Leaning Silo Miraculously Rights Itself at Just the Right Time  

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

The silo and the dairy barn it stood next to came with the large 1799 farmhouse house my husband and I bought on Sibley Road in East Montpelier in 1985 for our ourselves and four growing kids. The dairy operation on our place had ceased decades before. The present outbuildings came along later than 1799 but were still quite old.

When we had the property, we dubbed the silo the Leaning Tower of Pete-sa because we heard that a man named Pete had built it. We didn’t have a last name or a year. The silo’s lean was actually worse than the Tower of Pisa’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 nothing would be in harm’s way if the silo just fell one day. And if it did, then we could dispose of it more easily. For a while we regarded it as a kind of dangling Sword of Damocles. But after a while, I began to begrudge the silo its 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 inexplicable occurred that year.

We had decided to move. Our four kids had flown the coop. And although the house itself was well-loved and much restored over the years we lived there, we were ready to pass it on. We had spent months putting the finishing touches on the inside and then the outside in preparation to sell. From the curb one could admire the newly painted exterior, the new cedar-shingled roof, the handsome new chimneys, nice stone walls, and the extensive flower gardens I’d built over time. But that crooked silo was the eyesore that threw the whole pretty picture off. And here’s what I did.

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 day. Lo and behold. The silo was standing up straight as you please. It made no sense. No human activity could have taken place in the night without a terrific disturbance. And what reason would any human have to attempt such a thing. Had I, then, 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. I wondered if the ground under the rectangular concrete base of the silo had become softened where the rain collected and sluiced off the roof of the barn. It did seem pretty squishy there. The rain also ran down the back side of the angled silo. You could see the stripe 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. I wasn’t hoping to sell the idea that the thing was solid. Only that it wasn’t an eyesore. For the time being.

After we sold the farm we moved only a few towns over from East Montpelier and we passed the old place now and again. Some years later I noticed the silo began to lean badly once more. Then, a skilled neighbor with nerves of steel, Robby Porter, took it down for the present owners with chains and a tractor in exchange for the wood, which consisted of 2x4’s (or 4x4s? I forget) that were angle-cut 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 chains, Robby’s a hydropower entrepreneur, a student of financial systems, a unique furniture builder, and a fine writer. For those not just pretending to live by their own hands, making a living in Vermont requires everything you can throw at it.

My breath stopped for a moment when I stumbled on Robby’s video. I wasn’t so much surprised that the silo had leaned again as I was saddened by watching it chained, groaning and pulled to ground with a resounding crash. It felt like an indignity. I had allowed myself to imagine, just a little, that the thing had a kind of sentience. I allowed, too, that normal structural forces had everything to do with the the silo’s leaning this way and that. But what of my exasperated pleadings to the silo to stand up straight? And the fact that those structural forces followed within hours? What the eff would you call that?

Let’s term it a para-kinetic cosmanomaly, which sounds both laughably weird and yet to some minds perfectly plausible. There have been some heavy-hitter thinkers on this sort of thing. 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. I don’t know why I and my mundane concerns would reap the benefit of any of these phenomena. But one of them worked. □

02-28-25 | Ricka McNaughton

(Footnote: For placement purposes, you can see a spec of the much-photographed gold Sibley barn in the background, a massive, Victorian cupola-topped gem. Our former neighbors Bonnie and Jeff Sibley said if they had a dollar for every time someone stopped to take a photo of their barn, well. You know.)