"In July, I visited a cornfield that gave survival a new meaning. It was on the Tuscarora Reservation, just northeast of Niagara Falls, N.Y. A modern commodity corn farmer would have laughed at it from the air-conditioned cab of his $350,000 combine, and even a backyard gardener growing sweet corn would have found it puzzling. The rows were set wide, and the soil had not been hand-weeded, sprayed or “cultivated,” which is the name for mechanical weeding. It had been a dry season in the Niagara frontier. The cornstalks were waist high, and the leaves seemed to have opened their arms to the sun in a delicate arc. The tassels — the organs of germination — had barely begun to form.

I had the advantage of knowing what this field — part of a Tuscarora Community Supported Agriculture project — would eventually yield; otherwise I, too, would have been doubtful. Earlier that morning, I’d stopped by the office of the Tuscarora Environment Program. Neil Patterson Jr., the director there and co-author of a pictorial history of the Tuscarora Nation, handed me an ear of Tuscarora corn.

You may be thinking of Indian corn, picturing the ornamental, multicolored ears that seem to have been bred for Thanksgiving centerpieces. Or if you’ve spent time in the Southwest, an ear of Hopi blue corn may come to mind.

And while you contemplate those different types of corn, let me say how hard it is to see the antiquity in living agricultural plants, or in the seeds of such plants. It’s hard to visualize the antiquity in any plant, for that matter. A venerable redwood daunts you with its size, not its age, and when you stand beside a bristlecone pine — leaning along with it into the Utah wind — only the knowledge that it may be 5,000 years old keeps it from looking like rooted driftwood."

Get the Story:
Verlyn Klinkenborg: Children of the Corn (The New York Times 9/21)