Detasseling

Every once in a while, when I'm traversing the winding farm roads in my northern Illinois home-county, I get a bizarre notion: I should pull over, don a neon orange poncho and go running through the nearest cornfield (usually less than 50 feet from the road's shoulder). From there, I'll find the nearest batch of pimply junior high kids, scrounge up a sopping mud ball, sling it at the most defenseless one of them all, shout, "Boo-yah suckas, back to work!" and then pluck tassels from the corn like crazy.

The sad part of that dreamscape isn't that I fancy myself a bully, but that 10 years ago, that scenario was perfectly normal. To me and hundreds of kids all over Illinois (and the Midwest), pre-teen, agricultural power-tripping was a very real thing. It meant getting our arms and calves whipped by wet cornstalks at 7:30 in the morning. It wasn't a punishment for juvenile delinquents, sent off to tough-love, hard-labor jobs. It wasn't a sociological study of the lives of migrant workers. It was actually the best-paying job a 13-year-old could have. It was called detasseling, and if you were a middle-class teenager, living in northern, rural Illinois, it was a rite of passage — a character builder — and you hated it with every fiber of your being.

For those not fortunate enough go grow up in a rural community, it's difficult to comprehend why in the world you would do it, or understand exactly what it is. Basically, detasseling is done by a crew of junior high and high school kids (or the freaks who come home for the summer during college to do it), who ride school buses out to certain cornfields, the kind that grow seed-corn. This is not the kind of corn you eat, but the kind used for industrial and other agricultural purposes. Contractors, who in my case were usually high school teachers with a summer job, worked for companies like Pioneer, rallying as many kids as they could.

The most attractive part of the job (in my mind, the only attractive part) was the money. At an age of 12 or 13, there were no other jobs, short of baby-sitting, for kids without a work permit. Detasselers received special agricultural exemptions, unless you failed to meet a specific height, which I believe meant you had to sign a waiver.It seemed that whatever the short kids didn't have in height, they made up for with their enthusiasm. Working at minimum wage, with 10-cent increases given with each additional week on the job, or years of experience under your belt, a junior high kid could easily make $300 or $400 a summer. This, in addition to the lucrative lottery prize at the end-of-the-season-Pizza-Hut-blowout was enough to keep most kids in their bus seats for the four-to-six week season.

Once a contractor successfully rallies the troops, the group is broken down to smaller crews, which divide and conquer a field. The kids are picked up at dawn at designated spots in town, where they board buses bound for whatever cornfield the contractor has picked for the day. A contractor usually oversees about 100 kids or more, with other adult supervisors and designated "crew leaders," usually high school kids.

Most newbies are pretty confused about what detasslers actually do. Confusion can usually be cleared up with a brief lesson in "corn anatomy. Most people confuse the silk for the tassel. Or they think that detasselers remove the actual ear of corn from the stalk. But they do neither. The tassel is actually a little hard to spot until you're actually doing it. Fully developed tassels are the yellow, grain-like part of the plant that sticks out the top. When you see a regular cornfield, not a seed cornfield, you usually see the tassel. A detasseler's job is to yank that part off of the corn plant while the tassel is still encased in the long, slender, green leaves. If you find a tassel that's covered with black dots, you've found a "buggy whip." No skipping. It is slimy with bugs, and you must pull it.

In corn culture, there was no time for fashion. In fact, there was outright scorn for it. One of my cousins from Minnesota came down to detassel. She was heckled for unknowingly committing the sin of wearing eyeliner.

The detasseling uniform was this: 1. Pioneer-issued mint-green sunglasses, unless you wore glasses. Nobody wore contacts because of the pollen, and pollen got everywhere. Up your nose, in your eyes, under your nails, in your toes, in your hair. 2. A rain poncho or garbage bag uni was always employed until the morning dew vanished. Staying somewhat dry was important in reducing corn rash. 3. A bandana or hat was essential. Ten years ago I was wearing trucker hats long before they were a fashion phenomenon. It was part of the uniform. 4. One pair (or two, bought at Wal-Mart, you did not spend good money on field clothes) sweat pants or jeans, or, shorts and knee-highs. 5. Flannel shirt.

In a slow season with little rain, I was often taller than the corn plants, and had to bend over to pull off the tassels. Other times, plants could be 6 feet tall and I was reaching. If it was rainy, dry dirt became mucousy mud, penetrating any barrier. My hands grew blisters, suffered cuts and remained dirty for two months. Same with my feet. Even through layers of socks and shoes, my toenails stayed as dirty as my fingernails.

Most of the time, we just walked the rows of corn, plucking tassels, but if we were lucky, they loaded us into machines. The machines looked like a giant tractor, with huge arms spanning out from them. On these arms were baskets big enough to fit three people, with about three baskets per arm. We would stand in these baskets, and pull the tassels as we moved along. Sometimes we'd have to bend down to pull the tassels, and other times the corn was as tall as the baskets. This was more fun, but it went much faster, and you had to be adept at pulling bigger bundles at a time. It also left me with sore arms. In a field of younger corn, one or two sweeps with the machines would do it. Other times, we'd have to get out and walk the fields to catch all the tassels we missed on the machines.

I dreamed about rows of corn. Every time I shut my eyes, it was all I could see. I was never in the mood for sweet corn those summers.

June and July can be brutally hot months in Illinois. A day rarely ended past 2 p.m. They hauled us to the fields as early as possible to avoid heat exhaustion in the sun. We had many water breaks, or "Twinkie breaks" as our leader called them, named for the length of time it took to eat one.

I did this for two summers. The second year, I begged my parents not to make me do it again. I wrote a list of why I shouldn't have to. Included in the list was a clause stating that I planned on writing a novel that summer (at age 14), and therefore, I'd earn money that way. I kicked and screamed, cried and yelled, but did it anyway since all my friends would be with me.

While some of my friends took tours of Europe with their parents during the summer, I was immersed in another culture entirely. I literally lived and breathed (and sometimes accidentally ate) corn culture. I saw people do things that I couldn't do anywhere else. I watched a classmate eat a caterpillar for $3, to impress a girl, I'm sure. We knew we were all silently getting rich, as we heckled the rich country club kids and their summer trips to Hilton Head. Pre-teen and teenage crushes flourished in the cornfields in a way they couldn't working somewhere else. Instead of bra-snapping and hair-pulling, the ultimate sign of affection was shown, literally, by mud-slinging. Sharing a basket on the machines inevitably lead to junior-high hook-ups.

When I didn't detassel I worked at the family-owned True Value instead. Even though it's a family business, I wasn't safe. My dad didn't need me one summer, so I was forced to pollinate instead. That job was cushier, with more frequent water (or Gatorade!) breaks, an hour for lunch (which meant enough time to run to McDonald's), and shorter hours. Oh, the hierarchy of agriculture.

Until three years ago, I was reluctant to take detasseling off of my resume. If I was lucky enough for it to land in the hands of somebody familiar with the task, I knew they'd appreciate detasseling's presence. Fancy internships don't reflect the work ethic that you learn in a cornfield. But, until the day that I'm desperate enough for a job to apply to Successful Farming, "familiarity with agriculture terminology" will be tucked away inconspicuously next to "knowledge of QuarkXPress" in the "Skills" section.

— Mary Gustafson (mary@knotmag.com)