Fire, Family, and Friends Ten Years Ago

  The Scariest New Year's Day

Next Saturday, New Year's Day of 2022, marks a decade since Dad's barn burned. It was a traumatic day but revealed to Dad about two months before his stroke how deeply his neighbors cared for him. This post first appeared as the final blog post entry for December 2014. Ten years after the fire seemed an appropriate time to publish it again. The deep gratitude to God, family, and friends is just as great as it was ten years ago.

   On January 1, 2012, as Mother and I returned from morning church services, we were discussing a terrible tragedy that had struck a dear friend’s family on New Year’s Eve. Suddenly, to our horror as we topped the hill of my parents’ farm, dark smoke billowed in front of us. We had left my 91-year-old father at home in his recliner because he was dizzy. I gasped with a guarded panic in my voice, “Oh Mom, there’s a fire!” Almost immediately, my words punctuated with alarm and fear, I exclaimed, “It’s the barn!” Thankfully, hardly before those words had left my mouth, we glimpsed my father in the pasture about halfway between the house and where the barn once stood, staring at the smoldering pile of charred tin that less than an hour earlier had been the fifty-year-old structure that he had built himself.

   As devastating as that fated day was when Dad’s vintage pickup had sparked a blaze inside the barn, it was just as miraculous that my 91-year-old father had quickly driven the vehicle from the flames, instantly realizing there was no action that he could take to assuage the inferno and save the hay that was stored for the winter. 
   Yet just as destructive as the morning fire was, the outpouring of generosity overwhelmed the feeling of desolation even as the air remained filled with the acrid, pungent odor from the burnt, smoldering barn ruins. Within two hours of the fire, Rick Rice and Richard Fesler pulled in their tractors transporting bales of hay to replace the ones Dad had lost. 
   This was only the beginning. Carl Goad, Dave Goad, Joe Day, and Forrest Goad each brought bales with no fanfare - just hearts motivated by compassion and concern for one of the older cattlemen in the Big Bend community.
    Mother vividly recalled one day following the fire, she, with her arthritic knees, and Dad, slowed by his 91 years, were trying to drive the entire herd of cattle away from the lovingly donated bales with absolutely no success. Mother whispered a prayer asking God to help them. Almost immediately, Rick Rice drove in and helped Dad herd the cattle out of the much needed hay.
    On March 3 of the same year, Dad suffered a major stroke affecting his left side, his speech, and his ability to walk without assistance.  During the months of March and April, Rick cared for the cattle, repairing some of the timeworn fencing on my parents’ place as well as gates. He reported with pride when the spring calves began being born. One day in March, he made a trip to the rehab center in Stillwater to check on Dad and give him an account of his stock – some of the best medicine Dad could receive.
    When a family finds itself in a tough situation, God uses people to meet their needs--from Josh Harris and Caleb Rice who first glimpsed the smoke, to Joe and Mike Hightower, who arrived quickly on the scene with the Big Bend Volunteer fire truck, to the Indian Electric Cooperative crew and Kyle Welch who assisted with the electricity, to Connie and Carl Goad, who were overjoyed to pull up to the fire and see Dad unscathed. Then there were the men who donated hay.

Within a couple of hours of Dad's barn burning to the ground, these two tractors pulled in
with hay bales to replace those destroyed in the morning barn blaze.

    All of these were people God used to encourage my parents. Dad never spoke lamentably about his enormous loss, but it might have been unbearable if he had not had these individuals, through their actions, not words, said, “Ed, we care about you and want you to carry on.”

Richard Fesler and his tractor, Rick Rice and his tractor and Ben Bradley, my
brother-in-law, visiting with them both.