Barn Fire

 A neighbor's barn is destroyed by fire.

February 8 2010

On a Thursday evening last month, Don and I were watching television when we heard a vehicle go past and saw in the darkness the flashing red lights that we assumed meant an emergency. We were worrying aloud about who in the neighborhood might have had a heart attack or an accident when the phone rang and a neighbor told us that the Leaches’ barn was on fire.

This farm is just about the last of the old farms in Sandwich. When we moved here thirty-three years ago, Dot and Bill Leach still had milking cows as well as chickens and pigs. After Bill died, Dot got rid of the cows and the twice-daily chore of milking them. One of her sons, Earl, was still living at home; another son, David, lived nearby, and he replaced the cows with beef cattle that he tended. After Earl died, David moved home to the farm to look after Dot. Since Dot died he has lived on at the hardscrabble farm, with the ancient barn barely able to shelter cattle, goats, pigs. Some chickens and ducks lived there as well as in the hen house. We all knew the farm—and the geese who attacked our cars and the guinea fowl who strolled around the neighborhood.

And tonight the barn was on fire.

Many fire engines were roaring past our house now. Because of all this traffic, we decided it would be safer to take the pickup than walk. Don grabbed a flashlight, and we ran outdoors into the icy cold and rode up to where we could see the red glow and smoke down the hill. We parked there, so we wouldn’t interfere with the fire engines that filled the road at the farm, and began walking down by flashlight.

Footsteps behind us. We turned. David’s ex-wife, who lives in another town, must have left her car up near ours. She ran past us toward the fire, calling over her shoulder, “David’s all right, so’s the house, but all the animals are killed!”

I said to Don, “It doesn’t bear thinking about,” but of course that’s all we could think about as we stopped at a safe distance. I remembered the pasture as an anticipated pleasure on my early-morning walks or jogs, when the young cattle would lift their heads from the delicious green grass and watch me watching them. Occasionally, one or more got loose (David said that moose knocked over the fence posts); I remembered meeting one of the cattle in the road and running to the farm to alert David and help him round it up. I remembered hearing the rooster crow every morning and thinking that you didn’t hear this sunrise salute in many places anymore, how lucky I was to be hearing it, a sound that I first heard as a baby on my parents’ farm.

We walked back to the pickup and drove back to the house. A fire engine was parked out front over the culvert where our beaver ponds converge into a brook. It stayed there until midnight, pumping water through its hoses to keep them from freezing while it stood by in case it was needed.

That night, phone calls flew around town. We learned that a neighbor who lives on a high hill had spotted the fire, hurried down to locate its source, and called 911. David, asleep after having had a cataract operation that day, was awakened in time, and we all agreed that it was a good thing he’d been sleeping when the fire began because otherwise he might have tried to save the animals and probably would have died too.

We later learned from the local newspaper that this two-alarm fire brought firefighters from—in addition to Sandwich—Moultonborough, Center Harbor, Holderness, Meredith, West Ossipee, Tamworth, and Ashland. We’d truly seen mutual aid in action.

The newspaper reported that the fire was “of undetermined cause” and not “suspicious in nature.”

The next afternoon, Don and I drove down to the farm. A large yellow backhoe was poking around in the smoking rubble; a fire engine was still on guard. David stood outdoors in front of the old farmhouse, whose paint had weathered off so long ago nobody can remember it, the clapboards now worn to a brown-gray. We spoke with him. Like mourners, other people were stopping by to sympathize, and in a dazed fashion David was greeting them, like a host at a wake.

As I stood there while Don talked with a neighbor, I suddenly heard a familiar sound. Was I imagining it? Hell no, that was a rooster!

I looked over to the hen house and saw movement in a window. So some of the poultry had been in there, not the barn, and survived.

Cockadoodle-doo! I felt a rush of joy.

But in the days since then, the barn’s ruins have seemed to symbolize the demise of New Hampshire farming.

Yesterday Marjorie, my stepmother, sent me a clipping from the up-country newspaper she gets in Jefferson, NH. It was a column by Andrea Craxton, who years ago was Don’s student at a high school up there in Lisbon (Lisbon, NH, not Portugal!). Andrea became an elementary school teacher and now, retired, works with her organic-farmer husband and writes about gardening. In this column she reflected on why she’d begun writing it: “I’d done a lot of listening, reading, and thinking about our country’s weakened economy, the rising numbers of malnourished people, and nationwide reports of illness due to unsafe food. I believed then, as I believe now, that many of our country’s ills can be relieved by restoring traditional family gardens and small farms. It is a good thing for people to know and trust the producers who grow and market their food.”

So one form of farming is dying, but here’s hoping a new one is being born.

© 2010 by Ruth Doan MacDougall
All rights reserved