by Matt Weiland
We drive on a paved road behind and parallel to the highway, a neighborhood of what once were one- or two-bedrooom workers’ homes, now squeezed in by two or three trailer homes mounted on cement foundations. We stop at what is like a compound, outside the kitchen-slash-mess hall add-on to a brick schoolhouse—a banner over the stoves and grills reads SUPER COCINA LOS amigos. People are packing ice chests of lunches and counting how many meals go in each, getting the numbers right. As Tom sorts out a problem with the ice machine’s outdoor run-off hose, I head over to a picnic bench where a group of men, young and older, are sitting. Beyond them, on an open field, a few men kick around a soccer ball. They all go eyes up and quiet once I’m close, like I bear bad news. Instead, I find out that they are all from Durango. Have they done this work before? Half of them say no. The one who seems the eldest, a straw hat, dark skin weathered, says he’s done it most of his life. How did he find out about this, in Iowa? Just heard. But how, exactly? They look around at one another, nobody sure what to say. Do you hear about it … like, maybe you would gossip? They laugh at that. One heard it from this one next to him, he’s the one who told that one, thus. Isn’t Durango a long trip from Monterrey? They all shrug, the questions making them self-conscious. You just took a bus there? They say yes and nod, are now smiling at me. They took a bus to Monterrey, they signed some papers, and a bus brought them here.
The school building is where Tom Bell went to elementary school. Now it’s been converted into a bunkhouse for his workers—all men, only men. At the top of the first stairs in, there are old couches and a TV set up in the corner—a novela is playing—and then we pass through a small room, maybe fifteen or twenty bunk beds, all just built of fresh cut 2×4 and 2×6. Like a dad pleased by his son’s expensive college graduation, Tom shows me how much he’s transformed the school: Where we stand used to be above the gym floor, where you could watch a game, and down below was where the courts were. Down below now are maybe 100 more bunk beds, all occupied. Clothes are already hanging off them, a few have already washed underwear and socks and laid them out to dry on the head and foot boards. In a far corner, another lounge area of old couches, a TV up high, that same novela. The showers are gym-like, the sink for hands and face and teeth and probably rinsing underwear is a room-length trough with a dozen or so faucets. The walls and ceilings show the new remodel, all the new studs exposed, sheathed by pressed-wood, low-grade ply. Windows are open. A fan is mounted up high to blow in more air. Iowa? Right now it looks and sounds and—the kitchen is right next to this big space—smells like it’s Mexico.
Tom doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. What does he think about all these people here? He loves these people and he’s proud to do them right, he says. He owns a condo in Manzanillo. When all this gets done, in the winter, he and his wife relax there for a month. He loves it.
Becky is my ride to a cornfield being walked—it’s known by a field number, the digits as natural and recognizable to them as a pet’s name. Her blue pickup is loaded with iced sodas and a chest of lonches, and she wants to know why it has to be her who takes me and she isn’t entirely joking. She’s a big Iowa woman, a ‘60s grown-up, born and raised not far away, rooted to the driver’s seat. Her tattoos barely visible under the browned sunburn of her fleshy upper arms, she also works biker gatherings and just retired from the clerical staff at the university. It’s a few ranch roads to where we go, a route that crosses the rich Iowa River and leads to Muscatine. Talking about the men bunking in the school, she says she cannot imagine the raunch of it—sweat and dirty socks, snores, farts from those beans. Who’d be able to stand all of these men? she asks. Then again she might, she tells me after a pause, smiling dirty-minded.
We pull onto a dirt farm road where dust rises from behind like bad smoke rings and stop alongside the cornfield, near the rented yellow school bus that transports the workers. Tom’s son is there to wave at us from his pickup—he’s on the phone, as busy as his dad. It is lunch time, and men too short to be seen inside the tall corn jungle begin to emerge. No factory whistle, and it’s not like a construction site either, where it’s a certain hour and everyone stops everything. Mostly in pairs, the campesinos exit slowly, unrushed, from the world of zurcos, rows, bandannas under their hats to wrap their necks, bandannas and dark glasses masking their faces—a few have mosquito netting too—and long sleeved shirts and gloves covering their arms an hands. Each has a mochilla—a daybag or a plastic store bag to carry an extra shirt or rain poncho or some rubber boots and their own personal valuables—slung over their back or in hand. On their belts is a rubber clip for a soda bottle full of water. The gloves and bottle clip are gifts from Bell’s Detasseling. They get their lonches from the ice chests—a caldo of pork, pineapple, and bell pepper, a fresh jalapeño, tortillas still warm in foil. A few men go inside to sit on the soft seats there. A few sit against a side of the bus, in a slant of shade. I go over to three who rest at the back, to the water igloo, taking their time before they eat.
I tell them how they all look like Sub-Comandante Marcos coming out from the jungle. After a moment to absorb my joke, they look at each other until they finally grin. They are from Monterrey, young, though one must be closer to thirty than the other two. None of them have crossed the U.S. Mexico border before now. Only one of them has worked in agriculture previously, but this isn’t hard work except for the hours—though it isn’t so hot yet, even with the long-sleeved shirts that they have to wear, the fields aren’t too muddy, the mosquitos aren’t too bad. Jobs are hard to find in Mexico. The youngest one talks about working in garages and restaurants. There is a lot of danger to do other things. The older one says how running movidas might seem good for a little bit, but it’s not worth the trouble. This work is good for them, even if it’s only a month. We are looking at the sky, more Hollywood than Iowa, the clouds too white, too flawlessly shaded gray to be believed, too beautiful. The older one asks about me and I tell them how I was born in Los Angeles and worked construction and now live in Texas. Even through their mirror glasses, I see their eyes go starry. I mention El Paso and the capital, Austin, and how in Dallas … and how in Houston … and it’s as though I am speaking of mythical lands. I gesture to the east and tell them over there is where Chicago is, very close. The youngest one jokes how fast they could get there. The other two aren’t even considering it, though the third, a quiet one, takes a couple of steps in that direction to see that much closer. This is good for now, the older says. It’s what they have. After a pause, the younger one returns, sincerely, asi es la vida.
We drive to another field, more masked campesinos breaking through the corn jungle rows unexcitedly, unhurried, to take lunch. The conversations are muted. Music they like and don’t, other places they’ve been. Muted, like they are faraway. On this field the crew chief has them leave their mochila at the beginning of each row until they come in for lunch, and all but three have been picked up. When most have finished eating, two of the stragglers appear and nod, pleased, about where to find the lunches. Twenty minutes later, the last one, Oscar, unmasked, finally comes out just as these other two go back to work. He’s eighteen, maybe twenty-one, and unlike all the others I’ve seen so far he is overweight in that soft manner of a good boy from El Paso or San Antonio, playing too many video games, sitting in front of a TV with sodas, candies, Doritos. He is tired but also much more—lost, miserable, mom-sick—and he can barely speak, though he does: a thank you when he is told where he will find his lonche. When he is done eating—maybe he does take an entire half hour, but certainly no more than that—he ends his lunchbreak in the same self-absorbed, unself-conscious way he began, stepping back, like his feet hurt, to a line of zurcos where the others have been out of sight for some time already.
The rows of these milpas have been mowed earlier so that they are all of an even height. They are arranged so that one male plant from one seed will pollinate at least the two females, grown from a different seed, on either side of it, so that the la
yout is four rows of females, a male row, four female, a male, and so on. The leaves of the first male stalk are sprayed a Day-Glo orange—the men must know which it is because its aspigas, its tassles, are the only ones that must be left untouched: It is their pollen that will reach the female silks below that will grow the kernels on the cob, a new, third seed that will be harvested. Though corn carries with it both male and female parts, what the campesinos are doing is castrating the ones in the rows of four, yanking off their male parts. On a first pass, men pull this shaft out of its stalk, the one blooming an unpollinating tassle, from its node, effectively castrating the plant, leaving the cañajote beneath. The tassle pops out easily, a juiced, fleshy pop that sounds like cracking a knuckle, and is dropped onto the dirt of the zurco. After a second pass through, there is yet another pass, this one crosswise, made by a more seasoned chequeador, a checker, who looks for misses. Wrapped in the same leaf husk as the ripen female corn on the cob we know, peeled away it looks much like young rye or wheat, only deep green, and huskier. When left to bloom, the sun on it, the green becomes more golden, the yellowish pollen sticky, though not as sticky as the white female silks waiting beneath. The field has to be a 99.7 to 99.8 percent detasseled for the crop to germinate the exact corn seed that is hoped for.
Five thousand years of walking las milpas in Mexico, the descendents of those people are now in Iowa, walking the cornfields, attending to this cross-fertilization work considered spiritual way back then. Iowa’s Mexicans are only a little more aware of corn’s history than those in Iowa are. It’s as though the migration of the Mexican deity itself has finally summoned its native worshippers to tend to it, populating the soil it grows in. I ask Becky: Ten, fifteen years ago it would have been high-school and college boys and girls from towns here. It was not only a summer ritual, but a good income for the summer. Now you have to hire as many as you can because only half stay with it. They are too hot. They are too sunburned. One doesn’t want to work past 2 p.m., another says she can’t. One wants to rest a day because he got too tired the day before. Or it’s the weekend. Or it was just the weekend and now he wants to sleep in. One has to babysit on certain days, and then maybe the next just doesn’t feel like showing up at all. And then there’s the other, smaller issues. If someone’s litter from lunch gets left behind, for instance, you ask one to pick it up. It’s not mine, is the answer. Pick it up anyway. It’s not mine. OK, but pick it up anyway. I didn’t leave that. Just pick it up! There is no litter in these campos, and these mexicanos are always polite and they work until they are told it is time to stop. There are a lot more cornfields than there used to be, and there wouldn’t be enough Iowa people around who could work the fields even if.
To be at the school buses at 4:30 a.m. you have to get up and go to them earlier. It’s dark then, the rising sun in the east an ember of blue light so pure it calms all in its sight, the only nature visible except when a stray head- and taillight flash by on its sizzling highway. The buses idling, the campesinos with mochila hung on shoulder, hats on, and work IDs looped around their neck, find their way inside the bus they are assigned. So effortless and still, it’s almost like nature itself. A couple of men greet me when those men have gone, walking out of the kitchen with Styrofoam coffee cups steaming. The first one is named Raúl and he’s originally from Big Spring, Texas. Been here for so many years now he’s for Iowa football and thinks this year they’ll beat Texas. He works as a translator, and he tells me it’s the best job he’s ever had. When his wife and two teenage children drive up in a pickup—they’re working for the Bells too—he introduces them all to me, switching into English. His wife is a native Iowan, he met her when he’d first come up here for work. His children, sleepy as they are, are nothing but polite. They are Iowans.
When they take off, Alejandro, the man Tom Bell probably counts on the most, comes over. Alex is what they call him. This is his fifth year here. He is employed at least a month before the other workers and at least a month after, always the longest. When three men pile out of the bunkhouse at 5 a.m., it’s him who is shaking his head at them—he told everyone 4:30, and now there’s no ride until 6:30. They wait over on the school steps. Alejandro is from Nayarit, which is on the Pacific Ocean side of Mexico, a long way from a bus depot in Monterrey. He’s picked everything, he tells me proudly, every fruit and every vegetable. Just before he came here, he’d been working in a sugar cane factory back home. This is a good job, he says. He’ll come back as often as he can. Tom Bell treats him well, treats them all well. What happens when someone can’t take it, can’t make it out there? It happens, and they find something around the grounds for them to do. It all works out.
It is dawn now, blue-gray, more people, more talk, no more indoor lights needed. Alejandro yells over to those guys sitting. He tells them they can get a ride in a pickup that just pulled up, that it’s going to their field, to not forget to check in with their crew chief. Six-feet five-inches high, Alejandro is as tall and lean as the healthiest Iowa cornstalk, as native of Mexico to maiz, and he is right in the middle of the field of dreams.
KANSAS
CAPITAL Topeka
ENTERED UNION 1861 (34th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From a Sioux word meaning “people of the south wind”
NICKNAMES Sunflower State or Jayhawk State
MOTTO Ad astra per aspera (“To the stars through difficulties”)
RESIDENTS Kansan
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 4
STATE BIRD western meadowlark
STATE FLOWER sunflower
STATE TREE cottonwood
STATE SONG “Home on the Range”
LAND AREA 81,815sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Barton Co., 15 mi. NE of Great Bend
POPULATION 2,744,687
WHITE 86.1%
BLACK 5.7%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.9%
ASIAN 1.7%
HISPANIC/LATINO 7.0%
UNDER 18 26.5%
65 AND OVER 13.3%
MEDIAN AGE 35.2
KANSAS
Jim Lewis
I want to tell you a story about Kansas, or rather, to tell you a story that Kansas once told about me. This was in Wichita, at a place called the Coyote Club, a roadhouse out on the north side of town just before the fields began, with a big gravel parking lot outside, and beyond it a set of railroad tracks that carried freight up through little towns like Sedgwick and Walton and Peabody, to Topeka, before turning north-west for the Nebraska border. The club had first opened in 1935, and it had gone through several names—the Hobble-De-Hoy, the Country Castle—before becoming the Coyote Club.
There were bullet holes in the stone walls beside the front door; I heard several different stories about how they got there. Inside, there was a main dance floor big enough for a couple of hundred people, and a short, messy bar with scores of 8×10 publicity photos in frames on the wall above it: punk bands, blues bands, crooners, whoever happened to be passing through town and needed a place to play. It was summer. I made a midnight call to a friend of mine in New York from a phone in the club manager’s office and said something like, “This place is unbelievable. What am I doing here?”
Let’s say there are two separate and distinct places called Kansas, or two ideas of the same place. I’m sure there are more than two; I’m sure there are as many as there are people who live there, or have visited, or have ever thought about the place. But there are at least these two. One is, for lack of a better word, the real Kansas, where people live and work, and go to school, buy car insurance, check the weather report, fight with their families, weigh their produce at the supermarket—live pretty much as people live anywhere, allowing for the distinctions of local culture, climate, tradition, and the like.
The other Kansas is the Kansas of the Mind. This Kansas is mythical, even exotic, precisely because it represents a kind of zero degree America, the heart of the heart of the country: a land of great wide plains and endless fields of grass, long winds, girls in
old cowboy boots. If you grew up, as I did, in New York and London, visiting this Kansas is like The Wizard of Oz in reverse, where one passes from the daily drudge of the Emerald City, with its glassy canyons and cartoonish personalities, into a fantastic world of empty landscapes, battered buildings, imminent weather, nice people, and very long drives. I was twenty-five when I ended up there.
It happened like this, and just about this quickly: I was doing graduate work in philosophy at Columbia, and teaching the Core “Great Books” Curriculum to undergraduates. One weekend I met a girl from Texas, and on Monday she went home. We talked on the phone for a few weeks, and then made plans to spend a month together in Austin, but by the time I got down there she had changed her mind, and decided she didn’t want me around after all. I got drunk at nine in the morning and took a Greyhound to Houston; that night I went to a place called the Hey Hey Club to see a friend of mine, who was playing bass for an R&B singer and sax-player named Johnny Reno. Backstage after the show, Reno took me aside. He was a thin, dapper man in his mid-thirties, a showman; they had just finished their set and his face was shining. “I hear you’ve been having some trouble with a girl,” he said. I confirmed that I had. “Why don’t you come on the road with us for a few weeks?” he said.
A note here. I’ve received more kindnesses in my life than I can possibly have deserved; at moments when unhappiness or trouble, in its various forms, has threatened to overtake me, there’s often been a someone nearby who’s offered me, through no motivation other than sympathy or generosity, a way out. Reno was one of those people, and so were the men in his band. I had nothing to do and no place to go, no money, and I had just been dismissed by a woman I cared about. I was deadweight, along for the ride, and aside from George, the bass player, I was a stranger to them. But they took me in, they shared their bus with me, their motel rooms, their jokes, and, on those nights when Reno would call me up on stage during the band’s encore, to bash on a guitar while we tore through a couple of Roy Orbison songs, they shared their stage. George, Billy, Michael, and Reno himself: they rescued me, they were good to me, all they wanted was for me to enjoy myself; and I surely did.