Let’s Talk! – Corn Fields in All Directions

Are you ready to switch off your screens and ponder or discuss another writing/conversation prompt from my friend Tyrean Martinson’s book? Here’s my take on it.

I grew up in a Southwestern German city-suburb with a decidedly rural vibe. The village of barely 6,000 inhabitants was surrounded by agricultural land. One of my classmates in elementary school was a farmer’s son – as a city child I couldn’t get any closer to real farm life than actually setting foot on their farm. They even had horses and cattle. My room window offered a view to a field directly across the meadow behind our apartment building.

Harvests varied. There was cabbage, there was corn, there was wheat, barley, oats. Every once in a while, the field was not used for a season but only ploughed over in winter. It wasn’t a huge field. If it was ten yards wide and fifty yards long, that was all it amounted to. In that it was not that dissimilar to other fields in the region. Due to inheritance laws of yore, the land had been split up into parcels again and again. Today, if you fly into Germany, you easily recognize when you cross the border from France, as there is colorful patchwork of agricultural land beneath you.

Of course, I had heard that there were other countries with corn fields (or wheat fields) that huge that they reached to the horizon on each side. I had watched documentaries about the United States as well as about what now is the former Soviet Union. Tractors in the land I knew were small vehicles with huge wheels and sideway seats on top of the wheel well. I once experienced the adventure of a ride with a farmer when I must have been not much more than three or four years old. Attached to these were ploughs, harrows, manure trailers, or special trailers on which farm workers sat to reap potatoes from the ground. It was nothing like these huge combine harvesters I knew from the movies.

Little did I know that Germany had those as well – just not where I grew up, in the west. It was an eye-opener when – about seven years after the fall of the Wall – I traveled to what formerly had been the German Democratic Republic. The name alone was a bad joke, as all agricultural land had been dispossessed in the cause of creating just another kind of dictatorship and forming so-called combines. When I first crossed over the former border, I was hit with the notion that the grain fields I passed by went in all directions. They seemed endless. Same with the rapeseed fields I’d see in later years. At one point, I was driving on a cobbled road from Wernigerode to a small village in which I was going to visit one of the rare craft material manufacturers in Eastern Germany. The rapeseed grew higher than my car roof. I wasn’t able to see anything but the slippery cobbled road to the next bend. Cell phone reception was zilch. In other words, nobody knew exactly where I was, and if the car broke down, I’d have to walk for miles on end. Eerie.

Is it that sense of eeriness that we love to explore in corn labyrinths in fall? Or is it the seclusion of standing in a cornfield and hearing the leaves or the wheat ears rustle as the wind goes through, well hidden from anybody passing by? Anything that seems endless awes me. It depends on the context whether I love it or I fear it.