Sample

Illustration by Ryan Miller.

ESSAY

Following Shakespeare’s line…to sample or not to sample, that is the question. Farmers are evenly divided on this field practice, whether to sample or not to sample. The associated rationale of sampling or not sampling is independent of any logical process or intelligence because sampling or not sampling each have consequences.

For the record I am a sampler. When it comes to potato fields, pea fields, beans, sweet corn and #2 yellow, I sample. I have friends, neighbors, next of kin who do not. This for the same reason I do sample never mind how illogical this sounds. I sample my fields to know how the crop is coming, whether the pollen raining down, the silk moist, the row count 16 or 18, are the Gold Rush are sizing up, same for the Silvertons, the reds holding color or getting scabby. Similar query for Yukon Golds.

I have a plot of potatoes from Bryan Bowen of the Rhinelander research farm, coded varieties with good odds of amounting to nothing, rather like aspirants at summer baseball camp. Much the same process of elimination as dating, whether or not kissing is involved or any other gymnastics. I check the experimentals regularly because Professor Bowen being a touch Doktor Frankenstein comes up with some “interesting” potatoes, including those that belong in the flower garden as well as the field.

I sample regularly, routinely, incurably, instinctively, passionately, for I do like to know what the crop is doing…or not doing. From pea flower to pods to peas hard enough to use as bullets I sample, part of which is tasting. I taste peas from the flower stage to the pod. They are now four days past the tender-o-meter stage that just cost $10,000, equivalent to a nice used pickup truck much less that Porsche I deserve before I die. Seems my personal pickup has entered the Bondo stage of life, not that I’m complaining since I prefer the smell of Bondo to Old Spice. To my mind the men’s toiletry department ought include scents of Bondo, fusible tire patches, black powder, new tires, nitro solvent and chainsaw gas.

Similarly I sample my corn, from the first silk to early dent. Sampling corn is tasting. Most people don’t know you can start eating corn from about the sixth leaf stage until it actually rattles in the combine bin, at which point you are biting off the germ end. Sampling ideology helps us understand the basic hunter/gatherer mindset of prehistoric humanity when this sampling thing was of universal application, owing to the fact that most things are edible at some point in their life cycle. That vegetative morass we call weeds have a benign side, meaning edible, if you venture a Swiss Army knife and whittle them to some tender part. The ancient realms knew life was grazing, forever sampling, tasting; most of the time it didn’t kill anyone. You can eat nettle, milkweed, purslane, water hemp, velvet leaf, even ragweed will do nicely in a salad, so too corn silk. I know this…I’m a sampler. My wife doesn’t take me out in public very much.

There are farmers who do not sample their crop because they don’t want to know the bad news. I sample because I do want to know the bad news. Humanity is divided along the lines of this political instinct, those who want to know and those who don’t. This hunter/gather instinct to sample has its parallels in our religions, our sexuality, our fears, psychoses, traumas and night sweats all based on this division, whether you do or don’t…want to know.

I’m on that side of humanity who skips ahead in a book to read the last chapter, sometimes to read the last chapter first. If the book has promise…the last two chapters. Sometimes to skip over chapters like a flat stone thrown across a quiet pond, hopscotch from chapter to chapter, sampling as is the Scripture Lesson on Sunday morning, sampling…tasting. This doesn’t generally work with fiction as it does with Bible verses or Shakespeare or Twain or Mary Roach, same for science titles and history. Again, not so well for poetry.

Farmers who are non-samplers tell me they don’t want to know what’s wrong with the crop because it will ruin their sleep. Not knowing will ruin my sleep.

There it is, the entire she-bang, the big schlamoli, the ying and yang of humanity neatly condensed and each kind allotted to their correct herd. No need to count the spots, study brain waves, adjust for color, smell armpits or test for antibodies. The human bug determined, sorted and filed away by this single option, whether we are samplers or not samplers. In spirit of camaraderie to suggest there is no sin either way.

At harvest sometimes the bare spots bother my brother. He was not…a sampler…I already knew they were bare.