Picking Iowa Sweet Corn at Dan D Farms

Eating Dan D Farms sweet corn is an Iowa tradition.  Actually, people all over the world love the corn, coming to the Knoxville Nationals in August and shipping it home.  Every year for the past several years I have joined Dan Dennison and his corn picking crew in the early morning to speak with them about picking corn, and this important Marion County tradition.  Dan is a great guy to talk to, and the kids he hires to pick corn are fun too. Here is this year's interview.

http://www.kniakrls.com/2011/07/in-depth-picking-dan-d-farms-sweet-corn/

Coal Mining In Marion County

You wouldn't know it now but Marion County, IA was built on coal mining.  Local historian Doug Wilson is an incredible source of information on Coal Mining in the county as well as other localities in Iowa.  Here is my three part interview with Doug.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Watermelon

The watermelon appeared on the front porch one hot Saturday afternoon in September, sitting in my patio chair with a bit of dirt and bird poop on it.  It was about the size of a basketball and nearly as round and it was green, not striped, and I looked across the street at the house and machine shed where Jim worked on his tractor and knew where it came from.  I yelled for the kids and we hosed it off, pulled a little yard table and more chairs off the deck and into the grass and under the shade of the big elm out front.

I grabbed a butcher knife and we sliced the melon into big chunks and ate it with the juice running down our chins onto our shirts and I taught the kids how to spit watermelon seeds at each other and me and how to pinch them between your fingers and shoot them at each other and other things we had a mind to including the dogs.  We hoped Mom would walk out the door but she didn’t.  Asa who is seven said we sure are going to have a lot of watermelon volunteers in the spring aren’t we, and I said yes.

When we got to the center of the watermelon I pointed the big knife down and cut out a pyramid of the beautiful red seedless center and gave it to Johanna and said this is called the heart of the watermelon and I am giving it to you.  She paused for a moment giving that statement her four year old consideration it deserved, smiled and ate it.  We ate that melon like wolves, threw the rinds and what was left in what Mom calls the compost heap and really isn’t, hosed ourselves off, goofed in the yard until we were dry, and went back into the house to watch TV and read and Mom didn’t know any different.

A few days later my cell rang and I didn’t answer it, but listened to the message a couple of days after that and it was Jim and he said did you and the kids like that watermelon because if you did I have another one for you.  When I saw Jim under the big trees in his yard on Saturday, I wandered across the road to his house, a hundred yards or so away, on the big round curve heading into town.  His back was to me, as he was bent over the tailgate of his rusty 69 Chevy pickup so I shuffled a bit in the gravel as I crossed the road so as not to startle him.  He turned and said walnuts.  Shukin’ walnuts.  

His nearly black hands worked quickly, peeling the crusty brown-green off walnuts. Wait til the husk dries a bit and shuck it off, and let them dry, bake them in the oven and they’re good eatin’ especially in baked stuff.  Cookies and things.  Cakes. He pointed. See all those walnuts on the ground there?  Come on over anytime and take em home, I’m done with them and have this pickup bed full.  He looked behind me and pointed. Those two trees over there are pecans, and I looked and saw the pecan shells starting to dry and spread, opening like wooden blooms, nearly ready to drop their nuts.  Don’t see many pecan trees around here, I said.  No, he replied, they open and drop their seeds like hickory’s do.

Kids like that watermelon?  Yes, they did.  I have some more he said, wiping his black hands on his jeans, and started into his back yard.  Never planted these watermelons, he said.  They just come up year after year.  Must be volunteers from someones garden years ago.  Maybe a dozen watermelons were scattered across what looked to be an old garden plot.  Tomato plants and gourds grew amidst the watermelons.  Volunteers.  All volunteers he said.  He reached over and pulled at a striped melon.  This one’s stem’s dry.  I guess it’s ready.  I took the watermelon from his hands, and it was warm from the sun, with dirt and bird poop on it.

Don’t get your shirt dirty he said.  I said it doesn’t matter.  We walked back to the pickup so he could get back to shelling walnuts.  I set the watermelon on the edge of the bed of the truck for a moment, and glanced into the back of the truck.  Six dead blue jays were lined up, like in a specimen case in a natural history museum.  Was feedin’ those one by one to the cat, but just got too many he said, shucking walnuts.  They was getting the pecans.  Jays can clear a pecan tree in no time if you don’t shoot em.  Shoot them?  I said.  Yep, challengin’, he said with a little smile. Twenty two.

He continued shelling walnuts, and I wandered back across the street with the watermelon, wondering what the fine was for shooting blue jays, and thinking back to my granpa who thought blue jays were smarter and certainly more interesting than most people.  I got home, set the watermelon in the grass in the shade of the elm, and went to get the hose.  Kids, come out here, I yelled into the house.  Watermelon!

Carnival Life in Southern Iowa

Kenny Linville of Oskaloosa manages JKL Rides, a family venture.  What's it like to run manage a carnival in southern Iowa?  This podcast is one for KNIA/KRLS in Knoxville/Pella, IA.  I saw Kenny and crew setting up for the Fourth of July in Bussey, IA, and stopped to speak with him.  I don't know if I have ever known a man who works so hard.  But I'll let Kenny tell his story here.

A Walk in the Woods: Ephemeral Wetlands

Marion County Naturalist Marla Mertz is a treasure. She teaches kids and adults about nature, rescues wildlife, rehabilitates injured eagles and hawks, and does so with a gentle kindness and wisdom revered in other cultures and too often ignored in ours.  She richly explains and brings great meaning to things that most of us drive by, too busy to care, much to our detriment, and to the earth's. She's a great teacher, and has taken Austin DeJong, a seasonal employee, and anyone who cares to listen along with her on her journey to understand and appreciate life on earth.  Here her topic is ephemeral wetlands, and it's time for a walk in the woods on my program for KNIA/KRLS.  The program can be found here.

Muddy Boots

It's raining as I write this.  We're under a severe thunderstorm watch, and we have a flash flood warning until noon tomorrow. We have broken June to-date rainfall records that were set last year.  Last year we broke records set in 2008. In 2008 we broke records set in 1993, another year of great Iowa floods.  And so far, we're lucky--nothing here like the flooding on the Missouri. But it could yet come.

A few days ago I was driving home and noticed a US Geological Survey truck parked by the bridge at Cedar Creek.  Of course, I pulled over and had a conversation with two young men who were taking readings at the Creek, and checking instrumentation there. Garret Welsh and Lance Gruen, employees of the USGS are also students at the University of Iowa who are studying hydrology.

Flash flood watches and warnings save property and lives.  And you can have all the fanciest scientific equipment in the world, and it doesn't mean anything unless you have people checking that equipment, calibrating it, and making real-time observations.  And those men and women who do this important work--have muddy boots.  What's their job like?  And what do they think of notions in Washington DC, and Des Moines that will result in support for these river monitoring services being cut? I work in news for a great radio station--KNIA/KRLS Knoxville/Pella, IA, and my interview with them can be heard here.

Mallet

Old man Grayson in his overhauls, Red Wings,
and St. Louis Cardinal baseball cap grabbed my arm
at the primitive tool auction in Albia on Saturday
and said, “see that big ol’ mallet over there?”

And I nodded, looking where he pointed at a
rough old wooden mallet that was not from
this world but I didn’t know it yet that had
a hand-carved handle long as a broomstick,
thicker than the skinny end of a baseball bat with a
blocky oak head nearly the size of a concrete block.

I took it in my hands, shrugged, felt its weight, and
turned its business end to the ready and imagined
driving something with it, a big tent peg maybe when
Grayson said “my Granpa told before he died in 57
that that there mallet and those like ‘m was used to
drive timbers plumb and flush in the old coal mines,
like the Gold Goose he worked in the old days near
Hamilton, and all these old boys here at the auction just
think that these are mine tools but these here wood tools
are slave tools we brought with us from the plantations.

Or the idea of 'em anyway, ‘cause the plantation bosses
didn’t want black men with steel ‘cause steel was too
expensive to buy they said, but really with enough time --
and they sure had enough time -- a clever fella could make
a nice club or shiv outa steel and they didn’t want that, no sir."

And he looked at me and I said, “Oh.”