I have made a habit of taking one teensy tiny vacation per month. It lasts two days. I load my family into the good old family truckster, and we drive West and a bit North, for about three hours. It’s far, this mini vacation, but it isn’t a vacation that I take more than once a month, and I only go during the four months of summer, so the drive isn’t all that bad as it might be if I owned an actual vacation home that distance from my house. If that were the case, we all know I wouldn’t go there very often, on account of it being three hours away from my house. For reference, see anyone you know with a vacation home in Door County or anywhere in Michstakegan, because six hours round trip for one full day of vacation is something even professional semi-truck drivers would balk at.
But about this little town, where we go. It has only few things worthwhile. There’s a pizza shop, with pretty bad pizza. There’s a store where they sell Norwegian things, much like the store that Lake Geneva used to have before it went out of business due to a lack of Norwegian trinket buyers and plummeting interest in lutefisk. For all of these non-things to do, there is one thing that I’m very pleased with in this little town, and that’s the grocery store. It’s a small store, but it’s large enough to be sufficient for all grocery needs. Williams Bay has the Green Grocer, which is nice and needed, but you cannot exactly perform all of your weekly shopping duties there. This store, this co-op, it’s rather nice.
It smells like some sort of natural oil or fragrance, but it would be easier to say that it smells like Hippie. There’s dash of farm stand in the aroma, but mostly, Hippie. Oily and herby and naturaly. Still, I like the store and I like the way people look at me like I have absolutely no business being there. They think this because I don’t smell the same, and I don’t look the same, and I drive through the parking lot much faster than they do. I’m also taller. But still, the store.
Most of the thinks I like. The produce is nice, so is the meat. Everything is expensive. If Whole Foods = Whole Paycheck, then Co-op = Gross Monthly Income, pre taxes of course. In this store there are some bumper stickers. They say the sorts of things you’d expect them to say. WISCONSIN. GOT MILK? Stuff like that. Most of the stickers I like, and I agree with, excepting one. This one, it’s small and plain. The sticker is all black, with simple block white lettering. CORN IS NOT THE ANSWER.
This is what it says. I have driven through the valleys by this town, those swampy, silty, sandy valleys. Their corn is usually impish, small, and not boasting the ear parts of the stalk that contain the actual edible bits. Their corn is lame, and if corn today is three-something a bushel, I’m guessing farmers there will not all be getting new F250’s this year. CORN IS NOT THE ANSWER, says the sticker. Taunting the farmers there that are trying so hard to make it be. I say to the incense burning, quinoa having, oil lathering hippies: If corn isn’t the answer, what on earth was the question?
The phrase must be somehow anti-big farming. It must have a seething hatred for Monsanto, somehow masked by the simple appearance of the statement. I’m guessing it was penned by someone who drove around their town for a while and looked at their sad corn, and declared it to be anything but the answer to anything. I drive around Lake Geneva a lot. Every day, all day. I drive so much you’d think I was paid by the mile. I see corn here, lots of it. Nine foot corn, busting with ears that are overwhelmed with kernels. I see Walworth County corn, and I’m pretty sure it’s the answer. But this is horse corn, field corn as my Grandma May would prefer us to call it, and that might be the answer when it comes to feeding the world, but when it comes to feeding my family on summer evenings, well, then corn is still the answer.
But this is the sweet variety, and it’s everywhere right now. It’s for sale at farmstands and at grocery stores. Co-ops have it, too, flaunting their own sayings by putting it in their vegetable cases. Of course the grand-daddy of all corn is Pearce’s, and the stand just so happens to be right down the road from my house, and I’m pretty happy about that. This weekend, you’ll be at the lake. If you’re not going to be at the lake, we should chat about that. Assuming you’ll be here, because all of the other cool people will be, take a drive to Pearce’s at the corner of Highway 67 and County F, just West of Williams Bay and North of Fontana. Buy some stuff. Buy some corn. Because if the question is what are we having for dinner, then the answer is, indeed, corn.