Wednesday, February 07, 2007, 20:30

A Haunting Story

Every once in a while there's been a story in my newspaper work that haunts me.

When I lived in the southern part of the state, an elderly man who liked to ride his bicycle up and down the roads to collect aluminum cans for recycling was struck by a car and killed. The man was somewhat of a recluse, but those who knew him liked him very much. That particular story bothered me for a while afterwards.

There have been others, too. The entire family that was killed on a Fourth of July weekend by a drunk driver who was driving the wrong way on a divided highway and who walked away from the accident with only a few scratches.

The man who shot his wife in the face because they were separated and he "didn't want anyone else to have her." Fortunately, she survived.

And now there's another one.

On Monday afternoon, the sheriff's department in our county received a call about a man who had collapsed in his barn.

When the deputies and EMTs arrived, they found that the 77 year old man was dead, all 25 of his cows were dead and his dog was dead. The cause of death apparently was carbon monoxide poisoning from a tractor that had been running in the barn.

One of my tasks Tuesday was to find someone to comment on the situation. The director of the local Farm Service Agency said that something like this was unheard of. It was an old dairy barn, and anyone who has ever been in an old dairy barn in the winter knows they are far from airtight. There are drafts everywhere. And yet, enough carbon monoxide built up to kill the man, all of the cows and the dog.

The weather was very cold here on Monday -- 25 degrees below zero in the morning. No one knows for sure what happened, but I do know that when the weather is cold, barn cleaners freeze up and manure spreaders freeze up. It's possible the man pulled the tractor into the barn to clean it because the barn cleaner was frozen.

The tractor was a small gasoline-burning Farmall -- not a big diesel John Deere or anything like that.

Authorities are speculating, unofficially, that the man had a heart attack first or that he slipped and hit his head.

I wrote a two-part story on carbon monoxide a few weeks ago. This type of situation was never mentioned by anyone I interviewed. Problems with running cars in garages, yes, but nothing about barns. No one thinks about an old barn being tight enough to cause a problem with carbon monoxide. But in this case, it appears that maybe it did.

Meteorologist -- Did anyone watch the Today Show first thing Wednesday morning? Meredith and Matt featured a reporter from Chicago who did a segment about the cold weather and interviewed a meteorologist from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The forecaster was our very own Nate Larscheid from WEAU! We watch him all the time. Apparently the Today Show staff thought the 40 below windchills of this past weekend warranted a story. Nate told them that Wednesday morning it felt downright balmy outside from where he was standing because the temperature was only 8 degrees below zero and the windchill was only 20 below. Matt and Meredith thought that was pretty bad when 8 degrees below zero felt balmy, never mind the windchill.

A Bloody Mess -- I had come into the basement Wednesday morning carrying frozen water buckets and intending to get fresh warm water for the horses when I heard a terrible, strangled-sounding yowling coming from upstairs. I hurried up the steps, opened the door and saw my kitty cat, Winifred, sitting under Randy's great-grandfather's rocking chair, yowling. Winifred will be 16 in May. She has been on thyroid medication for the past four years.

"What's wrong, Winifred?" I said.

The cat jumped up and ran into the bedroom. I went after her and found her sitting on the rug, making that terrible, strangled yowling sound and pawing at her mouth.

I followed her around for a little bit until I could pick her up. The cat had settled against my shoulder when -- both at the same time -- I smelled the coppery smell of blood and noticed blood all over her front paws.

"Winifred!" I said.

I put the cat down. She pawed at her mouth some more and made more of the strangled, yowling noises.

I eventually surmised that she must have bumped a tooth -- or else knocked a tooth out. She never would let me look in her mouth. Winifred and the little calico we call Billie do not always see eye to eye. And sometimes one of them will sit under a chair and the other will sit on the chair, or on the floor away from the chair, and they will fight. Sometimes their fights sounds pretty serious. And sometimes they use a chair with rungs for their fights. And sometimes they whack the rungs quite soundly while they are fighting. The old rocking chair has rungs.

"Did you hit your tooth, Winifred?" I said, picking up the cat again.

Winifred settled against my shoulder, and the longer I held her and talked to her, the more she calmed down. After I had held her for a few minutes, I set her on the bed, and when I went back outside to give the horses water, she was cleaning the blood off her paws.

When I came in an hour later after taking the dogs for a walk and cleaning up some exceptionally frozen horse manure, Winifred was sound asleep on the bed, apparently none the worse for her misadventure.

LeAnn R. Ralph