flurry of memory settled down, but my skin and my insides were awake with sensation. I thought about the little hidden room itself. It was a perfect remnant of the original barn. The shaggy lumber looked as old as it had a quarter century before and probably a half century or more before that, but no older, as if it might remain unfinished forever.

There was only a small window and a few cracks to let in sunlight and wind, making the room almost warm compared to the rest of the barn. The walls whistled just enough to let you know they were working.

Some tall weeds waved vague shadows on the dusty glare of window glass. The slashing tin sounded far away. The outside world was both close enough and far enough away for comfort.

In that big, safe barn a thousand miles from New York, decades away from the life I’m living now, this was the best protected, most secret, most unchanged chamber of all.

Why couldn’t I clean that room out and put a bed there and stay for awhile. Why not hunker down right there, postpone the future for awhile, live a lot more simply, be satisfied just to have some breathable air and a little bit of sunlight. Spend my days worrying about nothing more dangerous than weather, listening to the faroff battle of wind and tin and letting the barn convert all that stormy force into a little nozzle of whistling oxygen into my safe chamber.

Well, there were lots of reasons why not.

I worked my way back through the dangerous lean-tos and foot traps of the more recent things, back out into the open. Back to the work I had to do before I heading back to New York and the life I’d jumped out of like a burning building a month before.

It would be have to good enough to know that secret vault is there, I told myself. Good enough for now to think about some old things and old shelters being out there, secretly outlasting some of the other things.

That got rather long, too long for an email, but it’s over now and you can go back to your life. Hope to see you soon.

From Missouri, Tom