Let me tell you about a Barn.

Whenever I injure myself, whether it's a paper cut or any bump or bruise, my family will joke that I fell off the barn roof again.

As I’ve mentioned, my family owns a hobby farm North East of the city near Port Perry on Lake Scugog. Most of the property is rented to neighbouring farmers to grow vegetables. Mostly corn. We just use the house, the surrounding out buildings, the meadow and wood lot. The farm dates back to the late 1800’s and has been owned by my Dad’s family since the 1950’s. The big six bedroom house and the barn were originally built in 1866. The place is our home away from home and now my eldest step sister Lorraine, her husband and my two young nieces are living there raising horses and teaching equestrian.

When I was twelve, just after we returned home to the city after the world tilted, I helped my Dad clear out the basement of his model railway empire which was destroyed by the flood, salvaging what we could. My bedroom, back then, was filled floor to ceiling with model cars, planes, ships and rockets, all from kits.

My Dad said “Hey Joe, you really like building these models don’t you?” To which I nodded the affirmative. “Maybe it’s time to ditch the kits and start scratch building like your dear old Dad.” So, as a team, we got to work rebuilding that railway empire stick by stick. We built it in the only scale that matters: The architectural scale of three sixteenths to the foot, where everything is built to the ratio of 1:64, commonly known as S Scale in model railway circles and which also lines up nicely with 28mm scale in tabletop war games.

A serious model railroader becomes a jack of all trades. You learn everything from basic carpentry to electronics to machine fabrication while building models.

I went from building shells of buildings to filling them with tiny bits of furniture, carpets and drapes. Filling miniature bookshelves with books and setting the dinner tables. I’m absolutely obsessed with the details.

When I turned sixteen, I decided that I would surprise my family with a detailed diorama of the farm. I spent months sweating the details. Sifting actual soil from the property and using sugar pine and spruce wood from which the original buildings are made. Even the stones I used for the foundations were pebbles from the farm.

My school year was done in mid June and I cloistered myself in the basement workshop to build the diorama. 

My parents were heading to Europe that summer and I was going to stay at the farm with my eldest sister Lorraine. A sixteen year old boy couldn't be trusted to stay at home alone for a whole summer. My middle sister Kate was in university and living on her own near campus, although she often visited the farm on weekends that summer.

It was just a couple of days before I was due to be deposited at the farm for the summer that I completed the diorama. I was so thrilled at how great the diorama  turned out and I couldn’t wait to show it to them all. I stood over the model and carefully examined it, making sure that everything was perfect when I noticed that the weathervane on the barn was slightly bent. I pushed gently on it with the tip of my finger to straighten it and felt a pin prick of icy cold. I pulled my hand away quickly. Weird. I looked again at the weather vane and it was still bent. I poked it again, and once more I felt that icy prick on my finger tip. I backed off a bit and carefully reached out to touch the roof of the barn and felt that it was also very cold to the touch. Just then, my vision started to blur and I suddenly felt very dizzy. I held tight to the barn to steady myself. A twitch of fear went through me as I thought that I was going to crush the model in my hand. Severe vertigo swept through my head as my eyes beheld the barn in my clenched hand and the actual BARN below me as I fell through the sky! Flailing, I hit the ground feet first to the terrible sound of crunching followed immediately by a thud and blackness.

I don’t know exactly how long I laid on the turf next to the barn before my Brother In Law Hume found me broken and twisted. I was rushed to Lindsay Hospital where I spent a week recovering from the fall. Pretty much all the bones below my knees were shattered and the doctors had doubts that I’d ever walk again. They had to stitch all the bones together with titanium pins, wires, screws and plates. Both legs were casted up to my groin with a couple of bars between them to keep my feet pointed in the right direction. The surgeon said that everything was put back where it is supposed to be, but if there was any nerve damage there'd be issues.

My Mother was bawling and Dad was livid.

"Catlin Theodore Matthews-Josephs what the hell did you do!?" He demanded. "Taking off like that. Without telling anyone where you were going. Nearly getting yourself killed. I'd ground you but you've already managed to do that to yourself. You'll be in traction all summer now. According to the doctors you may have permanent damage. What the hell possessed you?"

“How the Hell?” Lorraine asked me over and over again. “Joe, you almost died!”

“What the Fuck, Catlin.” Hume added.

It took me a while to muster up a plausible explanation for being found at the farm when I was supposed to be at home.

“I, uh.. I, uh… I, uh, decided to come up to the farm a couple of days early to surprise you.” …. “And, uh… I got a ride from a buddy who was heading up to Fenelon Falls.” ….  “And when I walked up the lane, I noticed that the weather vane on the barn was broken, so I climbed up there to fix it.”

“That’s gotta be the stupidest thing you could possibly do! You fell off the roof and nearly died!”

My parents were delayed a week until I was released from the hospital into my sister's care. They had to reschedule their flight to Paris and they were not happy. I spent the next couple of weeks trapped in the farm house sullenly brooding my predicament as I convolesced. To add insult to injury, with my legs trussed up, I couldn’t wear pants! It was too hot to live in a housecoat so I had to wear my sister’s skirt. One of Kate’s old school uniform kilts. 

When Kate came to visit the farm, bless her little heart, she would tease me the whole time. To her, I was now “Josephine.”

With my worst Scottish accent I’d shout “It’s nay a dress, ye numpty, it’s a Fekkin Kilt!”

“Okay, Josephine” she’d laugh.

With my parents in Europe, sister Kate in the city and Lorraine and Hume at their respective jobs all day, I had the farm to myself most days. My nieces were not yet born. Over the weeks I’d shown that I could mostly fend for myself without nursemaids hovering over me. So I was mostly left to my own devices. The casting was sturdy enough that I could use crutches and move around like some sort of bow-legged cowboy in a kilt.

Going stir, I figured out a way to make my own way down the porch steps and side saddle onto a four wheeler dirt bike. From there, I started to putter around the property. It felt good to get outside and into the summer air.

It took me another week or so to work up my nerve to make my way around the barn to where I had fallen. Seven weeks since my fall. 

There it was laying in some tall grass: The BARN.

I poked at it carefully with my crutch like someone prodding a dead animal with a stick.

Gingerly, I got down off of the four wheeler and sat down next to the barns. The big one and the little one.

I poked it again, this time with my finger. Turning my face away like it was an unexploded munition. Nothing. Taking a deep breath, I picked it up. Only looking at it out of the corner of my eye.

Working carefully, I got it and myself back onto the four wheeler and tucked it under my kilt. By inches, I got it and myself back into the house, stashed the barn and exhausted, I took a nap. Lorraine let me sleep through dinner, knowing that I could fend for myself if I woke up hungry.

I awoke after dark and pulled out my prize and set it on the side table next to me. Disbelieving everything that had happened over the last few weeks even though the evidence was undeniable. I leaned in and took a closer look at my masterpiece. It appeared to be in immaculate condition except for that damned weather vane.

I picked up a pencil and used it to prod at the weather vane to no avail.

I picked up the barn and examined it. I dropped it as it suddenly grew cold in my grip. It was like an electric shock. I played cat and mouse with the barn for over an hour. Picking it up and dropping it again. It finally wore me out and I surrendered to its chilly allure. I hung onto the barn and felt the vertigo build, and again I was falling briefly.

Crunch! Thud!

There I was, in a crumpled heap on the ground beside the BARN with the barn in my hands. The casts on my legs were smashed. I crunched my eyes tight and clamped my jaw against the pain I was expecting to explode through my body. After holding my breath for a long time I puffed it out and gasped for my next breath. Nothing. No pain.

Maybe I broke my back? Maybe I couldn’t feel the pain because I was now paralysed?

Laying there sweating and shivering in the hot humid night I tentatively mentally felt around my body. Working from the top of my head down to the tips of my toes. Everything felt intact so I opened my eyes again to visually confirm what I could in the moonlight. I flexed and relaxed myself bit by bit.

I felt euphoric as I sat up and tore off the smashed casts. I looked at my pasty white legs in the moonlight. The stitches from the surgery were still there, cinching scarred flesh.

What now? Stand up? I took a couple of deep breaths to steady myself and heaved myself up. And, I was vertical. My legs were stiff and weak but they could carry me.

Then panic set in. How the hell do I explain this? This miracle? I was supposed to be casted for another couple of weeks: X-Rays, braces, physiotherapy… Maybe never walk again…

I gathered up as much of the evidence as I could and stashed it in a crate in the barn and made my way back to the house. Starving, I ate a whole box of cereal while my brain ran in circles. Maybe this was all just a dream. A nightmare. Just in case, I made sure there were lots of blankets over my legs to disguise their new nakedness. Then I crashed hard into real nightmares. Dark Horsemen chased me relentlessly…

When I awoke it was bright and sunny. The adults were at work. Thank goodness for that. I showered for the first time in nearly two months and that experience was orgasmic. What a great feeling after having to be sponge bathed in the kitchen sink.

While in the shower I had a realization. When I had first activated the barn, I’m going to call it the barn portal, I had been looking down on the weather vane. Last night, I had been looking from a lower angle and apparently didn’t fall as far, or land as hard. So, maybe if I held it up and focused on the side I might wind up even closer to the ground. Hopefully not under…

I limped down the stairs still naked and dripping from the shower. I grabbed the barn portal and stared at the door to the tack room as I felt it go cold in my wet hands. Cue the flash-backs of vertigo, but this time the BARN appeared in front of me and I carefully stepped forward. There I was, naked to the world, standing at the tack room door with the barn portal in my hands.

I was euphoric, to say the least. I whooped and hollered and stumbled and fell a few times as I did a zigzagging, limping trot through the meadow next to the barn. I think I got stung by a hornet but I didn’t notice the acidic shock.

I stopped, a couple of hundred meters away from the barn and looked back.

Needing to exercise the scientific method, I stood with my back to the barn and regarded the barn portal once more. This time focusing on the broad side. Once again I was able to step through and find myself next to the barn.

I realized at that moment that I needed to conceal my barn portal and my miracle healing. I had no way to explain any of it and wasn’t entirely certain that any of it was real. I just needed a plan of escape.

Then I had a lightbulb moment. In the barn there was a crate full of rolls of padding and plaster casting for wrapping the horses legs. I would just have to re-cast my legs for the time being…

I took the cross braces out of hiding and carefully re-casted my legs. It took hours to get everything right. Including making them as filthy as they were before, which was a detail I almost forgot. Artfully I transplanted bits of the old cast that had been autographed by family and a couple of friends who had made brief visits to the farm over the past month and a half. That’s when I really started to feel that hornet sting which had shifted from painful to itchy in a spot now covered by the casts where I could not scratch.

A couple of weeks later, the doctors appeared to be shocked and stunned at how well my legs had healed. They didn’t really question it though. They mostly congratulated themselves for their success and chalked down my capacity for healing to my youth. I hammed it up with using the crutches and I diligently attended and participated in the rehab.

Something inside me felt that I needed to keep quiet about the strange events of the summer: The barn portal and my amazing recovery. After nearly ten weeks, my casts came off, just in time to return to school. 

I had gotten quite comfortable with wearing the kilt and my blue jeans felt like I was being casted again. So, call me Josephine if you like, but I will continue to wear a kilt! As a bonus, you kin fit many bits and bobs in a Sporran that ye kennit fit in the pockets o’ yer jeans.

I kept the barn portal to myself but I made a replacement for the diorama of the farm. I presented the diorama to my family that Christmas.