Corn

By Tracy K. Lorenz

I just got back from a nice little 1,958 mile cross country drive. If anyone ever invents a worm hole I hope it eliminates the state of Ohio. I looked very closely and I really can’t find a good reason that Ohio exists, it’s just a giant void between the lakes of Michigan and the mountains of Kentucky.

The reason for the trip was I was playing golf in the NC Beautiful Classic at the famed Pinehurst Resort (site of the 2014 US Open) in North Carolina. The format was simple, four man teams and you took your best two scores on every hole; we finished at thirty-two under par and came in third. Gyp.

The cool part wasn’t just the golf, it was the event. You can’t believe how they treat you, we showed up and they had a guy from FootJoy there fitting everyone for new golf shoes, you couldn’t turn around without someone handing you a drink or throwing steaks and lobsters at you. We got golf balls, shirts, sweaters, and famed artist William Mangum was there to autograph a collection of his works that was included in our goody bag. It was three days of “Yes sirs” from the guys who took care of our clubs.

What the heck was I doing there?

One thing Ohio has plenty of is corn, billions of ears of corn. It was while I was driving past those billions of ears that I had a legal flashback…

Back when I was in college I spent a summer living with three guys of questionable character and little money and, accordingly, no one was throwing steaks, lobsters, and free golf shoes at us. One day we rode our bikes to Lake Lansing (which is only called “lake” because “Pond Lansing” doesn’t have a nice ring to it), Lake Lansing was a nice place to go look at the townies and forget our poverty. I remember that day for two reasons; 1) On occasion my roommates and I would talk backwards, not whole sentences just certain words. For instance “Nroc on the Boc” sounds cooler than corn on the cob, riding your ekib to the rab had a certain undeserved panache, and so on. Anyway, one of my roommates, Peter Duguid (pronounced Do Good, seriously) and I were standing in line at the drinking fountain and the guy in front of us was some biker and he was COVERED in tattoos, Pete looks at him, then looks at me and says “Nice oottats.” Now if you’re a guy covered in tattoos and some dink college kid behind you says “nice oottats” you don’t need the Rosetta Stone to crack the code. A short yet heated discussion ensued.

2) The bike ride back home was kind of depressing because we knew we were heading towards an oppressingly hot apartment and very little food. That’s when I spotted the corn. On the side of the road was a giant Michigan State corn field and it was ripe for the pickin’. A nice little treat after a hard day of lying on the beach.

The corn field was next to a busy street and we didn’t want to look like we were stealing corn so Pete went in to do a little harvesting while Paul “Scrap” Carlsen, Sir Chaz, and I stood by the road whistling in an inconspicuous manner. Next thing you know a gigantic ear of corn comes flying out of the field. There was some rustling and then another ear came flying out.

Because Pete was deep in the field and completely hidden by corn stalks we couldn’t tell where he was and he couldn’t tell where we were. His strategy was to pick one ear off random stalks so in the event anyone took inventory of the, oh, seven million ears no one would notice a few were missing.

So Pete’s chucking corn at us like a combine but because he didn’t really know where we were he was overthrowing us by a mile and the corn was heading into traffic. It was like trying to catch punts on a freeway. Making over-the-shoulder corn catches with a Ford bearing down on you tends to tweak the senses.

In a short period of death-defying time we had a dozen ears in our backpacks and we rode home for our feast.

We shucked the first ear and it had sort of a red tint to it, so did the second. In addition to being red the kernels seemed abnormally large but hey, it was still food. We boiled it for a good while and then sat down to eat; it was like biting pea gravel glued to a stick. We boiled it some more, same deal. About that time the girl from across the hall wandered over, looked in the pot and said “That’s feed corn.”

Sadness.

And that’s where the dichotomy comes into play. I think the idiot dodging cars for feed corn is more “me” than being treated like a Sultan at Pinehurst. If nothing else it truly shows that money and happiness don’t always line up. I was never poorer than I was on that day in East Lansing but I was never happier, I loved having to live off my wits. By the same token I had a great time in North Carolina, I guess it all comes down to the company you keep and the friends you keep it with and I‘ve been unbelievably fortunate when it comes to friends. It’s just odd to think of the winding trail that takes your life from catching feed corn to drinking from crystal, when you actually stop to think about it the whole thing is kind of…earie.