When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, I hated birds because my mom loved them. In the dead of summer, she learned that the old barn she frequented for wildlife was going to be torn down and replaced. Even as a kid, I knew this was important to her, so I didn't resist as forcefully when invited to visit one last time as a send off.

It was on that day that I found myself clambering through grasses that reached my shoulders—a short walk from the two-leaf clover intersection, through the patch of large trees covered in plastic bags and toilet paper from the road above us. Ahead lay the barn, graying and held together with rust and staples, maybe a hundred or so years my senior.

Past the spider-webbed boundary of trees, the sounds of the road were still audible, but dulled. My mom, steps ahead and nearing an open window of the barn, shushed me—by that, she meant, listen closely. Tune everything else out, and focus on the natural.

After a moment, she waved me over to the dimly lit opening of the window. My head just barely met the bottom sill, so she boosted me up and pointed. Patches of light shone down from above, through large gaps in the roof, illuminated the space below. In the furthest corner, two big black discs held my gaze. My eyes fully adjusted, I could now comprehend: A large barred owl looked back at me—fully matured and standing tall, branchlike and unrelenting, it hooted at us.

HOO- HOO-HOO-HOO, HOO- HOO-HOO-HOO.

My eyes grew big, mouth ajar. I grinned at my mom, and she grinned back.

After that year, tired of days driving back and forth and only seeing construction, its replacement was finally completed. Free, now, of litter from the road, paved, trees replaced with light-posts and parking lots, it was revealed to be a barn-themed craft-beer live-music country-chic brewery. No owl could come home to roost here. Aesthetically built to survive the twenties, and structurally built to survive the twenties, it became the only successful business for miles. Down the road, the gun-liquor-nail salons kept changing hands, constantly fighting instability against an increasingly hostile environment.

The Old Barn was not the first piece of forest to be consumed, and it was certainly not the last. Bristow, Virginia was deemed just far enough south of the holy government citadel of DC to house all of the data centers our proud democracy would ever need.

Each time I go back, which is rarely now, Braemar is even more unrecognizable. Its deserted parking lots and ramshackle construction sites did not fill up with happy people. Forests unclaimed by business are claimed for data. Physical ramifications of our unwitting digital simulacrum, all pushed into the furthest corners of the edge of wilderness.

To an owl, visceral and fleeting on the desperate search for water, life does not go on from here. It will die, unsheltered and exposed, in the middle of a Walmart parking lot.