My Time in Agriculture
I’ve had three jobs outside of music and education. One was as an umpire for our local city league. I loved baseball, so getting to be around it after my playing career was over was great. Game-calling came pretty natural, as I had been a catcher beforehand and had a good eye for the ball as it would cross the plate. It was my first real training in being assertive, which is necessary for dealing with baseball moms and coaches who forget that they’re working with 10 year olds and not the Chicago Cubs.
Another was as a receptionist in a spa called Avani. This was a magical time. Soothing music and spreadsheets all day, conversations with fun co-workers, getting to practice my smile and warm welcomes to folks as they come in for an hour of pampering, the last-minute cancellation of a massage leaving me the opportunity to get one myself.
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My first job, though, was detasseling corn — about as stereotypically-Nebraskan as you can get. This is a pollination practice where a bunch of pubescents deflower female corn plants so they can cross-pollinate with male corn plants.
Kinky.
At 5:30am in the summer heat, I would hop on a bus of fellow teens, covered head to toe in denim, a long-sleeved t-shirt over a moisture-wicking athletic tee that seemed to offer no actual wicking, old sneakers that you would now call “dad’s mowing shoes,” protection-over-fashion safety glasses, over-sized studded gloves, and a baseball cap. You’d think the cap was to keep the sun out of my eyes, but it was really to remind people how many strikeouts I had thrown that season — listed on the inside brim. It was never impressive.
We’d be bussed into the fields, praying that we’d find a “Rider” on-site. These were specially-rigged tractors with stations where we could stand, two youths per cart, and pull the tassels out of the corn. These days were glorious, especially when the captain of the crew was a cool guy who didn’t care for your safety or production. He just wanted to get his day over with as quickly as possible. Sure, you wouldn’t make as much for your hourly minimum wage… but maybe you could get home before lunch and you could use your funds for Burger King instead of the deli meat sogging up the bread at the bottom of your lunch pail.
Other days, we’d find no machinery. We then would have to trek through the muddy fields, corn leaves whipping all along our bodies and faces, leaving behind itchy scratches and rashes. I hadn’t truly hit my growth spurt yet, and nothing was more demoralizing than having to jump to reach a tassel, cursing my overlords for not getting machinery into this field for us.
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It’s easy to become fully-immersed and unseen in the tallest of fields on the walking days. What a perfect chance to start tackling your unsuspecting peers into stalks of corn, an act labeled “corn-bore-ing.” This would sometimes devolve into entire competitions that stretched over entire days. Captains would be walking behind us, checking our work, and then see an entire row of corn knocked down after an obvious tassel-tussle. Easy to find those folks based on how muddy their clothes were. On the dryer days, the entire crew would get scolded. Culprits would be threatened with docked pay or even firing… but they never were. we can’t have that kind of bad pr out there. Everyone will start to work for K&J instead of G&E detasseling — you know how the market is.
I’d come home from the day out in the fields absolutely drained. The heat, lack of water intake (completely my fault… I didn’t understand my physical need for water at that point — I was just running on fumes and Mountain Dew Code Red), and physical labor had taken it all out of me. I’d come home to hopefully get a nap in before I went back out to a baseball practice and a strong Halo or Guitar Hero campaign… Falling asleep far too late before waking up at 5:00am the next morning for another day on the job.
Such is the life of a youth-corn-sex-assistance-professional.
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