You likely won’t see another photo like this online today…
Once we got the roof off of the silo it was time to set up a stack of scaffolding on the inside of the silo. We’d pull up each piece by rope on the outside and then lower it down to the bottom on the inside where we would assemble it. We would work from this scaffolding to disassemble the more that 2,000 boards that made up the silo.
But there was a problem.
It was early Spring and at the bottom of the silo there was a frozen slab of ice left over from Winter. It was a deep layer of ice and from what we could tell it was at least a foot thick, there was an odd mixture of things we could see frozen in this slab, from the ladder that can be seen in the photo, to a raccoon that you cannot see.
The thing we did not know is how deep this layer of ice might be. We had this unsettling thought in the back of our minds that this was perhaps a frozen layer of ice on top of a well.
The entire time we worked on top of this ice sheet we had this ongoing concern that at any moment our scaffolding would suddenly break through this layer of ice and vanish into the unknown depths of an imagined well…. carrying us along with it.
It was a couple weeks later, after we had finished taking down the silo, that this slab of ice completely melted revealing a concrete floor about a foot below the ice.
And, for all you animal lovers out there… we gave that raccoon a proper burial.
We did our best to pray him out of purgatory and into those heavenly gates.
Originally posted 2015-05-04 18:38:53.