Two years ago I planted a purple-black corn from Perú. I got distracted in 2006 and planted no corn at all. This year I planted Tohono O’odham White, an heirloom flour corn from the Sonoran Desert.
Suited for growing without irrigation in the desert, drinking only the groundwater in alluvial-wash cornfields and the occasional monsoon, Tohono O’odham White matures fast. It bears mature ears quicker than any corn I’ve ever grown, on stalks shorter even than the Hopi corn growing on the res near Tuba City. I grew up in cornfields with stalks six feet tall, or seven, instant and fleeting wilderness for five-year-olds. These stalks topped out at three and a half, four feet. And yet in a mere square meter of garden bed — the extent of my cornfield this year — there is enough corn for a few meals.
The catch: this is not sweet corn. Or if this corn did have a sweet green stage, I missed it while taking out the trash. Even young the kernels were mealy, thick with starch. This is corn for pozole, for nixtamal, and it will likely go into a crockpot for a few days with a chicken to keep it company.
The stalks are dead already, tan sheaths on tan stems, and I ought to get around to collecting the husks for tamales, or at least to feed to the rabbit. There are spots on the husks: a month ago the aphids had found the plants, were fruitful, multiplied. They seemed not to hurt the crop much, so I let them alone, food for the lacewings and hummingbirds, the ladybugs.
Sweetcorn kernels turn almost translucent when they dry, filled with crystallizing sugars rather than cornstarch. The O’odham White is opaque. Even dry, its kernels are balloon-stretched, replete, smooth.
I am a bit replete myself these days. I find small pleasures that would once have provoked an upward flicker of the left corner of my mouth — a breeze to tickle the back of my neck, the belly of a harrier wobbling over a distant field — and the river gives a sudden surge against this dam of twigs. I threaten to spill over. I am a naked nerve these days, joy and grief and discontent roiling in me at once.
There are house-sized eddies on the Colorado River, strong whorls persistent through decades, and boaters in the Canyon sometimes relax by abandoning the main stream and pulling into one. Twelve thousand cubic feet of water passing by each second, and yet some eddies hold their captives strong enough that four oars are needed, or six, to push the raft atop it back out into the river. A boundary of water against water, solid as a wall, and yet impossible to chart precisely except by navigating it.
These days my skin seems indistinct as the wall between river and eddy, my turbulent self contained by boundaries laminar and liminal. These days I strain at the oars. I struggle to cast myself out into the main stream again, to entrench meandered canyons in the swiftly rising desert. I am part of the river, and though it flows past me I must rejoin it.
There is another river in the desert. It has no banks, no rapids. One cannot swim in it; one cannot drown in it. Its headwaters are in the earth and it flows upward molecule by molecule, until the precipice at the surface. And then the cataract: a desert-wide river, ephemeral as desert rivers are, falls vaporous into the sky. Along its edges skins form: they separate small whorls from the river. The eddies grow, push seed leaves through stony soil, sprout stalks and ears, fill burgeoning seeds from which new eddies propagate. Corn is a chain of whirlpools in the sky river. We drink them and they swallow us in turn.
