``You'll see a lot of corn'', my mother warned me before I set out on the road trip.  ``An awful lot of corn.''  She said this as though it was a good reason to reconsider the whole endeavor.  Unsure how to respond to her intensity I replied: ``Well... I want to see what's in the heartland.''

Not much, I discovered.




Standing on a baseball field, surrounded by corn to the horizon, I thought about how I don't like baseball.  But they built it, so I came.  I stood on the Field of Dreams, took in the unremarkableness of it all, and wondered why I was there. 

On both sides of the Field of Dreams lay a colonial-style home -- and on the porch of each a separate souvenir shop.  The two homes looked like mirror images, but each ignored the other's existence.

When the director of Field of Dreams constructed the baseball field, he put half of it on one home's land, and half on the other.  For reasons I was unable to discern, the two owners do not get along and both operate as though the field is entirely theirs.  They went so far as erecting separate signs, each pointing in the same direction and each saying `Field of Dreams' at every intersection leading to the spot.

``Is this heaven?'' asked the brochure written by one of the owners.  ``No,'' it answers ``it's Iowa.''  If the Iowan notion of heaven is true, then God must really love corn and petty rivalry.

`I've got to get out of here', I thought, and packed back into the car.




When I first left New York to head West, I passed through the dense, roadside forests that surround the suburban island where I grew up.  To get anywhere in New England, you drive on highways cut through the forest.  Many hours I spent as a child looking out the car window and watching the trees roll by.  On the road trip I drove through the deciduous lands until I reached Chicago, a city that looks like New York Jr, then gone were my forests.

In the bread basket of the States, I drove idly across US-20 with no intended destination, listening to a playlist Noelani composed for me, and letting my mind wander.

But the mind can only wander for so long and the drive through the corn lost its charm at the end of the second day.  My increasing boredom and discomfort helped lead to my poorly-thought-out idea that a trip to a baseball field might provide an interesting diversion.  As night fell and I wanted to stop, I was disconcerted to realize that I had not passed a town, motel, gas station or anything in a long while.  Just the corn.  Endless, endless corn. 

US-20 is the longest road in the United States at 3,365 miles and not the modern highway I expected it to be.  It is one of America's original highways, a two-lane road built to cross the country in a straight line.  The US Road Department took to the notion that the highway system should transform the face of the nation into a sheet of graphpaper.  Highways crossing west-east received even numbers and north-west odd.  Those that ended in zero touched both the Atlantic and Pacific.  The Department's straight-line approach took a we-don't-give-a-damn view to both geography and demographics.

As the darkness grew, the rolling sea of corn took on a disquieting feel.  In that black, any horror could leap out of the fields and drag me off into the endlessness of it all.  The only spaces in the corn opened onto lonely farms.  These were no better.  Without lights they looked sinister, with lights they illuminated sharp, torturous machines.  While my cerebral cortex recognized that salt-of-the-earth folk certainly lived within those occasional dwellings and not the cinema-style crazy, isolated and murderous hicks I imagined, my reptilian brain feared the worst.  That, and the dark forms by the side of the road my tired eyes conjured for me, didn't induce me to step from the warm safety of the car.  The children of the corn waited out there.

Then, a beacon in the darkness: a single gas station in a clearing where US-20 intersected with an even more deserted looking road.  I pulled over, tired buttocks, empty gas tank and full bladder greatly relieved.

But -- oh good god -- the bugs.

The light from this isolated outpost of civilization attracted every flying thing with compound eyes for a hundred mile radius.

Unbelieving, I took out my camera and tried to snap a few photos to capture the essence of it.  When I show these photos now to gentle Englishmen, they assume the station is undergoing a blizzard.  Only when I inform them that it's actually bugs, do they drop the photograph in horror and revulsion.

I stepped inside the gas station, brushing the insects off my clothes and out of my hair, nostrils and mouth.  Inside I beheld two fat, ugly people: one behind the counter, a woman, and the other a man.  I stood for a moment, waiting for a break in their low, conversation about God's gift of corn and its varied uses.  Long moments went by before the fat man took notice of me.

``Oh,'' he said to the fat woman, ``you better take care of him, he's a...'' and then trailed off, failing to finish the sentence.

`A what?' I dearly wanted to know but, before I could ask, the woman turned to me suspiciously.

``Saw you taking pictures out there,'' she said.  She had a round head, lacking in facial features, like a baby, except with pimples.

``Yes,'' I said.  ``I'm a photographer,''  I lied.

Her pimply face betrayed no understanding of my words, so I continued the lie.  ``I'm from London on a road trip to photograph America.''  Well, not exactly a lie, but very close and vastly overemphasizing my importance.  I tried to give the impression of one who works for the BBC with purpose, instead of a lost, dumb tourist on a road not meant for tourists.

``You're at a gas station,'' she said, as though this structure's purpose would be unknown to one from England.  ``What you photographing here?''

``Well,'' I said, gesturing to the vast blizzard (not-a-blizzard-oh-the-horror) of crawling, flying things outside the window.  ``The bugs.''

``You came all this way to photograph the bugs?''

She misunderstood me, thinking that I had intentionally journeyed to US-20 after hearing legendary stories of the bugs along it and the great gas station to which they swarm. 

``But there are bugs around all gas stations'' she continued.

``But not like that,'' I said.

The pimples on her forehead came together in a way to indicate to me that she was furrowing her brow.

``All gas stations have bugs,'' she said, then added for clarification: ``at night anyways.''

To her, it seemed that the island of light in the middle of corn may well have been the only point of brightness in the Universe.  I imagined her father telling her, as a little girl, creation myths of a world of endless corn with only their town at the center, the way primitive island people imagine there to be nothing but water beyond their shores.

``Well,'' I said, not sure how to continue, ``it's the most impressive bug storm I've ever seen.''

The fat man took this moment to give his companion a knowing glance, and they resumed their previous corn-based conversation as though I wasn't there.  I paid for my gas and left.




The next day I crossed the border from Iowa into South Dakota where the road signs directed me to the Mitchell Corn Palace.  After two days' worth of corn-related travel, this I could not pass up.

Across sweeping fields I drove, looking at the advertising and wondering just what a corn palace would look like.  The only thing I had ever heard of that seemed possibly similar was the Ice Hotel.  I imagined a castle built of corn with corn maidens offering weary travelers such as myself some hearty corn alcohol and a restful night's stay on a corn mattress.

When I pulled into the town of Mitchell, I wasn't sure what to make of it.  The corn palace was a three-story high, cube-like building covered in corn.  The various shades of yellow, brown, orange and black that corn comes in formed epic images of ten-foot-tall cowboys, cattle and horses across the building.  The sign at the entrance read (in corn): `Salute to Rodeo 2006'.

I stepped inside and discovered that the Mitchell Corn Palace is no palace, but a stadium.  It was like a large high school gym, with sloping seats for perhaps 1,000 people and a center space with a basketball court.  The area currently held little craft shops selling corn-related items.

Corn murals adorned the inside walls.  As with the outside, the different color cobs formed the images: a man with a gun and dog hunting ducks, a cowboy and Indian shaking hands with a sunset in the background, Mt Rushmore, a deer drinking from a lake, and the -- as I was to discover on my future travels -- omnipresent American Jesus.

I couldn't tell if I was disappointed by, or in love with, the palace.

A girl with one of the most horrible nasal and rural American accents took tourists around the inside, pointing out the meaning of several of the murals and explaining the history of the place.  If your town glues corn into pictures on the outside of a building, it can, apparently, attract 500,000 people a year and make a handy little income selling popcorn.  Locals use the palace for sporting events, concerts and a frightening sounding `Annual Corn Palace Polka Festival'. 

But, much to my surprise, the revolutionary idea of gluing farm products to a building was not first developed in Mitchell.  There was one in Sioux City, Gregory South Dakota, and Creston Iowa.  But this last was constructed of bluegrass, which must have been quite an engineering challenge for the Iowans.  But the Mitchell Corn Palace is the only one that still stands and was built in a bid to convince the Governor to move the State capital to Mitchell.  It failed.  Why millions of carefully arranged ears of corn did not attract the greatest political minds that South Dakota has to offer I shall never know.

I called my mother on the pay phone from inside the palace, saying, ``You'll never guess where I am.''

``Probably not,'' she said, ``but I bet that where ever it is, you're surrounded by a lot of corn.''

 

Leave a comment, send an email or join my mailing list.

Copyright © 2006 Wellington Grey


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.