On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
JanieM
I got my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix, in early 2008. When my son left for China that September, I made a photo diary on Picasa to mark the year going by. Later I joined a Flickr group run by a Crooked Timber blogger, and last fall, for my sanity’s sake, WaterGirl nudged me toward On the Road as an antidote to election madness. I started submitting photos soon afterwards.
All this time, though I loved taking pictures and shared them often, I knew nothing about photography and even less about post-processing. Then one day Steve from Mendocino waved at me from across the room of this almost top 10,000 blog and asked if he could edit some of my pictures of fall color. WaterGirl facilitated the connection, and a new world opened up for me.
I owe Steve thanks for many things, including the intro to this series and his input on the new camera I got last winter. He continues to edit my pictures, even as he helps me learn how to do it myself. The collaboration is a treasure.
Thanks are also due to WaterGirl for adding go-between to her many blog duties, and to Balloon-Juice for giving us all a place to enjoy each other’s photographs.
A lot of my pictures are taken within a stone’s throw of my house. I’ve lived here for thirty-four years, paying constant attention to the sky, the weather, the seasons, and the amazing fact that someday I’m not going to be here, but right now I am. Everything changes, and my pictures are my ongoing attempt to capture the flow, one moment at a time.
In 1987 my family moved into a ramshackle old farmhouse with a ramshackle old barn on the ten-acre remnant of a dairy farm. The farmhouse was torn down and replaced in the late nineties, but the barn is still here, the focus of unending restoration, repair, and repurposing. The building is an L, with only one of the two major wings visible here. The little room that juts forward in this shot doesn’t count, but for the record, it was where the milk was stored, in a deep concrete basin in the floor, until the truck came to pick it up.
This is how the building looked the day I first came here with a realtor, a toddler, and a four-month-old baby in tow. When I brought my then-husband back to see it, the agent gave us a tour of the house, then said, “You’re not farmers, right? So you don’t need to see the barn.”
Um, yes, we needed to see the barn.
For all that has been added or restored, one thing from this old version is missing in the new: the cupola. We expected the roof to collapse under a snow load, and the cupola along with it. But they both survived the first winter and ended up falling – but only halfway – the following summer. A crew pulled the cupola down the rest of the way with ropes, an event that traumatized my three-year-old son so much that he re-enacted it for six months in any materials he could find to build replicas with.
Much like the tourist’s Great Wall of China, the exterior of the renovated barn is an artist’s rendering. The red boards of the silos have been replaced, repaired, painted, and repaired again. Similarly with the barn’s white siding, and the roof. The scaffolding just visible here was waiting for summer, when the roofer would come to finish the last section of a new roof – the second one the barn has had since we moved here.
A silo, up close and personal.
A reflection hides what’s inside.
When the realtor showed us the barn, the stairs to the upper levels were so rotted out that we couldn’t climb them safely. But there was a hatch in the ceiling of the milking parlor that allowed a glimpse into one of the lofts, where the previous owner had stored two hundred tons of hay. My ex stuck his head up there, had a look around, and announced, “That’s where the basketball court is going to go.”
I had been doing the house-hunting while he worked, and it was news to me that I was looking for space for a court. But I wasn’t surprised when he made it happen.
Soon the disintegrating floor had been replaced by 4×8 sheets of plywood, with screws set a foot apart in each sheet (over 4000 screws); there have never been any dead spots in that floor. It’s a full-length court, though not effectively full-width because of the rafters.
The barn hosted what my son dubbed “big guy basketball” three times a week for years. In a rural area where public playgrounds are scarce, generations of kids have used the court as a gathering place. For a long time I was the crabby old lady on the corner who enforced rules like “Bring separate shoes and change on the first floor,” and “Call before you come,” and “Don’t smoke in the barn.” Now my son is the enforcer. He has a lot more patience with teenagers than I did.
Picture #2 shows a building that looks like it could fall down in a slight breeze. This picture shows why it didn’t. The frame, with its 10×10, hand-hewn hemlock timbers, was largely intact when we came, despite being a couple hundred years old.
In my imagination, the frame carries the memories of all the years it has stood there holding that building upright, one sunset after another.
oatler
Remembering Don DeLillo’s “Most Photographed Barn” from White Noise.
Phylllis
That’s about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
J R in WV
Love your barn, also the pictures you take of it. Our farm had a barn, I spent a lot of time propping it up enough to hold hay for a couple of critters, now gone after it was no longer safe. It was a log tobbaco barn, which was the cash crop around here for many years. I never raised any, but did help elderly neighbors with their own crop.
What’s the current camera you have… or did I just miss it when you already told us?
JPL
Wonderful pictures!
@Phylllis: Definitely agree.
p.a.
Agree with previous comments. Thanks!
Van Buren
Good pictures, great story.
Mary G
Wow, some of them are very painterly, especially the first and last. You and Steve from Mendocino both have an excellent eye for angles many people might overlook, and your collaboration has been fruitful indeed.
Love the story of the basketball court in the barn becoming a center of social activity, and the series of photos showing the unending changes of paint and repair.
JanieM
@J R in WV: I haven’t mentioned the camera — it’s a Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark II. I might have kept right on with the CoolPix — I loved that little camera, which had gone with me to England, Belgium, China, and various parts of the US. But since it didn’t do RAW, it was too limiting in terms of what could be done with the pictures.
At the same time, I wasn’t ready for a fancy rig with multiple lenses, a tripod, etc. I wanted to be able to keep on walking around the world doing my normal things, ready to take pictures whenever I saw something intriguing, rather than have to make targeted excursions. In short, I wanted something that would fit in my pocket. The Canon is just at the edge of that range.
Steve’s input was crucial in the choice, since I knew (really, still know) nothing much about cameras. Now my CoolPix sits quietly in a drawer, while the Canon goes everywhere with me.
P.S. This is the middle of the night for me; will be back, in case of questions, after a few hours’ more sleep.
raven
Awesome work! The hoops court reminds me of the old gym in the building I worked in that was a converted school. It was about 3/4 of the length of a regulation court and it had a beam that ran right down the middle so you couldn’t shoot a jumper from the top of the key. I was telling someone about it and searched for a picture and came up with this shocking photo of the gym and the students doing what was called the Bellamy salute. It was used until WW2 when, for obvious reasons, they changed it to hand over the heart.
Wag
Beautiful photos of an amazing barn. I really like the abstract detail photo of the silo. And the metal roof should last a year or two!
Albatrossity
Very nice pictures, and a great story!
TheQuietOne
Awesome pictures and love your story telling that went with them. Living and working around rural western Missouri there was many a time I wanted to pull off the road and take pictures of barns I’d come across. To me, the buildings combined with the setting you find them in were works of art. Thank you for sharing.
Rusty
These pictures and description bring back memories. For 11 years we also owned the remnants of an old dairy farm in upstate NY. The barns too needed some serious attention. I did the machine shed myself which ha a shed roof and was only 30 by 18 with a shallow pitch. Sistered rafters, replaced boards and then sheathed with plywood to even out, followed by shingles. After that we ended up hiring the jobs out, higher and steeper roofs were beyond my skill and nerves. We first replaced the roof on the smaller barn (25 by 30 with attached 24 by 20 coop/garage)with metal, done by the husband of a coworker. When later we had the money for the large barn, 36 by 80, he wasn’t able to take the job and we hired a roofing company. Originally we planned to roof over the existing shingles, but when they got on the roof the shingles were 6 deep plus liquid asphalt in places. Off came 10 and a half tons of shingles and then the work on the underlayment. The price doubled. I called the roof my Buick in the Sky, because we could have bought a nice car for what we spent. We had to roof the tile silo too. I ended up painting all the barns and outbuildings myself since the quote was extraordinary, I took off a week of work to paint 12+ hours a day along with both weekends and with many hours after work the week before. A roller, a 12 foot and 24 foot painter’s poles, and 30+ gallons of Home Depot white barn paint got got thousands of square feet of asbestos shingles looking fresh. We ended up selling and simplifying out lives. We bought with 2 kids, had two more and over that time college tuitions doubled (meaning we faced quadruple the price) while my salary increased 6% in the same 11 years. Given the other large costly projects for the place we gave up, sold at a loss and moved on. I still miss playing basketball in the barn, the sunset colors on the white barn and over the field. Sorry for the long comment but I really appreciated this post.
randy khan
What a great story, and great photos to go with it.
HeartlandLiberal
Excellent photographs, especially the last one with its capture of emotion and time. Great story. Well told with visuals. Thanks for sharing.
cope
If you had just posted these pictures with no context, I would probably have thought “Huh, those are nice pictures”. With the narrative included, though, they have become great pictures. Thanks.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Rusty:
Don’t be sorry. That was very interesting.
arrieve
Wonderful pictures and accompanying story. Learning to shoot RAW makes a tremendous difference in what you’re able to do; enjoy the journey!
Phylllis
@JPL: Also, too, now I want a barn.
Phylllis
@JPL: Also, too, now I want a barn
ETA: Sorry for the duplicate post–ye olde mouse is fractious today.
JanieM
@Rusty: I’m with Steeplejack: don’t be sorry. Your story has echoes here, as you can imagine.
As to paint, my ex could have been running an experiment for paint companies. Between the two wings, the barn has seven big surfaces. He painted one every summer for a long time, trying out different paints to see what held up best in this harsh climate. You can imagine the time sink that was…so he finally decided to replace the old siding with vinyl. He would have had to paint all summer every summer in perpetuity to keep the place looking as nice as he wanted it to look.
As to the roof — I chuckled over your mention of tonnage. The guy who did the first roof replacement (who did a endless work on the building over the years and is still a good friend) told me he took roughly 14 tons off and put 2 tons back on, just for the older wing that shows in the pictures. I haven’t asked the current roofer for equivalent stats; I probably should, before he finishes up.
JanieM
@Phylllis:
When my son was little I took him to visit friends who live near Boston on a lot they had to get a variance for, because it’s half the size of the the already small lot limit for their town. (They had to blast to make a building site.) As we pulled into the driveway my son said, “Where’s their barn?”
Obviously enough, saving an old building is a time and money sink par excellence. But as @TheQuietOne says, there are a lot of beautiful old barns around the countryside, maybe waiting for someone with the time, money, and interest to save and repurpose them.
stinger
Some barn!
I love barns. Couple of years ago a neighbor pulled down one that had a roofline I loved; it would probably have come down in last summer’s derecho anyway. I have an old barn myself, with a stone foundation. I toyed with the idea of converting it into a 3-story home (people occasionally do that around here), but the cost was prohibitive and I ended up building a one-story age-in-place house, less picturesque but more practical. The barn remains unused, but since my grandfather put metal siding on it decades ago, it should continue to stand while I continue to ignore it until some other owner figures out something cool to do with it — who knows, maybe it will house livestock and hay again. My hope is that, when I ultimately move into town, I can partner with an organization to help a young farmer get started in integrated, sustainable farming.
CaseyL
That last photo looks like something out of Wyeth. Haunting and beautiful.
Thank you for the photos and stories of your barn! It makes me happy to see buildings with lots of history being preserved and re-purposed.
JJ
Love the photos, the stories, and the collaboration between you and Steve. Think what creativeness lies ahead!