Detasseling...Neither promiscuity, virginity, nor motherhood attracted me, so what role models did I have as a female growing up in the belly button of Illinois?
Remembering a simpler time when I thought life couldn't get any hotter.
Detasseling at Van Kamp Hybrid Seed Corn Company,
the machine looks like a giant praying mantis,
a highboy swooshing through the corn rows,
stalks so tall that this is the last week the machinery will fit,
and then it will have to be done by hand,
and I’ll have to walk past four cornstalks and jump to reach the fifth,
grabbing and pulling out every tassel only to toss it to the wind
tossing it between the rows to be plowed under,
fodder for next year’s crop.
We are sunburnt teenagers, hands raw, responsible
for four rows to the right of the tractor-driver
and four rows to his left.
It’s 1965, $1.15 an hour = $46 a week
to be used for car insurance
or college, depending on whether or not
you are staying on the farm.
Detasseling corn is cross-breeding, cross-pollinating,
one version of sex in the fields, the original version of GMO, and perhaps they were already embedding Roundup in the seeds; who knows when that began?
Another version of sex in the fields is
returning from Friday Night Lights football, after the sock-hop,
when you turn the headlights off
as you approach the waterway in your beat-up pickup,
of, if you are lucky, your two-tone, burgundy and white ‘55 Chevy Bel-Air
with white sidewalls.
Avoid the culvert,
cut the engine so there is no noise,
only the crickets to watch and listen.
Turn in, coast for a few rows before stopping,
invisible to the farmer or passersby,
to do god knows what that
might decide your future
if you aren’t careful,
but back to today’s sweat.
The Van Kamp Hybrid Seed Corn Company’s
heir apparent, Mr. Junior, drives the tractor.
Clint is my sister’s age, Class of ‘59,
but not really her same class.
Clint had wed the
head cheerleader cum homecoming queen,
and Sis had married the angry dropout
football star felled by temper and a bad break,
both life sentences.
Stopping the tractor for the afternoon break,
Clint turns and stretches to his full height,
a first-string alumnus lettering in all four sports,
flashing his winning smile, understanding his power
as our magnanimous liberator,
granting us our afternoon ten minutes of shade.
However, failing to notice a loose bolt as he jumps down from
the machinery, he catches the gap between his finger
and his brand-new shiny gold symbol of marriage,
and jumping off the tractor, he leaves his ring as well as his finger behind,
thus joining the fraternity of nine-finger farmers,
the ten-finger farmers
choosing to wear their wedding bands only to church.
Speaking of church, I did’t fancy either
Mary Magdalene or Mother Mary.
Neither promiscuity nor virginity nor motherhood
held complete sway over me, so
what role models did I have
as a female growing up in the belly button of Illinois?
Or those in Bakersfield or Biloxi, for that matter.
The revelation is a girl has to make her own
Book of Revelations.
So reminiscent of life as a teenager in Industry, Pennsylvania sans corn. Thank you, Janice.
Yes, detasseling corn is still a common practice in the Midwestern United States, and it's expected to continue. Detasseling is the process of removing tassels from corn plants to induce cross-pollination, which is necessary for creating hybrid seed corn and ensuring genetically equipped crops for future planting.