The following essay is FIELD TRIPS, a manuscript in progress. This collection of essays relates my visits to Minnesota farms as an urban consumer to learn about contemporary agriculture. Until three years ago, I knew as much about the source of my food as I knew about the inner workings of my car – close to nothing. Nor did I perceive this as a problem. However, after I began working as a freelance writer for the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, I had the opportunity to interview farmers. Their stories captivated me. Their struggles alarmed me.

I decided to learn more about farmers, particularly their connection to the land, and write about those experiences in a series of essays. At the time I didn’t completely understand the impulse. I knew only that I had to follow it into farmland throughout Minnesota. I knew I had to talk face-to-face with farmers, on their turf, instead of through the telephone wires, as I’d been doing with the Corn Grower articles.

I gained a clearer sense of my project when I read Kent Meyers’ definition of a weed in his book, THE WITNESS OF COMBINES. He defined a weed as “a plant that has lost its relationship to other plants,” and thus can “run amok, becoming rogue and opportunistic.” I thought, my God, I’m a weed. So are all of us who take our food source for granted, who have no relationship to the soil or the people who work it, who don’t factor in the cost of cheap food on the environment and the community.

AN EAR TO THE GROUND – Autumn 2001

After spending time on farms with farmers, I’m suddenly curious about the fields I walk or drive past. One day, in a nearby cornfield, I notice that many of the stalks are black and, from the distance, appear foamy near the tassels. I hesitate before crossing the buffer grass between the road and the soil: I’m scared, though I’m not sure of what. It seems silly to be afraid of a vegetable, so I inspect the corn close up. The diseased stalks are repulsive, like sci-fi mutants, yet I’m also drawn closer by intense curiosity. I look but don’t dare to touch. Insects have gathered on the foam. Their frenzy disgusts me. No wonder I’ve kept my distance from flora and fauna: I’m just too squeamish. Babies sliding out of vaginas, larvae hatching, ants scurrying over the round, unsheathed heads of peonies, hawks tearing off the fur or feathers of the prey pressed between its talons and the ground – life is revolting. In the city, people are protected from such sights in cubicles of solitary confinement. Nature arrives safely mediated from the television screen.

A week or so after I see the foamy corn, it’s gone. That is, the front rows of the field have been harvested. The rest of the corn still stands, too far away from the road for me to tell if those stalks, too, are oozing or pulsating with insects. I pass this field on foot at least once, sometimes three times a week, and though I never actually see a farmer on the land, someone is harvesting the corn, ever so slowly. Gradually, as the weeks pass by, fewer and fewer rows of corn remain standing in the field, even into December. The unfinished nature of this irritates me, like an unfinished project gathering dust on the table, or a man with a beard only partially shaved. Is the farmer lazy? Or is he simply trying to save money? I know that if corn is not dry when it’s harvested, it has to be sent through a drier powered by propane, which increases input costs to the farmer. Perhaps the farmer wants these fields of corn to dry naturally, in the air, and that for some reason – perhaps a full-time job elsewhere – the farmer has to cut down the stalks gradually, a few rows at a time. A trail of husks and bare ears shifts from one area to another on the blacktop road bordering the cornfields and leading to a new housing development.

One December day, when most of a nearby field is whiskered by the stubble of cut stalks and the cloud cover accentuates the dullness of leaf-less trees, my eye snags on a bit of crimson between the yellow and brown blades of grass on the trail I am following. I stoop for a closer look. Yes, it’s a single drop of dried blood, no more than a single squeeze from an eyedropper. Nearby I spot another drop, then another, and then a few tufts of grey downy fur. How, in this immense landscape, was a drop of red so dark it almost matched the soil able to stop me in my tracks? I’m thrilled at the possible answer. The land is telling me its story, and now, through the help of farmers, I’m beginning to witness it.

Who stood on this ground? When? Why? Who was killed, who survived? What was here that isn’t now? This December is unusual, because there is no accumulated snow – only the occasional dusting to reveal secret meanderings in the landscape. Like the reverse of what we’d see if I could lay a huge white piece of paper against the land and make a pencil rubbing, snow highlights the trails cut by machines, the paths trodden by hooves, the frozen streams and ponds punctuating a landscape that only the day before stood wide and empty of context. It was only wide expanse of barely discernible golds, browns and occasional reds. I remember as a child becoming acutely aware of the veins in my hands. They’d always been there, but I’d never noticed, and suddenly I couldn’t ignore the pulsing blue paths coursing underneath my skin. I hated the ugliness of those bulging rivers. I felt queasy when I stared too long at them. But the trails in the fields etched by snow are beautiful and suggestive of a hidden order to this chaos, because suddenly we can see something that was there all along. It’s just that our eyes weren’t trained to notice.

The day I spot the blood the little snow we had has melted. I am heartened by my discovery. I want to be able to read the land without the aid of snow, and perhaps recent visits with farmers have sharpened my visual acuity. I touch the drop of crimson. My finger remains unstained, so the blood is hours, maybe days dry, not anywhere near to being fresh. I brush my hand against the brittle grass, see flecks of green among the blades, feel the cold, hard earth against my palm. “Tell me more,” I ask of the earth, the blades, the drops of blood, the field shorn of maize. “I need to know more.”