Enough with the barn finds already. I know that ‘barn find’ has just become a metaphor for any car that has not been driven for a while, or simply left in disrepair. But seeing those two words in the title of an article just immediately makes me question everything that follows. There are no barn finds anymore, if there ever were any to begin with. But the the legends persist, and typically go like this: “I was driving down a dirt back-road in Iowa when, at 65 miles per hour and 200 yards away, I thought I spotted a familiar looking bumper peeking out from behind an old barn door. I turned around and rang the doorbell at the farmhouse and this little old lady answered the door and invited me in. When I asked about the car in the barn, she said that her husband had bought it new back in 1959, but died 3 days later when he got his head caught in the thresher, and it hasn’t been touched since. I asked her if I could take a look, and when we rolled the barn door open, there was a 1959 Corvette fuelie (because a lot of farmers were buying Vettes back in the day) with 8 miles on the odometer, covered in carefully applied dust and strategically placed boxes of junk. The farmer’s widow said she totally forgot it was back there, and didn’t even know what kind of car it was, and offered to sell it to me for fifteen dollars and a promise to come back some day for a slice of her home-made peach pie.” Right. It’s time to bury the barn find myth in a barn somewhere while there are still actually a few barns out there to bury it in.
