FROZEN FISH

Our antique fish weather vane has long been something of a puzzle. It’s a rather attractive piece of copper, but these things don’t come with instructions, and the parts didn’t quite seem to come together. So it’s sat around in a corner of the barn just waiting for the day it could swim in the air again — or maybe simply on an indoor wall as an ornament. Still, finally getting the roofs over the barn and kitchen re-shingled this fall before the weather turned bad provided a stimulus for action.

The first challenge was trying to figure out how to connect the rod to the roof. As I inquired at one hardware store after another, I kept getting the same response. “I don’t know, it seems like there should be a simple way to do it. But we don’t have anything like that.” A few clerks suggested places that turned out to be dead ends. And as I looked at all the cupolas under many of the vanes around town, I realized that even with a cupola, you’d still have to have some way of attaching the vertical rod.

Finally, after a bit of online surfing, I came across an answer — a store, in fact, we’d passed many times in the coastal town of Wells. Weathervanes of Maine turned out to have a nifty little adjustable roof mount for $30 that fit our needs quite nicely. The store, by the way, has row after row of shiny new weather vanes — roosters, horses, eagles, moose and bear, ships, dragons, pigs (yes, flying pigs), and many more. If you’re ever driving along U.S. 1 there, stop in — it’s quite the destination.

Still, the connection to the fish itself still didn’t seem right. And again, nobody could give me a satisfactory answer. So it was back to Wells, where a fancy soldering job did the trick. Our fish could now face the wind. And, as you can see, more.

Where we live in New England, vanes are useful predictors of weather. While our prevalent wind is from the west, wind from the east or the south comes in over the ocean, where it loads up with moisture we encounter as rain or snow. From the north, of course, means colder than normal — a pleasant touch in summer but a nasty bite this time of year.

I’m quite happy to have the fish provide a modest and useful crowning touch to the barn. Or, as I sometimes announce, “The fish has turned.”