Potatoes?

This past weekend we were in Iowa for Jenelle's nephew's wedding. It was a great weekend with perfect weather and a really nice celebration of marriage!

Not to minimize the marriage, but more to highlight that which I don't often see! That being corn in it's prime!

When I mention to people that Jenelle is from Iowa, I often get the response, “Oh yeah, that's where the potatoes come from”.

Usually, I just roll the back part of my eyes, the part that you can't see, and just smile and say something like, “That's Idaho, Iowa is all pigs and corn”.

Usually we go to Iowa for one of the holidays. Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Easter. We also go to the Iowa Deer Classic which is always in March. So usually what we see are empty fields. Usually they are tilling the fields in the spring, and in the fall they've already been harvested. Pretty much the only trees are the ones in people's yards and the ones growing along creeks and bigger woodlots beside rivers and on floodplanes.

Usually what we see, at least from Jenelle's parents home, is lots of fields bordered by a town off in the distance and fields bordered by the English River in another direction.

But this time, being that it's early October, all that you can see from here on the deck is a wall of corn. I think it's really neat. Kind of like living in the woods, except for the fact that you can still see the horizon and the understory is even more dense than the underbrush back home.

I'm always the inquisitive type, at least when it comes to nature and so the first thing that I did when we got there was to walk over to the corn and check it out. Big tall stalks along with ripened and heavy ears. It had rained the day before and there right beside the yard and in the first row of corn were a wandering set of deer tracks. 

There are usually no deer close to my in-laws house when we are there because there is nowhere to hide, but the corn changes things. 

The next morning I decided to follow the tracks. The tracks went over to my mother-in-law's strawberries. These are big green strawberry plants that look tasty even to me, carnivore that I am. There wasn't a sign of nibbling on the leaves at all. At my house they would have been eaten off down to the roots. But here, I guess that corn and beans are better. After that they wandered up through the corn and out by the fencerow that separated the corn from waste high soybeans. They wandered right through a patch of pokeweed. At home the deer love pokeweed! It's a preferred food source. They don't eat the berries, just the leaves and the tips of the plants. And they eat every piece that they can reach. But here, the leaves and everything were all intact. A little further along were a couple of rotten round bales surrounded by little five foot saplings that had popped up, as well as a couple of thorn bushes. Here there were lots of tracks. It looked like a doe and a fawn were calling this place, “home”. They could just stand up, eat a couple of bites, poop, and lay back down. They probably wandered around when they got bored or needed a drink.

Now, as I'm thinking about the corn, about how the deer out here have so many good things to eat and that they don't even notice the other good things that the deer back home just love, an Amish guy clops by on his horse.

Iowa has lots of corn and pigs. I forgot to mention that they also have lots of Amish. Sometimes we ask ourselves, why do the Amish do things the way that they do? Do they ever wish that they had my lifestyle?

As I'm thinking about mountain deer vs these Iowa deer, or the Amish vs me, I remember the fun that we had setting up and tearing things down before and after the wedding. Working together, not for money, but to get things done. 

And I think about our culture, how we work hard to find ways to be more efficient, to make more money, so that we can get up, eat, poop, and then lay back down again.

I wonder if we are a lot like deer? I wonder if deer are a lot like people? Even though it would probably be a little tougher going, I wonder if these Iowa deer would just love to move to the mountains. 

After all, fat and lazy might be fun for a while, but who wants to spend their life in a forty acre corn patch?