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Corn Legends

Corn has its legends. Once were the Mayan and Aztec, once the Sauk, the Iroquois, the Huron, the Navajo; once was Hiawatha. In our age legendary corn is knee high by the Fourth, though it might have been wiser had that not been uttered. For knee high by the Fourth is a public taunting, the equivalent of waving a red cape at the bull of agriculture. A challenge is that utterance “knee high by the Fourth” to assail the ability if not virility of every farmer, dirt-turner and plowboy who ever lived.

Corn is how the American continent lived and thrived since the stepped pyramids of the jaguar gods to that favored child of Nakomis, at the core, our allegiance has been to corn. When the English and French, when Jonathan Edwards, Kit Carson and James Doty wanted to do rotten work to the Indian tribes, to tame the West, to eliminate the problem, they burned corn fields. At the time of the European incursion Indian peoples across the breadth of the continent were steadily becoming farmers. In corn was a critical capacity to survive for people who were ideologically aboriginal, hunter-gatherers. Add here the routine list of erosive factors; war, disease, long winter, corn was a basic insurance policy and with it the aboriginal life style was in jeopardy. But to bring on agriculture, tend a corn field and the native is underwritten, insured by this amaising crop, durable, productive, readily stored.

Black Hawk of the Sauk bemoaned the dilution of his beloved warrior class because they were becoming “farmers.” Five hundred acres of corn represented a fabulous wealth for the Sauk in the opening days of Wisconsin Territory, the very one coveted by approaching white settlement.

It was corn too at the fur posts of the Hudson’s Bay and Northwest companies, corn planted in the remote corners of the wilderness. Corn and peas, corn and lard, corn and pemmican, corn and buffalo. Not to forget corn liquor. As a diet it wasn’t technicolor but it did support an industrial strength fur trade.

Portage County’s very own fur post at DuBay; in addition to trading for beaver, lynx, wolf, ermine, muskrat; in addition to building canoes, selling gunpowder and shot, also a licensed liquor house…raised corn. There was corn in the crib of the DuBay Post, add some dried peas, the result to carry them through the Wisconsin winter. Corn to trade, corn for cornbread, corn for corn soup, corn for grits and Shamus Beam.

Corn cobs belong on the American flag as fittingly as stars for it is corn that connects the Abenaki to the Sauk, the Mandan, the Hopi, the Anasazi. Where the prairie peoples had the pony, the buffalo and the dog; the Northwest had its salmon, the Inuit their seal, if Californians were reduced to acorns, the rest had corn.

2010 has been an exceptional year for corn that was head high by the Fourth. At the end of the week was tempting tassel. There have been summers when tassel didn’t arrive till August and when frost came the corn was as milkable as a Holstein, dry weight teetered at 40 pounds. Not so this year. The landscape reeks with the smell of silk, corn sex is in the air, the green of the fields seems contagious.

Walking the lanes of the home field provides an innate sense of wealth, a primal sense of well-being…if all hell broke loose, if society collapsed, we’d still have the corn. Most of the other crops are earth-bound, timid; wheat, potatoes, peas, beans, only corn sets off like rocket, to tower above us like the new urgent forest it is.

There is a moment of summer when the rest of the world disappears, the horizon cut short and we live in a well of corn. To be a farmer in such a place, witness the spectacle of this loyal servant and companion of our continent brings an abiding sense of completion. Of being part of an orchestrated pageant of human and biological strides. If others might point to the achievements of computers, automobiles, our trove of gadgets, there is a rural sense that what matters, what is thermonuclear, what is cool…corn. Michael Pollan has pointed out critically that corn, corn sugars, corn starch, corn plastics are seemingly everywhere, part of our breakfast cereal, the sweetener in soft drinks, the epoxy for car fenders, the glue of shoes, the lenses of eye glasses. That corn is a monoculture which is a bad word but oddly enough doesn’t apply to prairie, climax forest or lawns or suburbs. The charge is that corn is cultural, corn is everywhere, Michael got that right. Black Hawk would have agreed to add that corn is unmanly, no need for warriors if the field provides.

I know corn ethanol is only barely energy efficient, but it still puts fuel in the tank when corn’s next of kin lawn grass does nothing. Corn is step one of an energy revolution, never mind that our real goal is to keep energy cheap when the impacts of cheap energy is worthy of consideration.

Beyond the politics of corn is the serene field, with its rows like stanzas, one after another in this old American hymn. A monument to America is the corn field. Corn is our botanical Lincoln. And as Longfellow implied, corn is the messiah of the wilderness.