A barn razing

Nils Ling

This past weekend I was part of a crew for a barn razing. It was a magnificent, inspirational experience with people who shared a goal, working together in harmony, right up until one of the guys had the crotch of his pants catch on fire, at which point it just devolved into goofy and funny.

Now, please note that this was not a barn raising, such as you might see in the excellent movie Witness, where Harrison Ford goes off to solve crimes in the Amish community (“Sir, your brake lights are ... non-existent.”). In the movie, he ends up hammering nails on a barn roof with a work gang of Amish farmers, then having a swig of lemonade on his break and gazing lovingly at his woman, who is making a quilt far below.

No, this was a barn razing, where the object of the exercise was to turn a small out-building into a pile of unrecognizable rubble. The work crew was made up of gangly Canadian youths. The “lemonade” was darker in colour “closer, perhaps, to an amber shade. And the women were wielding eight pound mauls.

The outbuilding was on my daughter’s new property, and from the first day she moved in, she wanted it gone. I had advised her that it was going to be a fairly big job, and while I was more than happy to provide expertise, wrecking is a young man's game. Fortunately since she and her fella are young, they have a lot of friends who are young men. And the great thing about young men is, they work cheap. Like, beer-and-pizza cheap.

"Let me just say one thing, by way of warning,” I said. “And I say this having at one time in my life been a young man. Invite them over early in the day, feed them sandwiches and lemonade and soft drinks and water. But under no circumstances should you give them beer before the job is done.”

Well, most times, my daughter has learned to listen to me. This time? Not so much.

I arrived at about six in the evening. The crew had been there since the early afternoon. The outbuilding was dented, even bruised in a place or two “but still stood.

Which is more than I could say for the work crew.

"You gave them beer, didn’t you?” I asked my daughter. She looked away, sheepishly, and hid her own beer behind her back.

"You don’t understand,” she said. “It’s a really well made shed.”

I heaved the grand, dramatic sigh of the perpetually infallible father and grabbed a big sledgehammer. “We’ll see about that.”

I took up a position beside the shed, my feet wide apart, a solid, balanced stance. I picked a perfect spot on the building’s frame, brought the sledgehammer back and swung it forward in a vicious arc.

It was like hitting a concrete wall, if concrete were reinvented to be ten times more solid than the concrete we now know. The vibrations reverberated up the handle of the sledgehammer, along my arms, through my spinal cord and down through my feet into the ground, where they no doubt travelled down through the earth’s core to cause a seismic event in some foreign land .

While I bit back the tears, I looked over at my daughter and this gaggle of smirking, beer drinking slackers. I shrugged off the impact as if I hadn’t noticed it.

I took a few more swings, with various degrees of the same success (to wit: none). One of the boys came on to relieve me and swung at a board I had clearly weakened to the point where it shattered under his blow. He swung again and the board beside it disappeared. Another couple of young studs came over to swing at the old studs in the wall and gradually, over the next hour, the building began to come apart.

I told the crew that they could have beer when they were done with the un-building, so they better move fast. And to further motivate them, I supervised the job while occasionally having a sip. Psychologists tell us that visual evidence of rewards is a strong motivating factor in lab rats and young men, who share roughly the same IQ.

By 7:30, the building was on the ground. By 8:00 PM, there was a pile of wood for the bonfire. By 8:30 PM the burgers were on the grille and the boys were having their first beer of the night.

I didn’t warn my daughter about young men and beer and bonfires. I figured nobody needed to be warned if they’d made it this far in life. And what’s the worst that could happen?

Well, today there is a young man with very tender, very singed naughty parts who can answer that question better than I. When the crotch of his pants caught on fire, the rest of reacted like a well-honed Emergency Response Team, in the sense that like any humans on the planet we collapsed into helpless laughter.

Beer, destruction, burned body parts, and laughter. It was such a Canadian weekend.

This feature: From Nils Ling’s book Truths and Half Truths. A collection of some of his most memorable and hilarious columns. Write to him at RR #9, 747 Brackley Point Road, Charlottetown, PE, C1E 1Z3.