The Silo In My Mind
That summer day in 1964, my friend Andre and I headed up our street, not knowing where our journey would take us. The day was young and the sun beamed brightly, and we were eager for an adventure.
At the crest of the street we came to a sloping fenced pasture. Here I stretched a strand of barbed wire so we could squeeze through. Once inside the fence, we tromped through high grass and clover, pausing along the way to eat blackberries. We hiked on ‘til we came to the end of the sun-drenched pasture and then reached the woods—shadowy and unfamiliar. We had never ventured this far before.
The woods were dense with maples, poplars, and oaks, the undergrowth thick with laurels and pine saplings. Andre and I stooped to rake back pine needles and moist black soil, hoping to uncover Indian arrowheads and other buried treasures.
As we scouted for relics, I asked Andre, “You finding anything?”
“Nah,” he said, as he sat on his haunches in Bermuda shorts and concentrated on his excavating.
Andre was six years old—a cherubic boy with curly blond hair—and a willing and imaginative companion.
After we gave up digging, we trudged on for a good while. Andre followed me—his eight-year-old leader—trusting I knew where we were going.
We reached a clearing and saw a farmhouse and barn. Nearby stood a towering shiny silo—unlike anything either of us had ever seen.
“Look at that,” I told Andre, pointing to the silo, and we walked over and surveyed its expanse. “Ain’t it big?” I asked. “Makes you dizzy looking up at it.”
“Yeah,” Andre agreed. We stood and admired the imposing domed structure. We may have had a vague idea what the silo’s purpose was and what it held, but we’d never stood so close to one before, and we thought it was grand—a real treasure.
“Wonder who lives here?” I asked, nodding toward the farmhouse, and Andre shrugged. This farmstead was hidden in the woods, a good distance from our neighborhood; a place we’d never imagined existed.
Suddenly we heard dogs baying—hounds that seemed to be on the scent of something—probably us.
“We better go,” I told Andre. “Somebody might’ve sicced them dogs on us.”
We turned in our tracks and rushed back into the woods, which seemed darker and deeper than before.
Pushing aside tree limbs and shuffling through tangles of thorny briars that caught our bare legs, we stopped in a thicket of pines to rest.
“I ain’t sure where we’re at,” I told Andre. “I think we’re lost.”
Andre didn’t seem scared, though I was getting worried. What if we couldn’t find our way back home?
But we pressed forward, and finally I saw a hillside ahead, washed in sunlight. “There’s the pasture,” I said, and we took off running.
We lunged through the grass, not slowing to sample blackberries. We slipped through the strands of barbed wire and then our street was ahead. We were happy to be home again.
While Andre and I were still children, his family moved off of our street and into another neighborhood in McDowell County. After he moved away, we attended different schools and lost touch. A few years ago I saw Andre’s obituary in our local newspaper. When I read the tribute, I thought of the likable boy I once played with, and I grieved for that child.
Today, a four-lane divided highway—U.S. 221 Bypass—runs between the pasture and the property where the farmstead stood, and rushing traffic heading north and south has usurped the woodland that Andre and I traversed 56 years ago.
When I drive on the bypass, especially in late fall and winter after the leaves have fallen, I spy the old silo, its rusty frame leaning in a covering of trees. When I see it, I marvel at how far Andre and I had to walk from our street to get to it. We were so young.
The landscape of my Western North Carolina county has changed through the decades, and people I once knew and loved are gone. But the silo still stands as a reminder of a long-ago summer day and an adventure I shared with a friend.