By Jim Hagarty
1986
Logan Township, the rural municipality in Ontario where I grew up, is flat. There’s one minor hill as you’re heading west into the crossroads of Brodhagen but other than that, the place is a veritable table top.
Some people wouldn’t like living on landscape that level but it was all I knew growing up and I like it. To this day, I feel more at home in prairie-like countryside than I do wandering across mountainous terrain. I also feel like your famous fish out of water when I’m around water – Logan doesn’t have a lot of big bodies of the stuff (Woodland Lake Camp, an old gravel pit between Bornholm and Brodhagen, excepted.)
The first time I drove out of the endless forest around the north shore of Lake Superior and onto the vast stretches of flat fields in Manitoba, my breath literally caught in my mouth. I pulled the car over at a little gas station in the centre of nowhere and got out and gazed across the wide expanse of dark brown soil. I felt a mysterious calm descend on me, as if I had just briefly plugged back into whatever source fed my spirit in the early years.
Having no gigantic hills to frolic and rollick down as farm children in Logan Township, my brothers, sisters, friends and I used the next best thing – the barn “bank.”
The “bank” is nothing more than a huge pile of subsoil and topsoil, pushed up against the side of the barn where the big double doors are located on the second storey. It was indispensable in the early years of this century when machinery, for example, was taken up into the barn to thresh grain. Later, some farmers began storing their machinery in the upper part of their barns for the winter months and again, the bank was handy.
But none of these uses were as important as the one we kids put our bank to. In winter, of course, it was an ideal toboggan run. You could head your sleigh straight down the centre of the bank where it was the safest, or risk life and limb by sailing your craft directly over the edge onto the ground several feet below.
Bicycles could also achieve incredible speeds if ridden down the barn bank and in summer, the truly brave put their young lives on the line by riding down the grassy incline in a little red wagon with little red wheels. Those wagons had a habit of flipping their occupant(s) out onto the ground with predictable, tearful results.
It’s funny how the commonplace isn’t at all ordinary to a child. The barn bank was a thing of real treasure and importance to us. We had our favourite places to play, including the woodshed, orchard and chicken house, but the bank was the most versatile, accessible and all-weather playground we had.
Some barns had good banks, others were just so-so. Some, alas, had none at all. A barn bank could never be too steep, it seemed, but it’s fall could be too gradual making it a bore for the young boy or girl bent on a few fast thrills.
The grass was never cut on the bank, although the cattle were allowed to graze it for a couple of days each summer, so it also made an ideal place to take cover during games of hide-and-seek. Ideal, that is, except for the period immediately following the visit by the cattle who would leave little gifts hidden here and there – mostly here.
The bank had two other uses, not related to childhood games, but invaluable to adults. Tractors which wouldn’t start on their own would be backed up the bank at the end of the day so they could be rolled down the hill the next day and started using the “pop it into second” method. A finicky car or truck could even be started this way. It worked fine except some of those tractors were minus not only well-working starters but brakes as well which made for some scary encounters with a gate and several fence posts located just a few short feet away from the bottom of the bank.
And the bank also served as a lookout from which most of the surrounding fields could be surveyed for sightings of people on tractors who were a little late coming in for dinner. Several waves of the arms would bring in the offending fieldmen.
New barns don’t have banks.
