Scary is in the Heart of the Beholder…
Cornfields are scary… at least to some people I know.
To me, they are just an everyday sight. In winter, they are filled with the corn stalk stubs. In spring, the earth is churned up, awaiting re-planting. In summer, they’re lush and green. (I remember a saying from my childhood: “knee high by the fourth of July,” used to describe a successful corn patch. But that must only apply to backyard gardens, because around here, the large cornfields are filled with stalks more like shoulder high!) In fall, the stalks rub together in bare breezes to create a husky chorus.
Also in the fall, my family (and lots of people I know) like to go to corn mazes: mazes created in the midst of a corn field. It’s something a few area farmers do to earn a little extra money; they make more from devoting one section of their crop to making a maze which townies and city folk will pay good cash money to visit, than from harvesting and selling the corn itself. Kind of a sad commentary on corn economics.
And I’ve been known to joke with other suburbanites about our houses, built in the middle of former cornfields. (Actually, I think my current neighborhood was built in the middle of former forest. But my previous neighborhood was built in the middle of a former cornfield. And, having tried to grow a few petunias on that land, I have a new respect for the hardiness of corn. I’ve never dug in harder earth, before or since!)
I remember when the nearby mall and all the restaurants and shopping plazas didn’t exist… and that land was filled with nothing but corn.
So, I guess to me, cornfields—even though I didn’t grow up on a farm—have always been a part of my life, just sort of in the background, no big deal.
But I’ve met a few people who’ve visited or moved here from other parts of the country who find cornfields… fascinating. And intimidating. Even… scary. I knew one woman from New York City who was visiting for a writer’s workshop, held on a college campus in a small town, who was upset that she didn’t have anywhere to jog because the town was so small.
“How about in the countryside?” I suggested, wondering why she hadn’t come up with the obvious solution herself.
“Are you kidding? By those cornfields?” she said, shuddering. “Someone could just… just jump out… and drag me in there!”
I was stunned by her concern, and tried to reassure her that so far as I knew, no one had ever been snagged randomly by bad guys lurking in a cornfield. “If you’ve ever walked through a cornfield when it’s at its height,” I said, “you’d know it’s way too stifling and hot and buggy for anyone to lurk there long, anyway…”
She stopped me before I could go on, too freaked out by my simple description of a cornfield to hear more. And she isn’t the only person I know who feels that way about cornfields.
I’ll always be a little amazed when I meet someone who finds cornfields… or soybean or tobacco fields… scary, even though I know that what we don’t know or understand is often terrifying.
After all, the NYC writer’s description of jogging across the Brooklyn bridge just made me shiver…
