Windmills
By Wayne Pike

A windmill blew over a few weeks ago. It was one I have been watching for quite a while.  It stood alone amid a pile of rocks in a field where a building site used to be. One leg was bent and it just seemed a matter of time before that leg would give out. Finally, the wind that had given the windmill a useful life put an end to it.
 

The windmill on the farm where I grew up still stands as a part of the landscape. Like the hills and valleys it seems as if it has been there forever. It has changed a bit over the years. I remember the morning after a wind storm when we got up early and looked out to find the vanes of the windmill scattered all over the yard like maple leaves shattered by hail. It did not matter then in any practical sense because the windmill had already retired from water pumping duties. We went out after breakfast, picked up the twisted vanes and tossed them on the junk pile. Some of the vanes found a second career as repair parts for hog feeders. Eventually, they were all absorbed into the farmstead and disappeared. Our windmill served from then on as a large playground toy for my brothers and me. By the time we could reach the rungs of the ladder to pull ourselves up, we were considered old enough to avoid dangerous heights. We often climbed to the first support on the windmill and walked around on the angle iron perimeter like circus tight-rope walkers or workers on the high steel. We developed a sort of common sense approach to being eight feet off the ground, as if that was safe and anything higher was dangerous.

Our common sense was not shared by all. One warm Easter Sunday afternoon, our relatives from the Twin Cities came down to the farm. My two cousins, both boys, were adventurous little guys just a few years younger than I am. The oldest was about eight at the time. He thought it would be fun to climb the windmill as he had seen us do. He climbed, but did not stop at the first support. He went to the very top of our forty foot windmill, a place within my domain I had never been and will never go. My hands sweat even now to think of climbing that high.

He was still at the top when his parents came out of the house, ready to gather their kids and head back to the Cities. It must have been a shock to find their child forty feet off the ground on a shaky open windmill. All they could do was to ask him to come down and to come down carefully. He made it and we all survived although it was a bit uncomfortable  for us natives as we tried to explain how we were powerless to stop the climber.

Although windmills are pretty much useless now except as weather vanes and woodvine trellises, most still have owners who could take them down, but do not. It is almost as if, given adequate time, the windmills might sprout new vanes and bloom again as useful farm tools. The wind still blows. The water is still down there. It could happen.