I stopped by for a while yesterday afternoon for a picnic north of town, and kept returning my gaze to the lines of a gracefully dilapidated barn on the crest of hill above us.
Finally, I could stand it no longer when the moon appear briefly in a break in the clouds just off the edge of the sloping rusted roof, and ran for my camera. By the time I got back to the vantage point for a few shots, the moon–of course–had disappeared behind low clouds, an image composition in mind only.
I couldn’t help thinking: this one is beyond the efforts of my friend Ron Campbell to preserve in any kind of former glory with his pen and ink. The pity.
The functional metal barns that replace these rapidly disappearing wooden structures will not be worth even a passing glance from a photographer’s eye another generation hence. They will serve the purpose of keeping the rain off the grain, hay and farm equipment, but aesthetically, our future in agricultural architectural aesthetics are not likely to hold up well to the past.
I hate to see them fall. I always fantasize about who used the barn and what their life story was.
Gramma has a couple of places like that on her property. The uncles keep threatening to burn them in the fall. The uncles are not artists.
100 years in the future, some photographer will be taking shots of the moon over a rusted out barn, and will be waxing poetic about how the new plastic barns won’t be as picturesque. They’ll fall. They’ll always fall.
The funny thing about these old barns is, even after they fall they still provide materials around the farm…At least all the ones I grew up on and around.
I helped my grandfather pull tin off of the roof of an old barn that had blown down back in the ’70’s. All of the tin, rusted or not, ended up in projects around the place in the months that fallowed.
If we have gotten too good for that level of resourcefulness, then it’s time we relearned the lessons of our grandfathers.