Beleaguered barns stand guard over the village as best they can; wind and rain work together to break them apart. Opening small holes, rotting what is inside, the hurricane winds creep inside breaking, pulling, pushing them apart. Because the pressure is from the inside, roofs fly off, walls collapse out to the ground. Some barns have been lucky, have found new purpose or have owners that mend and patch and hope that they will last another year, another hurricane season, through the stormy winter and into the spring. Waiting again, for the one hundred and eightieth year, for the hurricanes that begin blowing in June. These barns are a testament to who we were though we are, technically, Halifax. In 1996 we stopped being a village, one of many communities amalgamated into the Halifax Regional Municipality. The HRM is 400km long (east to west) and 50-60 km (north to south): over 5500 square kilometres. They call us a ‘community’, at least that’s what the signs says as you come into our village, but we continue to believe that this place is different, separate, from the city. barns settlement | identity by sarah zollinger The road we are on loops, following the ocean. One end reaches into Halifax, the other way reaches the highway. We are on the farthest point on that loop, farther from the highway exits and amenities than our neighbouring villages that are expanding and growing faster than we are: there houses seem to pop up nearly daily. The longer you live here the further away the 45-minute drive to town, to Halifax, feels. Many who live here work in town but dream of when they will be able to give up the commute, what they could do here and how it would work to work in our village. People dream of making this village a village again. We dream, not city dreams but the opposite, dreams of the country, dreams of (really, fully) living in the village. There are still people who make their living, or at least augment it, by fishing or digging clams at low tide and because it is the country, people do have kitchen gardens but mostly to augment their purchases from the giant chain grocery store. Once, every family scraped their livelihoods out of the heavy clay soil, digging rocks out of the earth each spring and piling on seaweed before the frost, bringing nutrition and air to the soil. Now there is only one family that farms here and it is because of them that we see cows grazing the fields that border the ocean. Knock on the door at the right time and you might walk away with a dozen eggs laid this morning, but that is only one farm of many that were here. This place has changed and continues to. The barns are the casualty of the shift in lifestyle. They are useful, yes, for storing all the accoutrements of modern life in the country such as snow mobiles and ATV’s, surfboards and lawn tractors, but they are no longer necessary. The barns no longer hold what sustains us; we no longer need them, save for the way they sit in the landscape and create the pastoral beauty in which we live. agricultural patterns re-occupation community sustenance weather
There once was a calming symmetry to the village. Houses and barns were, in the 1800s, built by the same hands, with similar proportions, rock foundations, materials and technologies – always the pair, standing together or watching each other across what was a path. The houses are still here but now they look out at foundations or piles of rocks: the barns they once supported are only brought back in reminiscences the old-timers share. These locals, their family names recorded on the headstones in the cemetery, connect us to the history of this place. They know what the village was and they accept what this place is becoming. As the present and the future become part of the ongoing story of this place, its beauty and sense of community encourages ever more people to make this little dot on the road their home. And the more people that come here, the more it changes, both socially and physically. In the past the houses were built near the roads which wind through small valleys; today barns and houses are often separated by the highway that paradoxically connects us. The valleys are somewhat protected from the wind that whips off the ocean. Houses nestle here, this is where this community began. Neighbours are close enough to watch, to be connected to, but with enough space around to feel rural. New people move here for different reasons, their vision of country life is very different from those who originally settled here. Moving from the city we imagine that life in the country will allow escape, quiet, vistas. Thus, our new neighbours forgo the road and build their houses on the top of the hills, their driveways are long, they watch the sun rise and set over the water. View and quiet take precedence over any awareness of the daily comings and goings of neighbours. So the landscape of this place changes. It loses its barns, its two-by-twos, and instead gains beacons on the ridge: houses of light overlooking the ocean, the road and all of those people below. Nonetheless, though the place changes, there is still some continuity – we all hear what is happening when we meet each other at the Country Store or share food at the Community Hall. We know, support and take pleasure in our neighbours. It is really only from the ocean, once the focus of this village, where you can see that this place was once on its own. For those whose hearts have been captured by its houses, its barns, its winding road, it still is. –
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