Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  Another puzzling thing about maize pollen is its size. Though anemophilous, maize pollen is large, its diameter more in league with animal-conveyed than wind-conveyed pollen. At about one hundred microns, each grain is the approximate thickness of a coarse human hair.

  In the fields, everything hinges on a breeze.

  The kids long for relief in the form of pools, lakes, ponds, showers, lemonade, and ice cream. Instead, they’re forced to rely on the caprice of the wind. When a breeze comes along, they raise their hats and invite it to enfold their necks. Then they get back to work. In this way, “rite of passage” becomes synonymous with “misery,” a word they already know bears uncanny resemblance to the name of their home state.

  At least they’re all in it together. At least they all look stupid. Each of them is muddy and sweating more than they’d like to be in front of their peers. Each of them smells like a pair of moldy gloves that was recently rummaging around in a cow’s rumen. Each suffers, and each makes money. The kids walk the rows in the morning so that the female-designated plants don’t fertilize each other, yeah sure whatever, but mostly so they’ll have enough cash to keep them in their various pleasure-poisons until late August when school starts back up again—Monster drinks and digital downloads and lip gloss and condoms and smokes and chaw and movie tickets and Cheetos and more.

  They suffer to the extent that they’re exposed. Their emotional misery almost offsets their physical pain, however. Walking the rows, the kids get bug bites, corn rash from the leaves’ glass, and, in some cases, hospital-grade sunburns. They also get endorphin rushes from the camaraderie. They get boners and embarrassed and hormonally high enough from those last three not to feel the damage wrought by the bugs, the glass, and the UV right away. Detasseling lasts less than a quarter of summer break and each summer something magic happens. In the cornfield, social strata collapse. Unlikely kids become friends or more than that.

  ••••

  In the leaves, the opalescent beads are phrases of opprobrium; in the ground, pearls of approbation. The biogenic silica beneath the kids’ feet is so resilient it will linger in the soil for millions of years after the kids have passed. It will lend some grit to that cold diary of death until some archaeologist comes scrabbling in the field’s paleosol and catalogs it as evidence. Then the opals will be fossils and more properly referred to as “phytoliths.”

  Phytoliths are the main tool for tracing the history of maize and, by proxy, Paleo-Indians. The oldest discovered maize phytolith settled like an embryonic molar into a Panamanian lake bottom right about the same time that one of the world’s oldest surviving shoes was pitched onto a heap of unmatched others, average size women’s 8½, in a bat-inhabited trash cave overlooking the Missouri River. The shoe was braided from the leaves of a tallgrass prairie plant known by Native Americans as “rattlesnake master.” That was about eighty-five hundred years ago. Since then, maize has succumbed to what one archaeologist calls “extreme domesticity.” At first blush, “extreme domesticity” borders on the oxymoronic, but what it really means is this: Modern ears are so tightly wrapped in their husks that, without serious intervention, their seeds have no hope of escaping them.

  Dressed as they are, the only way to tell the boys and girls apart from a distance is their voices. Words are airborne and letting them fly brings a modicum of relief to the kids. When it comes to pain, swearing is chemically anesthetizing and serves a real physiological purpose. Studies show a person can hold his or her hand in a bucket of ice water a lot longer if allowed to let fly a few choice words in the process. The dirtier, the better. For the boys more than the girls, swearing is an art form they’re driven to master. Steven Pinker says that swearing originates in a primal part of our brains, the same part that gives rise to a dog’s howl when its tail has just been stepped on. Cussing is crying foul when trespassed against, which, when you’re a teenager, is pretty much always. Don’t look at me. Leave me alone. What do you want? Cussing is verbal silica.

  Neither maize nor language can self-sow, yet both hybridize as readily as plants with wind-borne pollen can, specially slang, whose usage spreads way faster than proper English’s. When it comes to the origin of “slang” itself, etymologists are at odds. Anatoly Liberman’s An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology devotes about half a dozen pages to “slang,” citing a Scandinavian trajectory and tracing its roots back to a time when “slang” meant “a narrow strip of land.”15 From there, “slang” was used to refer to the people who traversed that narrow strip, and then to name the patois of the strip’s itinerants. Along the way, “slang” was employed as an adjective to mean “sinuous, snake-like, long and narrow and winding” as well as a verb for “to roam, wander” or “to linger, go slowly.”16 To traipse the country was to be “on the slang” like a group of “traveling actors […] hawkers, strolling showmen, itinerant mendicants, and thieves fighting for spheres of influence.”17 To be on the slang was to go wherever the wind blew. It wasn’t until the word hit London in the eighteenth century that “slang” began to signify “jargon.”

  According to an entry recently removed from the Urban Dictionary, “cornilingus” is the act of eating popcorn like an anteater.

  According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the minimum acceptable abbreviation for corn is “CORN.”18

  Though they were told how to spray and to dress, and no, those weren’t suggestions, many kids feel hard words backed by hard muscle are all the protection they need in the fields and, for that matter, everywhere else. Those young bulls. Those plucky Vandivers. The kids who suffer the worst need to be seen learn the hard way to keep their skin covered no matter the temperature or the heat index, to keep as shielded in the rows as the ears of corn in their glassy husks, to keep extremely domestic.

  •••••

  Some of us require serious intervention. I moved away from my hometown decades ago, but my dad still lives in the fertile loess bluffs along the Missouri River. When I get homesick, I call him up and he tells me about the plot of corn he’s growing alongside his beans, okra, jalapeños, tomatoes, and spinach. His land is a fossil river meander; it is shaped like a human ear and its soil is the silt typical of all floodplains everywhere. The dirt there is as sparkly and fine as the moth wings I used to desquamate in order to paint myself glittery when I was a kid.

  On the phone my dad and I are on the slang. We talk about things real and terrifying, winding from politics to natural resources to climate and back again. He likes to wrap up on a funny note. Joking, he says that maybe if we humans can delay our own self-induced extinction long enough, then after some critical count of generations the races in our country will homogenize, “racist” will become obsolete, and everyone will self-identify as “Native Americans.” It will be funny in an ironic kind of way, but only a handful of historians and we ghosts will get it. But hell, funny won’t ever count half as much as what’s for dinner does. People will always struggle first and foremost to feed their kids, and that’s both the noblest and the most savage struggle there is. Then we talk about what each of us is cooking for dinner, and the provenance of our dinners’ ingredients.

  During the Pleistocene, glaciers picked and plucked, scoured and ground to flour the bedrock of the Canadian Shield. The silt wove its way south through the blue braided rivers that flowed within, beneath, and beyond the glaciers. Fine enough to hitch a ride on the wind when it dried, the sediment blew south and blanketed the Mississippi and Missouri River Valleys with a thick, wholesome dust. Glacial loess is so fertile it forms the loam of our nation’s breadbasket. When the North American ice sheets retreated after the Last Glacial Maximum, the loess became a plush 150-billion-acre bed from which prairies waved their enticing tallgrasses. Then, at the start of the nineteenth century, John Deere invented his steel plow. In short order the loess became the subcutis of the Corn Belt. Within a human generation, the geographical extent of tallgrass pra
irie declined by approximately 99 percent.

  Before there was corn, there was teosinte, a wild grass whose numerous little ears were each about the size and shape of a full-grown snake’s rattle. Teosinte kernels are not pillowy soft and golden and full to bursting with sweet milk. Nor are they interlocked on a thick cob in a hexagonal honeycomb pattern. At just a few inches long, teosinte ears bear only two rows of triangular kernels, about a dozen seed grains total. They are spikes, not ears. Their two rows of kernels come together like the toothed blades of pinking shears, each kernel encased in a dark, rock-hard shell. When dried, the seeds have nothing to hold them together. Instead of clinging to a cob beneath husks that are bombproof, the kernels separate and fall to the ground where they readily grow into new plants. Unattractive as they are by comparison, it is nevertheless true: If heated over a flame long enough, teosinte grains will blow their hull and turn inside out, flaunting their starch just like the blond seeds of our movie-theater corn do. Step right up.

  A couple of years ago, geneticists figured out that sometime during the Last Glacial Maximum, a wiseacre jumping gene named Hopscotch took a wild leap and landed somewhere in the architecture section of a teosinte plant’s double helix, resulting in the potential for a less branched mutant capable of bearing fewer but bigger ears. Jumping genes are bits of DNA that can detach from their strand, splice the strand closed, and then leap like a springtail to another rung on the spiral staircase. Jumping genes do their stuff when their host cells sense danger. What happens next is up to chance. Evolution can act on the changed genetic structure in a way that causes a disease to be expressed, or it can act on the changed genetic structure in a way that causes nothing to happen, or it can act on the changed genetic structure in a way that dramatically makes over a rather unappetizing grass, turning a dowdy tuft into a big, tall queen or crassimarginate goddess, a grain of dirt into a pearl. About twenty-three thousand years ago, when the North American ice sheets were at their most eminent, a teosinte cell sensed danger and its DNA took measures so drastic they were heritable, the DNA revising not only itself, but also its future generations. Thirteen thousand or so years later, Native Americans coaxed maize from teosinte by selectively breeding the Hopscotch mutants through a process called backcrossing, successfully domesticating corn, a feat made easier by the wind-pollination method of grasses. Ninety-five percent of the corn grown today contains the Hopscotch gene.

  ••••••

  Darwin thought Delpino’s finding “surprising”—why should animal-pollinated plants abandon their M.O. to become anemophilous when clearly insects are much more reliable couriers, providing pollen “incomparably greater safety” than the wind possibly could?19 Yet that seems to be the way things happened. Anemophily is a “derived” or secondary condition. Wind-pollinated plants came from animal-pollinated plants. Modern scientists believe anemophily evolved from zoophily at least sixty-five separate times in the evolutionary history of plants.

  Wow.

  Like the flowers of most anemophilous plants, maize blossoms are fairly inconspicuous and lack fragrance. There is no nectar to speak of, and the pollen offers little in the way of nutrition. Maize flowers aren’t tantalizing because all they need is a stiff breeze to peddle their pollen, which is also plain looking. There’s no pressure to lure winged beings with food, no need to seduce them into inadvertently doing maize’s dirty work for it. Fragrance and physical beauty would be a waste of effort. The elegance is in the mechanism, not on the face of the plant. The elegance is in the wind.

  Delpino said that if form and function were considered synchronously, they would “mutually form together a set of high scientific interest.”20 He wrote, “[…] raise the veil of apparent immobility and insensitivity of plants, and below it you will see […] a number of curious phenomena, which compete for the number, variety, talent, and effectiveness with those presented by the animal kingdom.”21

  The science of botany was a bit of an uphill battle in the beginning. Linnaeus lifted the veil before Delpino, and many of his contemporaries were scandalized by the fantastic goings-on that plants seemed to keep hidden. Goethe contrived prudish explanations that he hoped would redeem the botanical world from whorishness and prurience, using the phrase “loose concupiscence” to describe the reigning explanations of the pollination process.22

  Botany seethes with sexual verbiage—how many books about plants have you seen whose titles titillatingly combine the word “sex” with “hidden” or “secret”? And most comparisons between the fertilisation of the Gramineae and our own lusty shenanigans are just too crude and obvious to mention, the processes and scientific parlance lending plenty of innuendo on their own. It can be hard to keep a straight face, though the science is both real and real amazing. That’s why, for Goethe’s sake, I’m hopscotching the mechanics of maize pollination to the essay’s end.

  Here’s how it begins.

  In stillness, the rays of maize’s tassel point like the arrows of a wind rose. The main rachis pokes straight up and the many auxiliary spikes point in every direction of the compass. They look like a coterie of prairie dogs surveilling the horizon—not for predators, mind you, but for mating prospects.

  Stillness is waiting, is torpor, is (it’s too easy to anthropomorphize here): anguish. Maize leaves come alive to natter and flap in the wind, to loll and to lash, but the more amazing thing is what the tassel does. In the wind, the coterie becomes the supplest of fronds. It becomes a feather plucked from the display of a color-blind peacock. It becomes a whole tail full of feathers. A flirted fan. A flag waved with the coquettishness of a mock distress signal. The tassel struts and bunches. It twirls and sways. It performs great supplicating bows. It’s as if the tassel were playing the wind and not the wind playing the tassel.

  But look closer. Each arm of the tassel’s plume is covered in several dozen wind-sensitive spikelets. Each spikelet blooms with two florets. Each floret opens to release three stamens. Each stamen is a gossamer filament with a pollen-producing anther bobbing at its end. Each anther hangs like a clapper from a hull-less bell, like a runneled tongue stuck into the wind, like a shotgun’s double barrel.

  Holy moly.

  In the wind, the spikelets put on a show. It’s The Gold Rush, Charlie Chaplin’s table ballet, except instead of two dinner rolls, there are six anthers, the forks are gossamer stamens, and Chaplin’s dancing eyebrows are twin florets. In a cornfield, a billion million anthers kick at the sky like little impaled baguettes, testing and tasting the breeze, desperate. Which way? Which way? their choreography seems to beg. Where did it go? and Can you feel it, is it coming? and When? and How strong? Is it strong enough yet? and Now? Now? Now?

  It’s important to know when the perfect breeze will arrive because there’s last-minute work to be done before the anthers let go of their pollen. Right about the time of pollen shed, one of the cells (there are only two to begin with) inside each pollen grain undergoes division. From one cell come the two sperm necessary for pollination.

  •••••••

  Maize husks have runnels that span their length like the ridges in the aisles of school buses. On the seats in the otherwise empty buses are closed lunches and wadded-up rain ponchos. Inside the maize husks are pithy unfertilized cobs. Cuplike are their bare white sockets. I once trespassed on a bus to do things I never told anyone about and my bare feet slipped on the runnels. The bus was parked in the middle of a field in Iowa. The door was unlocked. I stepped up. The ears of maize are waiting like the rest of us to fulfill their own superspecialsecret purpose, a purpose that feels so unique and custom fit when you’re realizing it, but which is in fact the oldest, most universal deal in the book. There are soundscapes for this. Check iPods for playlists titled “urgent.”

  What if you only had one summer?

  What if you only had two weeks?

  In the time it takes a few busloads of Midwestern kids to detassel a cor
nfield, a language is buried with its last living speaker. According to the Living Tongues Institute, every two weeks a language dies.

  By the time the kids are middle-aged, the world demand for crops will have doubled. Linguists estimate that half of the seven thousand languages now spoken on our planet will be extinct if not by 2050 then at least within a half century later. If they’re right, and the UN’s predictions for population growth are also correct, then in another thirty-five years, earth will be host to 35 percent more humans and 50 percent fewer languages. What’s ironic but not funny at all is: Even though our country produced about fourteen billion bushels of corn last year, Native American tongues are among those most threatened by language extinction.

  Maybe, because we humans have been growing roots around this planet since the scabs on our ancestors’ knuckles healed, because we’ve been reaching and wrapping it in our thick tangles of cultures and customs, been colliding with and outcompeting and succumbing to one another’s armies and tongues since the dawn of combat and language, all the time sprawling faster and harder around the earth’s surface, something akin to thermodynamic heat death is in the works in terms of language. “Entropy” means “turning into.” In thermodynamics, the thing you start with is the ability to do work and the thing you end up with is spent energy in the form of heat. Different sciences use the word “entropy” to express different things, but all agree that entropy is a one-way street. “Entropy” is synonymous with irreversibly momentous chaos, disorder, homogeneity, and, in some disciplines, species loss.

  But language isn’t dying like a tree with a few girdling roots. No. It’s thriving while also becoming monotypic. It’s undergoing a major architectural overhaul. It’s forsaking its fretwork of twigs and limbs and girthing up a few of its basal branches, namely Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic.