The Crazy Miracle of the Leaning Silo

This photo I took of our old silo in 2005 commemorates a miracle of as yet undetermined forces that I’m about to ask you to believe, because I’m not lying. Here’s the tale:

The old silo and adjacent sway-backed dairy barn of undetermined age came with the rambling 1799 farmhouse house my husband and I bought in East Montpelier, Vermont, in 1985 as a home for our growing family of six. The prior owners had ceased commercial farm operations sometime in the 1970’s. It was just any old homestead now that needed a lot of work, surrounded by open fields and neglected outbuildings. I had in mind a day when we could have the place set up properly for a few horses. Maybe. Never happened. Too much else to contend with.

When we bought the property we did some research. i.e., talked to neighbors who knew things. We learned that a man named Pete had built the add-on wooden silo that was now leaning precipitously. We dubbed the silo the Leaning Tower of Pete-sa. The silo’s lean was actually worse than the famous Tower’s. We expected it to fall any day. But for 20 years it just hung off kilter, not going anywhere.

Taking it down would have been an expensive and dangerous task. It wasn’t a project we were willing to undertake along with so many other renovations to do, and we had no use for the structure. We laid odds that soon enough it might come down on its own, making it easier to dispose of. For a while we regarded it as a kind of dangling Sword of Damocles. But as years passed I grew annoyed with the silo’s crooked holding pattern as it sought to stave off its own impermanence. But look at the silo in the 2005 photo above. It isn’t leaning. That’s because something completely crazy occurred that year.

It was the year we decided to sell the place. Our four kids had flown the coop. And although the house itself held many memories, and we invested both money and a ton of sweat equity in it over the years we lived there, we were ready to pass it on. We had just spent months putting the finishing touches, inside and outside, in preparation to put it on the market. From the curb one could admire the newly painted exterior, the new cedar-shingled roof, the restored chimneys, nice stone walls, and the extensive perennial gardens I’d built over time. Our real estate listing was about to launch. But that crooked silo was the thing that threw the whole pretty picture off. And here’s what I did about it:

I waved my arms at the silo and said, “Can’t you just stand up straight?” I don’t normally talk to inanimate objects or order them around. Or I didn’t back then. I was tired, stressed. And that sagging silo just bugged the heckin’ heck out of me.

I finished up my labors for the day. I came out the next morning, and Lo and Behold. The silo was standing up straight as you please. It made no sense. Had I suddenly become a master manifester? Did I possess heretofore-unknown telekinetic powers? What, then?

Maybe this.

It had been a very wet couple of years. Possibly, the ground under the footing of the silo, a concrete slab barely wider than the silo’s base, had softened on the side where the rain sluiced off the roof of the barn. It did seem pretty squishy there. The rain also followed a path down the top side of the angled silo. You could see the track of darkened wood down to the ground. If the base sank on one side, maybe the other side thrust up just enough to make the structure perpendicular again. In Vermont, frost heaves also shove old foundations around with regularity. But you would think, in this case, that a good heave applied to a structure on the verge of falling would have completed the journey. Not reversed it.

After we sold the farm we moved only a few towns over from East Montpelier and we passed the old place from time to time,. Eventually, the silo leaned again. But didn’t fall. Until a few years ago, when a former neighbor, Robby Porter, took it down with chains and a tractor in exchange for the wood, which consisted of 2x4’s (or 4x4s? Or 4×6’s. I forget) that were angle-cut on the ends and stacked in such a way as to form a cylinder. We always thought it was very interesting old workmanship. The wood had never rotted much. Whatever it was, it could still be repurposed. You have to admire that kind of cellular endurance. Of course some of the silo shattered when it hit the ground. But there was apparently enough salvage for Robby’s purposes.

You can see a video Robby posted showing the silo coming down and the building of the two home saunas he made from the reclaimed wood, one for himself and one for his brother. In addition to being good with tractors and chains, Robby’s a hydropower entrepreneur, a student of financial systems, a unique rustic furniture builder, and a fine writer. For those without trust funds now, making a living in Vermont requires everything you can throw at it. I highly recommend Robby’s book of essays titled Concrete and Culture, a whole wandering grab bag of ruminations on money making, and life.

I stumbled on Robby’s video of the silo operation posted online by accident. We had moved to Minnesota a few years before. I hadn’t known this had occurred until then. My breath stopped for a moment. I wasn’t so much surprised that the silo had leaned again as I was surprisingly saddened by watching it chained, groaning and pulled to ground with a resounding crash. Much as it had annoyed me for years, it felt like an indignity. I had allowed myself to imagine, just a little, that the thing had a kind of sentience. An admirable will to endure. But you would think, in this case, that a good heave applied to a structure on the verge of falling would have completed the journey. Not reversed it. But what of my exasperated pleadings to the silo to stand up straight all those years before? And the fact that within hours it righted itself according to my wishes? What the eff would you call that?

Let’s term it a para-kinetic cosminomaly. It sounds no weirder than what scientists have christened other complex forces to make them sound important and understood. There have been some heavy-hitter thinkers in this arena. Albert Einstein said that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. Carl Jung believed in invisible connections call synchronicity. Atomic string theory involves wave-like energy forms in separate locations and dimensions operating in tandem, suggestive of communication paths difficult to fathom. I don’t know why I and my mundane concerns about curb appeal would reap the benefit of any of these phenomena. All I can say is that one of them worked. □

02-28-25 | Ricka McNaughton