43
The next few days delivered the promised land of corn mazes. Miles was starting to see what they meant, how could anything ever escape the labyrinth, a deer hung limp having underestimated the leap to freedom.
Still fresh, caught in the crossfire of the convenience war, a sacred creation tossed away with the husk, but it wasn’t too late to honor its life in a good way. A little tobacco, a par of wire cutters, seven prayers, fourteen hands, a week’s worth of venison jerky, but where were they going to find a place to camp?
“It’s kinda off track,” redirected Brooke. “But we’re not that far from Elmer’s, we could be there by dark and have space to work on this guy. And probably dinner in the meantime. The turn’s just ahead I think, kinda convenient spot for this to happen really, I’m thinking we’re probably supposed to ride over and check him out.”
Elmer was a farmer like everyone else around here, a corn farmer, a GMO corn farmer. He’d made the unlikely acquaintance of the traveling foodies on a previous migration, a wintertime icecapade, and when a blizzard rolled up the map, he opened his doors, they opened his mind.
“We used to grow everything around here when I was a kid, tomatoes, watermelon, cucumbers, now it’s just corn, corn, corn, as far as the eye can see. Most of us can’t even feed ourselves from our own farms, still gotta buy groceries from town, every square inch of viable land is committed to barely turning a profit. Hell, I don’t even like corn, never did, and especially not now, but it’s the only thing that pays the bills. Almost.
And it’s not like everybody’s rushing out to buy all this stuff, I only make any money because the government subsidizes it. They set a price, I sell it for whatever I can get, and they make up the rest as they supply the demands of the big agriculture lobbies. It seems like they’re trying to help us farmers, but all it’s done is destroy a state’s worth of farmland, and now we’re broker every year and still have nothing to eat. And ever since these guys taught me about just how bad this GMO corn is, there’s no way I’m going to eat it now.
I still grow it of course, have to. Gotta buy sterile Monsanto seeds every year, with pesticides already built into the DNA, but if I don’t, then my yield suffers, and I’m already on a shoestring. Plus, nobody cares if it’s organic or not, all the corn around here gets mixed together and shipped off to food factories. It’s in everything nowadays. A piece of it here, an extract of it there, they even somehow invented a sugar that’s worse for you than sugar, now that’s doing something.
Pushed us into destroying ninety million acres of actual food for Americans and replacing it with processed corn puffs, it’s sick, and the folks around here that eat it get sick, could be pellagra making a comeback. And the cows they feed it to get sick, ‘cause cows don’t eat corn, not supposed to, no wonder it gets them all bloated and hooked on antibiotics, and then the cattle give us shits like E. Coli.
I’m not that convinced we’re even supposed to eat it, not what it’s become anyway. Corn is a grass, a grain, and once Monsanto got ahold of it, over two thousand varieties of heirloom maize disappeared as this pumped up impostor took over the show. It’s only number one in the market because it yields the most energy per acre, nothing else matters, not health or taste or poisoned parts per million, it’s just a part number on an assembly line. They say that three fifths of the corn isn’t even for food, it’s industrial grade for energy and manufacturing, which means we’ve traded away a country’s worth of nutrition for a microwave.
But what can I do? I’m a slave to the bank. And the bank tells me that growing corn is the only way to keep the farm. So I grow corn.”
Miles could tell that Elmer felt as trapped as the deer, defeated and depressed and sadly resigned to feeding a machine he’d lost faith in. But he had let the travelers take down his fence, they’d inspired him to believe that he could still offer something to a planet he felt responsible for tearing apart, and the scrap metal alone made up for the few missing ears of whatever stray deer made it this deep into the wire-rimmed jungle. They’d forged a real friendship, an understanding of each other’s very different ways of life, they’d found common ground amid their bipartisan distrust of an agricultural empire.
They could stay as long as they wanted, there was even an old smokehouse they could use to cure the deer’s ailments, beds inside if they wanted, but he knew that this crew was going to sleep with the horses. They stayed up smoking and carrying on all night, snacking on fire roasted niblets and stretching the hide for tanning, a bit more of an undertaking than the raccoon. Dawn brought an early morning as Elmer was relieved to have help, and company, he threatened to close up shop and join them. He was welcome.
Brooke came bouncing off the porch with a basket of supplies, “Hey, ya’ll wanna go on an adventure?”
Has anyone ever answered no?
Miles and Jordan were in, obviously, Tiana close behind, but then Jordan remembered some mysterious phone call he had to make from Elmer’s landline, Miles would have to hold it down for the both of them. They walked past more rows of corn than bags in a dirthouse, finally reaching the runoff rich creekside.
“We’re gonna plant a bunch of Indian Grass all through here,” said Brooke. “It’s one of the strongest plants of phytoremediation, which is just what it sounds like, using flora to decontaminate our most polluted ecosystems. And not only is this wonderful purifier specifically geared for transmuting agrochemicals, like pesticides and herbicides, but it’s also native to this region, what a beautiful coincidence.”
“Ooh, and are we gonna transplant this Wah’pe Was’temna too?” smiled Tiana.”
“You know it. I gave Elmer a bunch of seeds last year and he had these starts up and going, like he knew we’d be swinging through or something. Miles, you probably know this one from the rez, these are just babies, but you’d recognize their purple coneflower that smells like a taste of heaven.”
“Oh yeah,” he recalled. “What’s the other name for it, the one I might know? Bergamot, right?”
“Yep,” nodded Tiana. “Or Sweet Leaf. Or Wah’pe Was’temna. Another sacred one.”
“Yeah, we took it in the lodge once, smelled way better than we did.”
“I bet,” wagered Brooke. “And it’s good medicine in the other way too. You can make a tea that helps with digestion and headaches, and cough and cold and influenza and all that stuff, plus it makes a perfect aluminum-free deodorant, but the best part is that it’s highly tolerant of manmade pollution.”
Miles was digging it. Planting medicines for the Earth. Healing our footprints and regrowing a natural world. And Brooke wanted to hear all about his own rewilding, about the dirthouse, and the piñons, and eventually the vine worked its way forty feet up a tree.
“You should have seen it Brooke,” insisted Tiana.” It was incredible. Miles was incredible. He was bobbing and weaving all over the place, they couldn’t touch him, and just when they thought they had, he pulls a Tango and Cash and slips right past them. Incredible.”
And Miles thought that Jordan’s retelling made him blush.
“I would have loved to have seen that,” roused Brooke, with eyes as wide as the sky. “You’ve got some stories in there, don’t you Miles? May have to pry a few out later. Ooh, look at all this Ghost Pipe over here.”
“Oh yeah, it’s all over the place,” codiscovered Tiana as she turned to enlighten Miles. “It’s a super medicine. It looks like it might be a fungus since it’s white like that, but it’s a non-photosynthetic flower, that’s why it does good in the shade under these trees. You can treat so much stuff with it, like heavy kinda stuff, like epilepsy and PTSD, and neck pain and pinched nerves. I think it can even be a non-habit forming opium substitute, but where’s the money in that?”
“It can also be used as a hypnotic and a gonorrhea treatment,” Brooke prescribed with a chuckle. “Even in this sea of yellow, there’s still pockets of nourishment creeping out of the cracks. Anybody else would call these weeds, especially the farmers who poison entire fields of natural medicines that treat the side effects of improper nutrition. But there’s no such thing as weeds, unless maybe you mean the cornstalks, invaders of a soil that they’d have no chance of surviving unless the biodiverse population is genocided with the rest of the native species.
You know it already from the plains, the grasslands are completely made up of strong medicines, and I’m sure it was the same here before all of this. Even people’s yards at home are full of medicine, and food, but the FDA doesn’t have a tax code for consuming the free and natural abundance that sustained people for tens of thousands years, so it’s way safer to buy Frosted Flakes and insulin from Walmart.”
“Yep, that’s the classic trademark of a capital lifestyle,” recognized Tiana. “Where we never had need of a word for weeds, or vermin for that matter, they were just plants and animals, our brothers and sisters, and any concept of not sharing the natural abundance seemed preposterous to our common minds of simple sense. They’re just more constructs of agricultural scarcity, further philosophies of us vs. them, as the invasive species insists on overexerting themselves to prove their own superiority over nature.
The limitations of excess demand a larger workforce, to provide enough farmhands to cultivate all the food they need to feed them all, and to fill all the pockets of generational wealth as they pass down an empire, while of course passing the buck up the chains of the interlocked church and state, who encourage extending families as they simultaneously raise money and soldiers. And like with any farm, each head of cattle has a dollar value, so they expand inventory beyond maximum capacity, until the only logical option is the expand the farm, and then they wonder how they find themselves in an overpopulation of underachievers.”
“Except that nobody wonders about that kind of stuff,” said Brooke. “It’s just another obvious truth to deny, as they recite whatever they’ve been told to believe. All the humans on Earth could fit into Texas, so we’re nowhere near overpopulated, and just think of all that wide open Indian land we haven’t seized yet, never mind that our footprint is much wider than our political stance. And yeah, our physical footprint only accounts for four percent of our land use, but there’s a lot more at play, like how cow hooves take up over forty percent of our country.
They measure it in global hectares, it’s the amount of available biocapacity that each human in the world demands of the Earth. If we broke it down to every person’s fair share, then we’d each have to sustain ourselves on 1.7 hectares of land, which is around four acres, seems pretty doable to anyone not consumed with their inflated ego.
Americans, of course, inherited the privilege of ignoring what the rest of the world thinks of us, so we have no problem with our average consumption of over eight global hectares per person. That’s over twenty acres each, and that includes a lot of factors other than just food production, like waste and carbon and all that kinda stuff, and if everyone in the world lived like us, it would take over four Earths to keep up with the Kardashians.
And a big chunk of our wasted products are the gross overproduction required to facilitate the inefficiencies of convenience. Like the wheat they use to Roundup pennies to the dollar, that average American consumes 180 pounds a year of gluttonous gluten, yet we grow 500 pounds per person, as Amber waves all that fertile farmland goodbye.”
“And that surplus of scarcity fills the shelves with a fear of our own expiration date,” expanded Tiana. “So we hoard so much food that we each throw away twenty-four pounds a month of wasted potential, and that’s not even counting the dumpsters of day old bread that we have to lock up, or else the lawbreakers of competition might find the treasure of feeding their family among the refuse of society’s leftovers.
Scarcity is a disease that has infected a world of abundance, and the zombies insist on sentencing every last one of us to a less than meager existence. It’s a mindset that the Earth is a finite resource meant to be picked apart, which only pits us against each other in a race to consume the entire planet before it’s all gone. And with billions of us sprinting toward the finish line, the prophecy becomes self-fulfilled as we topple our way to catastrophic failure.”
“Or maybe cropastratic failure,” offered Miles with a grin.
“Now we definitely didn’t need a word for that in Lakota”
“But wasn’t it a lot more feasible to live with the land back then?” wondered Miles. “I mean, wouldn’t this inflated population problem put us in the pickle of having no room left for cucumbers?”
“That’s certainly what they want us to believe,” Tiana broke it down. “That life is scarce, so we better hoard our personal space and let the economists figure out how to feed us. But amid all this confusion of limited understanding, what do you think the most irrigated crop in America is?”
“I’m pretty sure that would have to be corn, obviously?”
“Nope. Guess again.”
“Really? Then I guess I’m yet again clueless.”
“The most watered down plant in this country...” she dot dot dotted. “... is lawn grass. We spend more time, money, energy, and resources, to maintain an invasive species that we don’t even eat, or want anyone else to eat, so we spend our precious weekend cutting back our excess, instead of just letting life take over the planet.”
“All those weeds with pretty flowers are just growing too tall and healthy to see the property line,” mocked Brooke. “And the grass in the flowerbed crossed the border, so we kill the flowers in the grass and the grass in the flowers, when they obviously enjoy each other’s company. And now we’re too busy keeping the land from escaping, to realize than it would have taken a lot less effort to just grow the plants that we spend the rest of our life working at the power plant to put on the table.”
“I don’t know if we have a word for convenient,” admitted Tiana. “But I’ll bet it would more accurately describe a yard full of local produce, than all the energy expended to stock the shelves of the local convenience store. And if the whole neighborhood was your grocery, it’d be a lot easier to let a stranger step on your grass as community bloomed into abundance.”
Once all the rest of the bones were thoroughly picked over, they raced back to the barn, Miles lost, but he felt like a winner. He felt like he’d done something. He was riding a horse across the prairie on a prayer, forging tales of revolution, and rewilding the water with two pretty girls, and one of them might actually like him.
How could he possibly have found this fortune under the cushion of his apartment?