Happy First Sunday of the Month! Linking up to
Sian's Sunday Story to share a piece of my childhood.
Gretchen, Wake up, the Barn's on Fire
by Bruce H. Mero
A strange
popping, crackling noise woke me.
"What
the heck is the cat doing now?" I mumbled, only to get a barely audible
grunt back from Gretchen.
I listened
for a minute or so. The noises continued
so I decided to investigate. It was just passed four thirty, but when I opened
the bedroom door, the orange glow streaming through the opposite window was startling.
I walked a couple of steps toward the window when the reality of what I was
looking at hit me. It was not sunrise I was seeing, but flames...our barn was
on fire!
I yelled to
Gretchen as I slipped into a pair of jeans..."the barn is on fire, wake
up!"
I bolted down
the stairs and ran to the back door. The barn on the north side of our farmyard
was burning, flames were leaping into the night sky. I ran for the telephone,
only to find Gretchen already telling the person on the other end of the line that
we had a building on fire. We both went to the back yard, but the heat from the
fire kept us a distance away. There was nothing we could do. Gretchen had the
presence of mind to have grabbed the camera on her way outside and she was
snapping photos of the fire. We could not get close to the barn. After what
seemed like an eternity we could hear fire sirens in the distance. The Lee Center
Volunteer Fire barn is about four miles from our place. The fire trucks were
rolling, getting closer with each scream of the sirens. I put my arm around
Gretchen to give her a hug and realized that she was only wearing panties as
she stood there. I suggested that she might put something more on before the
fire trucks arrived.
"Oh,
right!" she replied, leaping up the back steps and inside the house as the
Fire Chief's vehicle pulled into the driveway.
"My guys
will be here in a minute," he said as he came along side me on the lawn.
"By the looks of it, your barn's a goner, I'm afraid. Are there any
hazardous materials in there, propane tanks, gasoline?"
Just then a
small explosion within the barn and a flaming streak rocketed toward the sky.
"There
are a hundred paint cans stored there," was my reply. The previous owner
of the farm had been a painter and left us all of the paint he'd accumulated
during his tenure here. We'd thought that it might be useful, so not discarded
any of the paint in the several years we'd owned the place. Another can
exploded and smoke and flames trailed the rocketing can into the sky.
"What
else is in there?" said the Chief as his first truck pulled into the yard
and his guys piled out, putting on their turn-out gear as they unrolled hoses.
"Tools,
garden tools and my beekeeping stuff," was my reply. "And
Chickens."
"Chickens?"
the Chief questioned. He then shouted instructions to his crew, telling them
about the paint and the chickens, as more flaming paint-can comets exploded
into the sky.
Gretchen
returned, more appropriately dressed for our early morning company.
Within
minutes two dozen volunteer firemen were working the fire, shouting
instructions to each other and spraying water onto the flames from hoses hooked
to a tanker truck which had arrived. While they worked to put out the fire, I
could hear the guys making clucking sounds and joking about fried chicken for
breakfast.
At some point
during the excitement, Mitra joined us in the back yard to watch the fire.
She'd slept through the sirens and trucks arriving and the yelling, said it was
the chicken clucking sounds that got her out of bed.
The Fire
Chief asked me to cut the electrical circuit to the barn if I could, the heat from
the fire had melted the insulation from the electric line between the house and
the barn and the wire was now on the ground and arcing, making fires in the
dried grass. At some point the hoses were turned onto the shingles on the house
closest to the fire to cool them and prevent a second catastrophe.
By daybreak,
an hour and a half after it was discovered, the fire was out. Firemen were
rolling up their hoses and removing fire clothing. Still, an occasional
clucking noise could be heard from the guys stowing their gear. Only a portion
of the back wall of the barn still stood, the rest of the barn and the
greenhouse we'd only recently built on its south wall was gone. It was a total
loss. Before he left, the Chief told me
that a Fire Inspector would be coming to see if they could find a cause for the
fire, though he would report that the likely source was the greenhouse...the
fire had appeared to spread from there in two directions. The Fire Inspector
arrived later that morning. Eventually, it was officially determined that the
opinion of the Fire Chief was straight on...it was the greenhouse where the
fire initiated. The official ignition source was determined to be a faulty heat
tape in the growing bed in the greenhouse.
I called into
work, told my secretary what had happened and took the day off. Mitra skipped
school.
Mitra and I
spent the early morning recovering roasted chicken carcasses and burying them
ceremoniously in the orchard, thirty of them. We found burned-out paint cans a
hundred feet from the charred remains of the barn. That the fire was intense
was evident in the pools of melted glass we found where the greenhouse windows
had melted. Gretchen contacted our friend at the insurance company and informed
him of the fire. Norm told us to begin to make a list of the items we'd lost in
the fire. Later that afternoon an insurance adjuster arrived to look things
over. He reiterated the request to list the items we'd lost, but asked that we
add a replacement cost for each item and the approximate age of each. The Sears
catalog was very helpful. Admittedly, though, unaccounted-for items that were
burned-up in the fire are still coming to memory, all these years later.
Mitra recalls
the clucking noises made by her politically-incorrect bus driver as he
delivered her to our driveway each day for weeks after the fire.
We did
alright. The barn and its contents were insured. The insurance adjuster and
insurance company were fair. We were eventually able to re-build the barn and
replace the items we most needed that were lost in the flames. Hence the second
part of this story.
The day after
the fire I went to work. Gretchen combed through the ashes to recover whatever
was left of our possessions, though there was little the flames had not
consumed. Mitra went back to school and told tales of the previous day's
adventure, complete with the chicken clucking stuff of the firemen.
At the end of
the morning staff meeting, my boss, Sherm mentioned our fire and announced that
a barn-raising party to replace the lost structure would be happening soon and
that he wanted his engineering staff's full assistance with the design and
construction of the replacement structure. I was not even thinking replacement,
so soon after the fire, but Sherm turned me in another direction by his
announcement and our loss turned positive.
Within the
month we had a generous check from the insurance company for the loss of the
barn and its material contents. The chickens, however were not insured. By then
we had also settled on a design for the replacement barn and had secured the
requisite permits from the Town of Lee. The building inspector commented, when
we submitted our plans, that he'd never before seen an architect-stamped set of
blueprints for a chicken coop. Of
course, our new barn was to be more than just a chicken coop. We had designed
into the barn a large, rat-proof space for a new flock of chickens, a large
woodshed, greenhouse and a drive-thru spot to park our tractor and trailer and
ample space to store our gardening tools.
Sherm had set
the next phase into motion. We had an insurance settlement. The Lee Center
Volunteer Fire Department allowed us to burn the remainder of the barn. We then
hired a guy with a backhoe to dig us a hole behind the barn and bury what
remained of the barn and greenhouse (and some other useless stuff that we'd had
kicking around). The backhoe broke-up the concrete floor of the barn. We then
discovered an unintended benefit of the fire...it had completely wiped-out a
colony of Norway rats that had been living in a den beneath the concrete and
eating free from the chicken feed we'd been providing our, now-defunct birds
twice daily. The fire had consumed the oxygen from beneath the slab and the
rats had all suffocated.
Within a week,
seven dump-truck loads of sand and gravel covered what remained of the old barn
foundation (as well as numerous old tires and several defunct small appliances,
including an ancient TV set). The plan was to install a couple dozen 12'
pressure treated posts within the new fill, pour a concrete floor and then do a
barn-raising weekend a couple of weeks hence. Things went according to plan,
mostly. We rented a post-hole digging contraption from the local rental place
to place the poles, but were offered a discount on the rental because the
throttle on the motor was not working properly. That should have been a clue. The
device required two digger-contraption holders and a throttle control person to
make it work. Gretchen was the throttle controller, my friend Bill and I were
the diggers. It took a couple of holes for us all to get accustomed to the
digger, but after five of so holes we were pros....that is until we dug a hole
and hit that old TV set we'd buried within the fill. Before Gretch could
let-off on the throttle, Bill and I had rotated six or seven times around the
auger (which had drilled through the TV screen and stuck itself in the wires
and plastic case of the TV set), feet dragging and hollering
"Shut-it-off" to Gretchen. It took an hour and a half to extricate
the auger from that old TV set. After that the digging was easy since none of
the other junk we'd buried was encountered. We completed setting the poles the
next day.
We hired a
friend, Louie to do the concrete work the next Saturday. All went well...Lou
and his accomplice were pros. That next week in after-dinner sessions, Gretchen
and I, Dad and Mary and my Uncle Ted built 26 roof trusses. 4000 ring nails and
250 nail plates later we were ready to raise a barn. Fifty people were invited,
twenty showed up...not all of them willing to work. Jimmy wanted to chill, in
the shade in lawn chairs with my Mom and her friend, Jody to watch the
proceedings. (Jimmy... accordingly to Jody... hit on her - 30 years his senior
and offered her a joint behind the other barn.) We dared not ask what happened.
The rest of those folks who came contributed mightily. My boss Sherm and friend
Bill set all 26 roof trusses. We did refuse to tap the keg of beer until the
roof steel was on late in the afternoon, figuring (correctly) that once the
brew flowed, the work stopped. We did, however, have a most of the barn up by
the time that first beer was poured. We ate and drank until the keg was empty. Chicken
was not on the menu.
Over the next
few weeks, Gretchen and I hung the glass on the greenhouse and installed doors
at both ends of the woodshed and into the chicken coop. It was nice enough to
live in, and a huge improvement over what we had been taken by fire less than a
month before.
That was 25
years ago. We are still using the woodshed, greenhouse, tractor shed and chicken
coop, functions that our new structure was designed to provide. It works
perfectly...just as it was intended. The building inspector was so impressed
with the design that, over the years he has recommended others in the town make
a visit to our place to see our barn...a
complement to the guys who worked with us on the final plan.
The community
that came here to put out the fire and help us rebuild is the best part of this
story. The fire guys clucking chicken noises while they put water on the flames
is memorable. The barn raising
unforgettable. Whatever came of Jimmy's offer to Jody the mystery. Never in a
million years would I recommend a fire to bring folks together, but it worked
for us.
