A few weeks ago, I traveled down to Solvang to meet with Pedro Nava, our assemblyman, to discuss the challenges farmers are facing in the northern end of his district.

Every quarter, Teri Bontrager, executive director of the Santa Barbara County Farm Bureau, and several other Farm Bureau Board members meet with Nava.

The quarterly meeting give me the opportunity to travel down Alamo Pintado Road from Los Olivos. The drive always stirs memories of growing up in the area, and I can keep tabs on what/s new along the Alamo Pintado corridor.

As I made my way down the road toward Solvang, I noticed some cleanup work being done to the old Petersen farmhouse across the street from the Mormon Church/s apple orchard.

A little further down, I glanced over to the right and, to my surprise, the barn that stood for years on the Petersen dairy was gone. Nothing but bare ground and an excavator remained.

The barn had been falling into disrepair for several years. The last time I drove by, it looked as though someone had removed the shingles with the idea of restoring it to its previous working status.

I remember three barns along Alamo Pintado Road in particular when I was a boy. There was our barn, which fell down from disrepair at least 20 years ago; the barn near the old Petersen farmhouse that met the same fate; and the barn at the former dairy that was just removed.

There was nothing better than going into a barn on a hot summer day and playing on the bales of hay stacked neatly inside. There was no end to the forts that could be made from rearranging a few bales here and there or to the fun of climbing to a ledge in the haystack and jumping down to a loose pile of hay on the barn/s dirt floor.

The end of summer was always the best time to play inside the barn, because most of the hay needed for the winter was stacked inside, protected from the rains of early fall and winter.

The only limit to playing inside the barn was the depth of your own imagination.

When my sister Elisa and her friend Dana Del Masso were around 9 or 10 years old, they would ride their ponies all over the ranch, many times stopping and playing inside the barn.

Usually one or two of our dogs would be with them, jumping around and sniffing all the places mice or cats could hide in a hay stack.

Several times they would come flying down the ranch roads on their ponies looking for me or my brother Dana. They were convinced that they happened upon a bobcat or something even bigger lurking inside the barn, and we had better get up there right away and check it out.

The only wild animals we ever saw in the barn were an occasional barn owl and the half-wild cat my grandparents fed every day.

We let the girls know that when we got some time, we would go up and check the barn and make sure everything was OK.

That scenario would repeat itself every couple of weeks until one time they came down looking more frightened than ever, telling us they could see a big cat and it looked right at them as they looked down into a gap in the hay bales.

So, off we went with the two cat hunters to the barn. Sure enough, there was a cat looking back at us when we looked up into the gap in the hay bales above us.

It turned out to be my grandparent/s big black-and-gray tomcat, probably taking a break from looking for mice and cooling off between the hay bales.

The girls felt pretty silly, their imaginations having gotten the better of them, but that was the fun of growing up on a ranch. We all still laugh about the big cat that hid in the barn when we get together, including Dana Del Masso.

So, we lose another barn along Alamo Pintado. I/ll bet we haven/t lost the memories of the folks who lived and worked around the barn during the dairy/s heyday.

There are still some great barns full of hay and equipment throughout the rural roads of the Santa Ynez Valley and the Central Coast.

Take a ride out into the country on one of our beautiful fall afternoons and enjoy the rustic charm of the barns that are still a vital part of farming and ranching in this special place we call home.

Kevin Merrill is a vineyard manager for Mesa Vineyard Management in Santa Maria. He is president of the Central Coast Wine Growers/ Association and a board member of the Santa Barbara County Farm Bureau. He can be reached at kmerrill@mesavineyard.com.

September 23, 2007