Summer Reruns -- Red Man, Twinkies and mud

From July 25, 2010

One morning not long ago, I was strolling down the walk next to my house.

It was humid, warm and spitting rain. And as I brushed past sweet corn I'd planted along the path, there was the sound of rustling leaves and a smell of wet dirt and green corn that whooshed me back 20 years.

I was a freshman in college the last time I marched into a field to detassel corn.

And that summer marked a lot of last times.

I'm pretty sure it was the last time I chewed Red Man, and the last time it made me woozy. It was the last time I took my shirt off in public, on purpose. It was the last time I didn't have a farmer tan.

It was the last time I wore mirrored sunglasses I won at the carnival, and the last time I wore a garbage bag as a rain poncho. It was the last time I was more than 6-feet tall, if you count six inches of mud on my shoes.

It was the last time I sat in a Porta Potty being viciously rocked and pelted with thrown corn ears. It was the last time I was so dirty that the water in the shower swirled mud brown at my feet. It was the last time I ate a summer sausage sandwich, Fritos and frozen Twinkies on a muggy school bus with more flies than people.

It was the last time that I lay in bed, shut my eyes and saw endless corn rows etched into my mind's eye.

It was the last time I had a job where every dime was mine, after taxes of course, and the speed of its disappearance depended solely on my level of frivolity, instead of responsibility. Life was still out over the horizon.

There are only about 20 days in July and August when detasseling is done. If you're new to the Corn Belt, detasselers are hired by seed companies and contractors to pull tassels off one variety of corn so that it can be pollinated by another variety planted alongside. That's how you get hybrid seed.

I detasseled for one season when I was 14. After a few years of working at a drive-in, I went back into the field. I failed to mention that break when the seed company asked me about my experience. So they made me a crew chief -- my first management position.

It wasn't all sun tans and Swisher Sweets. We had to make tough calls.

Once, a supervisor bawled us out for taking the kids out of the field ahead of a thunderstorm. While he complained about our costly caution, lightning hit a nearby farmstead and sparked a fire. He conceded that God had intervened on our side of the argument.

I also remember detasseling a field next to the interstate, longing to hit that road and see where it would lead. It turns out life didn't take me very far away after all, and a small part of me is still in that field.