Stopping at Barns

Stopping at Barns

By: Dave Woehrle

My father worked second shift at Hertz at O’Hare airport in Chicago, which meant my brother and me had the mornings to play with Dad, or as he put it, “dick around for a few hours.” His jovial demeanor, keg-like German belly, and his cookie-duster mustache make him easily comparable to a cartoon walrus mayor.

Each morning started with oatmeal, apple juice, Gumby, and the Dukes of Hazzard, all four of which shaped my psyche more than I’d care to admit. Gumby aired after The Andy Griffith Show, and we only caught the famous, happily-whistled exit music. My father would whistle along, amazing me in his tonal dexterity, considering, to this day, I cannot whistle. For years I thought the Andy Griffith outro music was actually the intro music for Gumby. The non sequitur nature of this segue did not bother me; the screen that once held a strolling man and his son with a fishing pole on a gray gravel road, now displayed my main man Gumby and his trusty stead Pokey over gallivanting hills of colored clay. The residual Pavlovian effect exist to this day, so much that any whistling whatsoever makes me think of green clay.

The Dukes of Hazzard came on after Gumby. All I remember of the show was the fat sheriff constantly falling into brown creeks, later emerging to sadly empty his cowboy hat of water, whilst looking comically jilted. I know not what my father – or anyone, for that matter – got out of that show.

My brother and I spent the rest of each morning playing with plastic He-Man or Ghostbusters toys in the living room, while our father made us PBJs in the kitchen. He'd often call our Dalmatian into the room to tongue up the globs of grape jam that made their way to the floor. My father was no chef. His peanut butter / jam ratio grossly favored the latter. Eating his sandwiches was like puncturing a blister highly pressurized with purple puss. Our dog got fat.

The remaining hour before elementary school was up for grabs. Mostly, we drove around suburban Chicago, looking for abandoned factories, barns, or other buildings that looked cool, or were covered in weeds. My father would often take us to parks, as well, leading us through forests as my brother and me fought with sticks, and climbed trees. There were times where we were more a pack of silver-back gorillas than suburbanite family: we'd grunt, laugh, throw stuff at each other, and chase squirrels.

The drive to wherever we were going created suspense like I've never since experienced. We'd get in the old black Chevy Suburban, with its gnarled gray seats reeking of dog hair, car oil, and melted fruit snacks, an aroma I associated with adventure. In my seven-year old mind, my father could be taking us to Mars, or the playroom at McDonalds. And either way, I'd leave sweaty and missing a shoe. My brother climbed into the backseat and traded guesses with me about our potential destination.

"Spaceship park?"

"Maybe. Bowling alley?"

"No. Went last week. Mickey D's?"

"Dave, don't call it Mickey D's. No one calls it Mickey D's anymore."

I learned, and continued to learn, that my older brother was the knowledgeable vortex of slang, fashion, music, and recess social codes. He always told me new curse words and what sneakers I should get to maintain the right kind of coolness.

Some days we'd go to flea markets and browse the dirty booths, observe sad men in folding chairs, fingering greasy dollar bills in gray metal cash boxes. Some sold Star Wars figures in their original packages; some sold vinyl records; some sold stolen telephones probably ripped off cheap motel walls. And there was always a man selling hundreds of knives, the blades fanned out on a large card table like a metal flower. No one stopped to ask how or why the knife man did this, and only now does it seem strange.

I also inherited an affinity for buying used books from these flea market days. It was an art to be crafted. You had to bargain down from 50 cents; you had to leave with an armful; you had to open the book and smell it to calibrate its aroma in the New Book / Old Book smell spectrum. I still practice to this day, collecting words others grew tired of, pages tinged with attic, yellowed with time.

One place my father favored was an abandoned fairground off Lake Street near the town of Addison. It was the site of an amusement park called Adventure Land, where, in its heyday, a quarter could buy you a hot dog, a funnel cake, and two rounds on the Ferris Wheel. However, like all older, semi-dreamy people, my father has a tendency to romanticize the past, dress it in the soft focus lens of perfection.

"It was great," he explained as we approached what appeared to be only a forest. "They had these slides. Huge friggin' bumpy slides. You know, the ones where they give a green Army blanket and you climb stairs to the top? We would just haul."

"Haul?" I asked, perplexed by such vocabulary.

"Haul. You know, like, to move, or to move real quickly. As in 'to haul ass' or 'haul furniture.'"

"Okay," I said, considering how I could use 'haul' in my recess talk, perhaps in the context of Tag.

We parked and went into the forest. The Midwestern trees looked haunted and happy. The oaks, maples, and willows hovered over us like strange-haired relatives over a crib. It was fairy tale-ish, as most days were back then. My brother and I hit each other with sticks and laughed. My father never told us to knock it off, as he knew it was probably healthy and organic for brothers to spend time in the woods hitting each other with sticks.

Suddenly, we came to a fence with a posted NO TRESPASSING sign. Of course, we climbed the fence. This was standard operating procedure for my father. He was convinced his goodwill would be adequate in defending himself in the face of law. "We're just exploring," he reasoned. "We're not doin' nothing wrong, so the feds can kiss my ass. The worst they can do is ask us to leave." My brother and I cheered at our dad's defiance; we were, and always will be, delighted by his badassery. At the time, I had no idea what the word "trespassing" meant. I said the word nightly in my "Our Father" prayer, but, like God, I couldn't wrap my head around the word’s definition.

Climbing over the fence meant ripped jeans, which, in turn, meant lies to tell our mother. "Tell her you fell off your bike or something." My brother and I nodded and looked at the denim flaps at our knees, our secret trophies.

Walking on, the forest floor went from dirt to concrete. Broken black wires snaked through our footing, each wire tip plumed out in copper flowers. There were cinder blocks in shrubs, plastic bags caught on branches. We came upon four rectangular slabs of cement. Our father informed us the slabs had once supported the Ferris Wheel. We each climbed up on a separate block and looked around. My father pointed at the most center point between us.

"I wonder what's under there," he said.

We jumped off our blocks. My father knelt down and flipped a gray metal lid. The rust crackled off in red flakes, exposing a large hole in the dirt. My father put his head in the hole, looked left, then right, and jumped in.

"Boys…"

"What?"

"I think this is the bowels of the Ferris Wheel, where they had all the gadgets and stuff. It’s like a bunker or somethin’.”

My brother monkied down, swinging on a black cable with the grace of a ninja. I opted to jump down, landing square on my chubby little boy ass in a puddle of something. I stood and tripped on cement broken jaggedly upwards by roots. It smelled of mold, metal, and time, like a shrine where only mildew worshipped.

We stood in a rectangle of light, kicking moss and old popcorn bags. Darkness extended in either direction. My father led us one way, hit a wall of dirt, then went the other, and hit a wall of dirt. The tight soil was laced with beige roots and bugs. He touched it and said, "Well…I guess that's all she wrote, boys." He sighed. "I guess they paid some poor schmuck to work down here. How wouldja like that job, huh? Underground like a mole, messing with gears and levers like a carnie Quasimodo.” My brother and I looked at him ponder his imagined poor schmuck. He said, “Shit. What a world,” and climbed out.

We walked back from Adventure Land through the same forest, yet the trees seemed different, as if we or they were guards or intruders. We were on land once used for human entertainment, ways to thrill and dazzle teenagers on summer nights. But the trees reclaimed their clout, swallowing not only a cheap amusement park, but our fleeting concepts of time and space.

Back in the car, my father cranked Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band of flannelled, bearded men who, like my father, knew all of about six chords on the guitar. We drove home, my mind flooded with images of ghostly slides and Ferris Wheels disappearing in forests. John Fogerty asked, “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”

I think now of the rusty wires in the dirt. I wonder, "Geez…who can stop anything?"

***

Our explorations crossed state lines. The Midwest has a large amount of melancholic remnants on its flat lands, like scraps left on an old dining room table.

One such place was an abandoned shack a half acre away from our family cabin in northern Minnesota. It was a small single room cabin, about the size of ¼ tennis court. A cinder block under each of the four corners gave the shack an elevation of six inches to protect it from floods, since the shack was about twenty feet from the lake.

An old fisherman once lived there, a drunk with no family. I never met him, but I heard stories. How he kept to himself and only nodded solemnly at others to communicate; how he paddled the bay and fished for sunfish from a small green canoe; how he stopped showing up one summer, his shack left to nature.

The lock on the front door had long been busted when our father first took us inside. The floor noticeably slanted to the left, so one had to lean to keep balance like a funhouse. The fridge and oven were rounded, capsule-like, something considered modern in the 50s. The flour and sugar tins were still full albeit chunky-sounding to the shake, my irreverent touching of everything never being frowned upon. The red and green flannel sheets were sun-bleached on the single made bed in the corner. I'll always remember the single, varnished spoon on the table in the center of the room. I could never bring myself to touch it. It was one of the few I've seen in life that looked at home in its aloneness. On the rare occasions my father moved an object – an ashtray, a Field and Stream issue peeled and molded over – he made sure to put it back where he found it, as if the ghost would return and tally the locales of his possessions.

My father pointed to the broken windows and sighed. "Why do people gotta do that?" My brother and I never told him we had done the window-breaking with our BB guns last summer. We had done it for the same reason every male breaks things: it looked and felt cool.

Someone from the county eventually took the cabin down, burning the piled wood for a whole day. All that was left were charred cinder blocks, which wolf spiders took over with their thick webs.

***

Three years later, we moved to a more western suburb of Chicago. The neighborhood was clean and new, smelling like mall and clean laundry. I didn't like it. The town lacked the modern decay we had explored earlier in our lives.

But my father quickly discovered the local forest preserves to explore. And, of course, he wasted no time in finding new relics to “dick around in.”

I’m not sure how my dad found the farmhouse. For all I know he had a map of abandoned houses in the greater Chicagoland area in the glove compartment. My father’s boyish sense of adventure never wavered. He was a modern day Huck Finn, minus the slim physique and corncob pipe.

The white farmhouse was on a thin state highway near a cornfield. Half the roof had clasped, like a ghost with a broken shoulder.

We approached the farmhouse like hunters on a wounded animal.

“You gotta be careful,” my father said. “Some hobo could come out screaming, wielding a knife or somthin’.” He yelled loudly at the house, apparently to spook away potential squatters. When neither sound nor man came out of the house, he said, “Well…I guess the coast is clear.”

On the rickety front porch, my brother’s leg disappeared with a cracking sound into the rotted wood, to which my father said, “Oop. Careful.” Now this may sound like child endangerment, but it’s not. My father was merely installing a tough, find-out-for-yourself curiosity. Coupled with my mother’s thriftiness and medical knowledge – she holds the belief that most ailments can be mitigated, if not cured, by ibuprofen, ice, a makeshift splint and nap – my upbringing rendered my brother and me self-reliant with a tinge of smart ass.

The front door fell off its one hinge when my father pushed the door. On the inside doorway rug a dead mouse the size of a baby’s fist was being eaten by dozens of bugs. “Circle of life, boys,” my father said. Instead of being grossed out, we knelt to observe the decay, the several scavengers nibbling another scavenger. The gray fur along the ribcage moved like a finger moving behind a drape.

Since these semi-legal explorations coincided with my extensive reading of the R.L Stine’s series, Goosebumps, my imagination ran wild when we entered the creaky attic. My father tiptoed on the weak lattice of fifty-year-old insulation and papery two-by-fours, crouching down to a black chest that, to me, just had to contain pirate bones or rubies. Instead we found thousands of checks dating back to the 1910s. As my father and brother kneeled down under the pallid light from a yellowed window, I stood on edge, darting my eyes to corners and sounds.

“You guys hear that?” I asked skittishly.

“Raccoon, probably,” said Dad.

“Yeah, Dave. Duh,” my brother explained.

My father brought out armfuls of checks, which looked like papyrus.

“Apparently…” my father started, raising the check up to the weak light, “James Schwartz’s check-writing days are over, ay, boys?” He chuckled and dug his arm back into the chest, searching. My brother handed me a check. The names and numbers were written in that cursive hand I’m convinced went extinct after World War II: slanted, consistent, elegant.

Those checks are the only things we ever took from that house, but we went back several times. Each time was less scary. It was like visiting a relative that couldn’t talk because of a terminal disease, a presence of death breathing. There was only silence, objects, and space. And I found it comforting for the first time. I realized the lack of life was its own life, and I had my first cravings for that doppelganger, the shadow body left to rot.

The house was bulldozed a year later. The whole family drove by after dinner one evening, my father vaguely pissed off yet unable to articulate why, exactly, it was a loss.

“It was just a neat house. A bit of history,” he sighed. “The bastards will probably put up another friggin’ Circuit City.”

“Honey,” my mom started. “Don’t talk like that.” She gave my brother and me a concerned glace, worried as all mothers are by their children’s intake of dirty words and disgruntlement.

“Ah…they’re still bastards,” my father said, shaking his head, looking our his window at the pile of shady white wood scraps that were once a house, next to freshly overturned Illinois soil.

***

A few months before I left for college, I drove out to a campground to meet my father for a weekend of eating and walking in the woods. It was dusk, a time when the rural Midwest turns briefly orange and angelic. I listened to CCR with the window down, smelling leaves burning on the wind.

I turned on the road to the campground and noticed a gray barn a couple hundred yards to my right. It looked like the shed of a god in the day’s waning light. Its gravel driveway was bifurcated in the center with knee-high tan grass. I drove slowly up to the barn to explore.

I had sprained my ankle a few days prior, so I limped about in the darkening bowels of the barn, looking through the stables. The air was heavy yet cool inside the barn, smelling of animal and rain. Brittle hay lay in loose, slouching bales amongst pellets of deer and raccoon turds. The roof was gouged in several places, the light purple sky patchy and dispersed in the gray roof like mellow, scabby stars. A rusted out combine held a collection of brown rain water. Glass Pepsi bottles were lined at the base of one wall, target practice for the local kids with BB guns or sling shots. I moved through a few smaller rooms, finding a few ripped plaid shirts and a teal kitchen chair with its dark yellow stuffing ripped out of the seat. I explored for an hour, hearing only my disjointed footsteps and slow breathing in the cool Midwestern evening.

I drove the rest of the way to the campsite in the dark, contemplating my father, his life and love of history. I parked my car and walked up to the site.

“What’s going on, Peg Leg Pete?” my dad asked, sitting by the fire, scratching himself. Peg Leg Pete was my current alias due to my injury.

“Not much. What’re we eating?”

“I got some dogs boiling. Should be done in a few.”

I pulled a lawn chair up to the fire. We sat silently, swatting mosquitoes.

“How’s the foot?”

“Tender. But better.”

“Good. Ma said you should ice it tonight. Take some ibuprofen. You know the drill.”

“Yeah. I know the drill.”

We sat awhile longer. He prodded at the hot dogs in a pot over the fire. “Almost there,” he said. “How was the drive?”

“Pretty.”

“Yeah. It’s awful pretty this time of year, ain’t it? This Indian summer is great. A bit of nip in the air, you know? A little frost on the pumpkin, as they say. But it’s nice. Real nice.”

“Yeah, it is.” We both smiled up at the dark sky and sighed through our noses.

Later in the evening, eating hot dogs and drinking diet cola, he said, “On the way here, I stopped at this old barn just across the way.” He gestured in the direction of the woods. “South of here, I guess.”

“I stopped there, too,” I said.

“Really?”

“The gray one, right? All falling apart and shit?”

“Yeah. I walked in and heard this nasty hiss, and then this spooked raccoon ran out. It scared the hell out of me. Then the coon just kind of looked at me for a few seconds. It didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Geez. What do you think goes on in their heads?”

“In a raccoon’s head?” I asked, with a mouthful of hot dog.

“Yeah. I mean, when they see humans, what does your average coon think?”

“I never thought of it. Maybe they’re thinking, ‘what do humans think when they see us’, you know?”

“I don’t think we’re that far from coons, evolutionarily speaking. We both try to get grub and have sex and stuff. I think I read somewhere that raccoons have elaborate social hierarchies. Like they have an alpha male and an alpha female. They’re smart little buggers.”

My father nodded and sipped his cola, thinking himself a biologist. My father, like myself, gathers knowledge based not on the reliability of the source in which he found it, but on how interesting he finds the “facts.”

“Yeah. Mammals are good,” I said.

“Anyway, we should check out that barn again tomorrow. Together.”

“Sure.”

We sat and gorged, each of us having four dogs a piece. My father put another log on the fire.

He sat back down, belched, and said “I wonder where they went, you know?”

“Who?”

“Whoever owned that barn. I wonder why they left. There’s gotta be a story there.”

I nodded and looked that fire, the bottom logs becoming as flameless and black as the night. I went inside the tent, iced my ankle, and fell asleep.

We went back to the barn the next morning after a breakfast of oatmeal and apple juice my mother had packed. My father whistled Gordon Lightfoot tunes all morning, happy and husky in the sun.

Both of us were silent in the barn, the morning light giving the barn a spiritual aura, like we were Amish pilgrims finding home. We split up and wandered the barn like old times, and left without speaking.

This was all my father said that day: “It’s something else. It’s really something else.”

In that moment, I realized I was my father’s son. The idea of seeing a gray dilapidated barn and having to stop to explore – both us of thinking, “how could I not stop?” – revealed my acquired curiosity. Perhaps it’s our mutual pessimism of life; we feel the whole world is doomed to decay, but the light at the end of the tunnel is how beautiful that decay can be. It’s morbid, yes, but what’s left behind in the wakes of our lives is the crux of human history: the stories of people on land. It’s the wonder of what happened.

My father and I both like the idea of not being around people, but rather where people once were, their lives suddenly void of the false veil of themselves. Artifacts lack that respite of façade. Our dwellings and tools for living are left naked and unexplained for explorers, but there is a shortage of explorers. Many of us forget the impermanence of things, that these shacks and barns are neglected suburban archeological sites that need a thorough going over. Modernity tricks us into thinking that the future is now, our physical reality solid and endless. But our buildings and lives will be gone to nature once again.

This is all just AdventureLand. This Ferris Wheel will stop turning, and we will all leave this temporary carnival. I just hope there will be creatures around curious enough to sift through our debris, that the NO TRESSPASSING signs render inquiry and not fear.

That’s why I’ll never stop “dicking around” on this planet, for it’s the most human thing to do. And I know it makes my father proud.