I love the old barns in Oregon. When I drive down the back roads I look for these crumbling weathered structures and think about the passage of time when I see them. At one point these barns were crisp and new, housing fodder for a homesteader’s animals and sheltering their equipment from eight months of rain. And now, a century later, they are still standing.
But there is evidence there that they won’t be standing for long. Some of them are in poor shape – held together in a balancing act between weathered planks and lichen. There was one barn that looked solid enough, but that I could sink my fingers into like it was thick cheese, the smell of the dry rot heavy in my hands. When I made a fist the wood fibers became fluffy and soft in my hand, and sugar ants trickled out of the hole I had made. Another barn’s roof had fallen in, and swallows nested all along the beams that are now open to the sky. Below the nests I can hear the movement of small animals hunting and hiding among the molding wood and grass that has sprouted up through the old floor. The straight lines of the tall walls are no longer steady – instead their shape is organic, warped and knotted with plant life. They have become part of the landscape instead of on top of the land.
I love these buildings in particular because they remind me how temporary humanity is. There is no greater comfort than knowing that the buildings people erect will be gone – their inhabitants with them. Someday, with luck, these old barns will become soil. Termites and ants that have already whittled away at the planks will weaken the structure so much that weather and gravity will pull the walls down. Then the worms and grubs will get to work. Roots will wind their way in between rusted nails and delight in the nutrients the rotting structure provides. Perhaps a rich meadow will become a forest. Perhaps, with time, with luck, there will be no evidence that people had ever nailed a straight-lined shelter in that field.
I’ll admit that I want to build things. I want to make myself a home, a shelter for my family and I. I even want to build a barn for the horses I plan on rescuing someday. Straight lines are efficient for space even if they do not appeal to me. What I do know is that I need to build my world out of wood and sod and stone – things that can fall away when I have gone. I don’t want any of it to remain and remind the landscape that I was there. If anything I want what I build to be eaten down by the little creatures, the invertebrates, who balance everything through their persistence.
The same goes for these old barns built by Oregon settlers. Their legacy isn’t disappearing; it’s rotting away and becoming part of what it once was. In fact, because it can rot away, did it ever leave? I’d ask the sugar ants, the mice, the slugs! The idea of persistence and living beyond a lifetime is depressing – why do people need to leave things behind? And we do leave things behind – organic things, things that enjoin us in the cycle or rot and rebirth. What people ask for when they build out of poisonous material is that they want death to be their legacy. To disappear is to let life prevail.
And it’s true that the greatest gift a human can give to the world they live on it to leave nothing behind but molecules of carbon in the soil that fertilize the next generation of life.
Smell it in the decaying wood and rich soil, and hear it in the snap of the swallows’ wings as they hunt mosquitoes above your head.
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