Derek Johnson Muses

While I was looking through files for a profile picture for this blog, I found the picture of the barn with cracked paint, and it brought me back to the memory of when I took it. I took it the first full week of September this year when I was in Wisconsin to get some ear corn samples for my father. I remember now where I was: I had finished obtaining the samples on a farm fifteen miles east of Eau Claire, forty miles west of the Twin Cities. It had spent an overt amount of time in my truck over the last twenty hours. The previous day, I’d gotten into Eppley at four, had dinner at the Corn Crib in Shelby (best breaded pork sandwich ever), burned to my parents apartment in Ames, then up to Minneapolis where I lunched on Minnesota fish, then over to our plot. The job was hard-10 samples, and I got lost looking for one field (Wisconsin roads, argh, the don’t go straight thanks to the Mississippi.) And my truck got momentarily stuck in a ditch. And I had to Owatonna, Minnesota to get samples tomorrow morning, and make a time sensitive trip back to Ames. It was a long 24 hour stretch, with miles before me.

I spied the bar from the east as I was driving to get on I-94 at the Rusk, Wisconsin exit. By now, I’ve learned to spot barns before I drive up on them, and I knew by the light of day, if I turned south, I would get a good view of this barn as it faced the sunset. I had to stop my huge truck on a highway, but it wasn’t busy by this time of day (it was after six). I snapped pictures as I drove down south to the point I could turn around.

I was exhausted, but I wasn’t past the point where I wasn’t looking for good art. This has been a habit of mine as if I’ve around the midwest for work these past few years, finding old barns or other old farm structures and photographing them. It just occurred to me once on a trip to Wyoming in 2008, it was a such a shame to spend all this time and gas roaming and not take pictures of all these decaying structures. So, put up after after spending the last two and half hours in a field chasing corn samples, I pulled over and photographed this barn that was falling apart.

The rural counties I run through are mostly dying and sad. There isn’t one rural place that I go to in Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Michigan that doesn’t look like it is smaller than it once was or have some abandoned building that looks like it could be torn down. As the young people flee to the larger cities where the jobs and opportunities are, these landmarks of a rural dominated scene just sit there, rotting wood that’s waiting to tell a story, monuments to a life that once was. That’s why I photograph the old barns, because I think that most of them have a still small story to tell in spite of themselves.

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