Growing Up Rural: The Barrel

There they sat. In the back of an old parking lot at the bottom of the Rockton Street hill, across from the old Crystal Bar, next to the Chuctanunda Creek. They’d been there for a while, and I often remember driving past them. Dad, of course, was keenly interested. His inventive mind was going a mile a minute on what he could do with one of these things. So somehow, he found out who owned them and, by golly, he acquired one. One fine day he hooked up the big yellow heavy equipment trailer to his 1977 International dump truck and drove into Amsterdam. I am not sure of the particulars of how and what it took to winch this thing up onto that trailer, but sure enough, I got home from school and there in the driveway, sitting proudly on the trailer, was “THE BARREL.” 

The barrel was actually a drum from a leather tannery. Constructed from solid planks of tongue and groove wood, it was roughly 8’ across and about 9’ tall. It had thick steel bands around it with turnbuckles to keep it tight. There was a square hole cut in the side of it which would have had a door over it. Inside there were all these rounded-end wooden spikes. Normally these drums would be on their sides on sturdy foundations with large gears and machinery in place to turn them (with the leather and solution inside). One end had a large steel bracket on it. Dad’s plan was a lot more simple… he was going to turn this into a sauna. 

Now let me digress for a moment. Evidently my parents were pretty fixated on saunas. When I was a kid, I have vivid memories of “The Tipi” which was this large canvas covered structure down by the crick. Dad said it was a “sweat lodge.” To this day, I’m not sure what all went on down there, but I remember helping Dad get a fire going to heat the rocks that were inside. I know that people went in there even during the winter months. It was a cool thing to have in your yard as a little kid. After a while, Dad decided to build a more permanent building. So one day we started constructing the new lodge. It was a square building and even had a window overlooking the crick. I have no recollection if it was ever used for a sweat lodge or not. I do know that in time, we dragged it up the hill and it was repurposed as a storage shed. It might have been Dad’s office for a bit as well, now that I am thinking about it. Anyway, after a few floods, I think Dad decided it would be better to have the sauna closer to the house up the hill, and we’d attach it to the back deck. 

So that was the plan. The barrel sat on the trailer for quite a while. Speaking of which… another digression. Dad had this vintage 1942 Jeep that he drove from time to time. I was around 13 or so and we were trying to get the Jeep started. Dad figured we could pull it up the driveway and “pop the clutch.” I had never done this before but he told me what to do and I got in. There we were, pulling the old green Jeep with the dump truck which was hooked up to the trailer, on which was chained that huge wooden barrel. So this odd caravan got underway slowly and he told me to let out the clutch… which I did. Well, the engine caught and started, and of course, me not knowing what the heck I was doing, the clutch was still out. So the Jeep proceeded to repeatedly slam into the back of the trailer while I tried to figure out what pedal to press. Obviously, pressing the brake did not help much, and to compound the whole thing, the pedals were bare steel and slippery because of the winter snow. The truck/trailer was stopped and Dad came running back and yelled at me to press in the clutch. I finally got the thing stopped, and it stalled. Needless to say, the front bumper was pretty trashed from the repeatedly slamming, and Dad was not happy at all. So yeah, the barrel being on the trailer was starting to get annoying for him. He decided where he wanted it and that meant one thing. Because if there was something that Dad liked, it was the sight of Matt and I digging holes with post hole diggers. These character building moments seemed to make him very pleased. Not us, so much. We dug above 5-6 holes, 48” deep — to make sure we got below the frost line, of course. 

The grand plan, as usual, was all in his head, and to this day I still don’t know exactly what it was. Dad backed the truck and trailer alongside the house. At the end of the house, the back hill sloped all the way down to the crick. His plan was to slowly roll the barrel off the back of the trailer using some ropes and pulleys and his jeep, along with Mom and I. There were pulleys and ropes tied to trees and the Jeep as well. Dad, however, had foresight. He had a bulldozer parked half way down the back hill – around the spot where the barrel would be tipped over on to the piers — to catch it in case it would get away from us. I bet you know what’s coming next. He released all the chains and come-a-longs that were holding it in place and we were ready to go. He started the Jeep and began letting it go down slowly toward the end of the trailer. Mom and I were also pulling on ropes. I don’t recall Matt and Sara being there but it is quite possible they were. As it began to go down the ramps, the ropes suddenly snapped and Dad yelled, “Look out!” The barrel quickly rolled off the trailer and picked up some speed as it rolled down the hill and crashed directly into the waiting bulldozer blade. After a few utterings of “dirty bird” and then making sure the thing was still in one piece (it was just fine), Dad laughed and said, “Well aren’t you glad I parked that there? Otherwise we’d be fishing that thing out of the crick.” (That’s how you say it kids… crick, not creek.) I’m pretty sure he used his big John Deere backhoe to set it upright on the piers and there it was, it all it’s glory — from parking lot in Amsterdam, to the back hill in Hagaman. The future sauna. It was to get a conical roof and be lined with redwood or cedar. It was going to have a cool door and a porthole window overlooking the crick and be connected to a lower deck from the upper deck.

Sadly, that is as far as the story goes. The barrel just sat there for quite a few years and was eventually torn down. It really was a great idea though. Dad had a lot of those, and you just never knew what crazy thing he was going to see that would spark his imagination and what big thing he would come bringing down the driveway.