Barn fire at Amish farm brings community together

By this time in the evening, we thought the fire had to be out. So, when I drove over the top of the hill, we were surprised. Flames shot up from the top of the barn roof. Smoke hung in the Saturday night air, turning the darkness into a thick ashen fog that permeated the Amish homestead — the barn, house, shed, and greenhouses, all white buildings clustered tightly together, clinging to each other in a fearful embrace.

Lights from nine different small-town volunteer fire department trucks lit up the sky, their beams illuminating the scene. Police cars, parked along the gravel road, flashed their siren strobe lights silently, but furiously around and around: red, red, blue, red, blue, red. Still more fire trucks rolled into the farm yard, carrying huge tanks of water. The volunteers had set up and filled large plastic swimming pools, dipping their hoses down beneath the surface, suctioning water, and spraying it on the barn.

I parked across the street on a narrow gravel lane, wedging my car next to the ditch to allow the buggies enough room to pass. The Kauffmans, Glen and his two young sons, poured out of my car and disappeared into the darkness. I headed toward the fire, but the smoke was too much for me, so I stayed on the edge of the crowd and watched men, women and children trying to help with anything they could do to dampen the flames.

At least a hundred Amish men were working right along with the small-town volunteers. Their faces smudged with soot, they anticipated each other’s actions. Earlier that afternoon, they had moved the 40 milk cows into an adjacent shed. A neighbor had appeared with a portable vacuum milking machine and chores were done as if nothing unusual were happening.

Now the big chore was to stop the fire. The first level of the barn might be saved — the milking parlor and stanchions. But the beams in the loft were so charred, they were a total loss. The hay loft would have to be completely rebuilt. That could be done, of course. That was the easy part. Really. Getting the fire out had proven to be harder than anyone thought.

It felt like I’d stepped into William Faulkner’s story, “The Barn Burning.” The crackling barn boards, the interactions of father and sons all around. With mothers and sisters waiting on the side. But the famous Faulkner story is about class and patriarchy, money and power, lying and truth telling, loss and revenge.

“He say to tell you wood and hay kin burn.”

But here, there was only one mission: to work together to put out the fire and save a homestead, a family and their livestock, all part of a larger community. People from a radius of 20 miles were here to help. Were there tensions among these people? Of course, but they were put aside to get a job done.

Here, there was no arsonist, only sparks from a saw powered by compressed air, sparks that flew through the barn, rose up and fell down, landing on a pile of hay. That’s all it took in this dry spell. That was at 1 o’clock in the afternoon. And now at 8 p.m., the fire was still burning.

“I thought the fire would be under control by now,” Glen said, finding me at the edge of the crowd. “They need more men to help. Can you take the boys home and bring my respirator?”

We were off, down the gravel to the black top, dropping the children at home, donning my head lamp to search for Glen’s respirator hanging from a nail above his workbench in his tool shed. I circled around to my house to grab a box of N-95 masks I had left over from Covid, and headed back to the fire.

The next couple of hours were spent fetching more respirators, fetching coffee butlers and cake pans, and returning more children to their homes. The Amish tend to have large families and they travel in units. We were in the outer reaches of my neighborhood, so I didn’t know some of the children or where they lived.

“Can you send an older child with me who can speak English?” I asked. “Or at least one who can point the way?”

We plunged into the dark night, one gravel road making a T with another.

“Okay, turn here to the right,” my 12-year-old navigator said, pointing with her hand. “Now a sharp left.”

We coasted along in the dark, the farmyards and houses dark without electricity or lights. Barking dogs crawled out of their little houses to greet me with suspicion.

I pulled up in front of one house where my car was recognized as the bearer of bad news.

“Oh, no,” I heard the grandma on the porch. She knew it spelled trouble when I arrived at 10 p.m.

“Everything’s all right,” I called. “They just need another coffee pot.”

“Fire out?”

“Not quite.”

“You gave me quite a fright.”

Back at the barn, Amish men were up in the loft, trying to pitch the hay down to the ground where the fire fighters doused it with water. The men in the loft had managed to unwrap all the small square bales, but when they dove into the loose hay with their pitch forks, it just burst into flames. For another hour, the men pitched and battled the flames, pitched and battled until the fire was better under control. Inside the barn, the flames were extinguished, most of the roof gone, the rafters looking like crumbling skeletal bones. Outside, the hay was still smoldering on the ground, emitting a steady stream of smoke.

Around 11 p.m., the workers began to drift across the road into a neighbor’s garage for supper. Five banquet tables held pots of chili, crackers, cinnamon rolls, carrots, celery sticks and dip, pies, cakes and cookies, all freshly baked that afternoon. Their clothes filled with the smell of smoke, the men teetered on one leg, then the other, too exhausted to talk, shoveling up the desserts with plastic forks.

Many of these same men would return on Monday morning to start to rebuild the barn. They wouldn’t even have to call a frolic, the Amish word for a barn raising. The men would know to come with their tool belts strapped around their waists. The work would be completed by Tuesday noon.

I hung at the edge of the garage. Above, the stars began to shine through the cloud of smoke. In seven hours, it would be an early spring morning with the robins and cardinals beginning to sing.

“Please, have some supper,” one of the women beckoned me to the table.

In Faulkner’s story, Sarty, the young protagonist, left his dead father and his family behind, walking into the woods.

“He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing–the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.”

Glen returned my box of N95 Covid masks and thanked me. The masks were filled with soot but stacked, their elastics stretched, one cradling the other, back in the small cardboard box.

“Join us,” the woman repeated.

At last, I stepped into the garage and picked up a bowl of chili, hunger and fatigue suddenly washing over me, the warm liquid effortlessly sliding down my throat.