It was a barn on a farm at the western border of Minnesota. A barn that always had a dusty and still sweet-smelling mountain of hay in its loft. You had to climb a ladder of rough-sawn boards nailed to the wall and squeeze through a small open hole in the loft floor to get to the hay mountain. There were other holes in the floor through which hay was pitched down to the stock. The holes weren't marked in any way and represented the kind of hazard that made the place an adventure when you played hiding games. You had to remember where all the holes were. You wouldn't want to fall down into the horse stall, the calf pen, or the sheep room. Kittens were often born and sometimes died around the edges of that hay mountain. We found their dusty little disarticulated bones years after the fact.

It was a barn with a slightly sloping, shingled roof over the milking stanchions. Easy to reach by climbing up the fence posts at the corner, and a wonderful place to run until someone saw you and said, "Get off there before you break the shingles." The lower edge of the roof was just far enough from the ground to make jumping off a childhood feat.

We loved to show our Minneapolis cousins the barn. They may have had streetcars, but they didn't have a barn. After a romp in the hayloft, Aunt Genora's nine-year-old announced that he had got his pants "soft" from sliding on the hay. He meant smooth, but Aunt Genora thought he said "off." I can still see in her eyes the certainty that we rural barbarians had led her little boy seriously astray. It was all cleared up in moments, but I knew what she thought.

It was only a barn. A barn that held our family for a few hours on a deadly cold February night in 1936 while our nearby house burned to ashes; flaring orange on the barn windows that I was too short to see out of. Familiar milk cows with names like Betsy sounded and looked like monsters in that barely lantern-lit space. I had never been so afraid. I have still never been that afraid. We rebuilt the house 50 yards west, but the burn scars on the trees around the old house site are visible today.

It was only a barn. A barn attached to a concrete stave silo with a wooden silage chute that ended three-fourths of the way to the top. It was by far the tallest structure on the farm and for miles around, and the one I wanted to climb more than any tree. Especially above the silage chute, where there were only the widely spaced holes in the silo to hold onto. And I did it, all the way to the top, in a triumph of eight-year-old bravery. As an adolescent, I spent half-hours up there feeling the high breezes and watching the daily DC-3 to Watertown fly west.

The last thing I did before leaving home forever was to paint the barn. I looked at, scraped, and painted every board and tore down every wasp nest. It was red with white corner boards and white window frames when I left. No one ever painted it again. The farm and barn belong to someone else now. They bought the hay, the holes in the floor of the haymow, the shingled flat roof, and even the kitten bones.

Last fall I drove by to show my children the old place. Where the barn had stood was a still-smoking pile of burned hay, the blackened remains of beams and a scorched silo at the south end. The barn had finally gone the way the house went. When I got home three hours later, I called the current owners of the farm to express my condolences and got a confused response. Well, yes, the barn had been burned, but they hadn't needed it any more and on a day with a good north wind to carry the flames away from the other buildings, they had torched it to get it out of the way. All unknowing, they had burned the kitten bones and the hide-and-seek games and the pride with which we showed urban cousins and new kids in the neighborhood our barn and all its wonders.

I believe I know for the first time how some unnamed member of the Sioux nation sitting on a small hilltop of western Minnesota prairie felt as he watched a Norwegian immigrant guiding a plow through the unbroken prairie sod. The newcomer was pursuing his own dreams of wheat and prosperity and never imagined he was disturbing the dreams and bones of the former residents. Barns and prairies and maybe even corporations would cost a lot more if you had to buy everything. mm

Roger M. Knutson now lives in Charlevoix, Michigan. He is the author of Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways.