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:: 2017 SPRING TRAVEL WRITING CONTEST FINALIST ::
Circus tents, blackened husks, stained fingers, average consumption, brick barbecues, four-wheel-drive, corn stamps, Stroh’s, eight hours & the Upper Peninsula.
M ost days, the folks who turn off U.S. Route 2 toward the tiny town of Cooks in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan live there or near there, or have family or friends who do. But one day a year, Cooks gets actual tourists, like my parents and me (they, from Florida, summering near Sault Ste. Marie, a couple of hours farther along; I, from New York City, visiting them after visiting my sister at Bark River, about an hour back). So on that day, a Sunday in August, the small green sign bearing only the town’s name is covered up by a conspicuous hand-lettered poster for “The Cooks Corn Roast, Sunday 12-8,” with an arrow at the bottom pointing left.
A quarter of a mile down the road, another sign says “Parking” and seems to be guiding us either into the front lot of a squat, square building that big, rough letters declare to be The Cooks Bar or over to the right on either side of two fire trucks. These turn out to belong to the fire station, which shares the building with the bar.
The time is 12:01 p.m., one minute past the opening time of the roast, and we find room for our car. When we leave a mere hour later, more recent arrivals fill the spaces and practically every family around has stationed a preadolescent boy to collect a dollar each from out-of-town visitors for the privilege of parking on its stretch of street.
Cooks folks held their first corn roast fifteen years ago, the corn cooks tell us later, and the event became so successful over the years that the town—with considerable volunteer labor, recorded in photographs on the fire station walls—constructed a permanent home for it and other outdoor festivities: two long pavilions, roofed with corrugated aluminum, under one of which is a giant brick barbecue pit. Two awnings made from old circus tents provide additional shade for rows and rows of picnic tables, now occupied by only a few eaters. Most of the several dozen early visitors are still reconnoitering the various edibles and drinkables—hot dogs, $1; brats and sloppy joes, $1.25; soda, forty cents; beer, seventy-five cents; homemade cookies, pies, breads (heavy on the zucchini) and jams (heavy on the blackberry)—and deciding whether to throw dice (ten tosses for a dollar) or buy raffle tickets (first prize, a thousand-dollar discount on a four-wheel-drive vehicle; second prize, a microwave oven).
We dunk our ears in five-pound coffee cans filled with melted butter floating on hot water, then sprinkle them with salt from baby-food jars with punctured tops.
My parents and I join the line to get our corn stamps, which for $1.25 each entitle us to as much corn as we can eat during the eight hours of the roast. “You’ve been picking blackberries,” says the stamper, taking my hand. “I’ve got a few of those myself.” To the rosy briar scratches on the back of my hand he adds a dense, black, oily X. “You’ll have to wash a lot of dishes to get that off,” he says with a grin. (A day later, after two dips in Lake Michigan, two showers and at least a little washing of dishes, my X lingers.)
“Do you think he’s a farmer?” I whisper to my mother. “They’re all farmers,” she says, speaking with the authority of one who grew up among farmers in Gettysburg, South Dakota.
Some five hundred dozen ears of corn will be consumed in Cooks today. The corn cooks, all male, are shoveling corn out of two dumpsters onto the grating of the barbecue pit. The first cooked ears—about ten dozen, I’d guess—lie heaped on the grating, their blackened husks steaming. One of the cooks, wearing work gloves, picks out an ear for me, peels back the husk, revealing mixed white and yellow kernels, and says, “If it ain’t done, throw it away and come back for another.”
No worry. All of our ears are done to a T—maybe overdone for some tastes, but I like the rich caramelly quality of the longest-roasted kernels. These are a deep tan; some smaller kernels at the end, where the husks opened, are lightly blackened.
We dunk our ears in five-pound coffee cans filled with melted butter floating on hot water, then sprinkle them with salt from baby-food jars with punctured tops. We polish them off in, say, seven minutes, and go back for seconds. The server says his piece—“If it ain’t done…”—word for word as before, only this time he throws away the first ear he opens, then picks out another that is even better than the one I just ate.
One of the cooks, wearing work gloves, picks out an ear for me, peels back the husk, revealing mixed white and yellow kernels, and says, “If it ain’t done, throw it away and come back for another.”
My parents, meanwhile, have started on half a grilled chicken ($2.50), a portion that, added to the corn, is just right for the three of us. While the chicken isn’t what you’d call barbecued—its flavor is distinctly that of chicken, not sauce—its appearance suggests some magical ingredient or process. The blackened skin puffs out and separates into feathery tendrils that resemble peeled-back corn husks, as if decades of being served together with corn on dinner plates throughout the Midwest has affected the chicken’s genetic makeup, given it husks for skin.
All this food requires something to wash it down, so I go to fetch soda for my parents and beer for myself. The woman tending bar asks whether I want Stroh’s or Pabst, then pours me a big paper cupful out of a plastic gallon milk jug. A sign warns that beer cannot be taken from the premises. Above the table that holds the beer jugs is a sign with a long list of names (both men’s and women’s) indicating hours for bar duty. The list is nearly double that of those (all women) who serve the brats and dogs and pop, probably reflecting heavier demand and a more arduous pace. The roast has a reputation for being the scene of serious carousing as well as eating.
Wishing I had room for more, or more hours to make room, I finish with a third ear (this one bright yellow and the biggest so far), as does my mother; my father manages four. We speculate about what the average corn consumption per capita at the roast will be: close to what we’ve eaten, or more like half a dozen? Some of the big eaters must put away at least a dozen, especially if they stay all eight hours or come back for the equivalent of another meal or two. Are any Guinness-style corn-eating records set here? If there were, would we know, does anyone count? There do seem to be a few people who aren’t eating corn at all, but maybe they’re just concentrating on brats for now, saving the corn for dessert or for supper.
Well stuffed, we pass up the various games of chance, buy some blackberry jam and a few cookies for the road. The next morning, my mother pronounces the jam delicious.
The blackened skin puffs out and separates into feathery tendrils that resemble peeled-back corn husks, as if decades of being served together with corn on dinner plates throughout the Midwest has affected the chicken’s genetic makeup, given it husks for skin.
“It reminded me of something,” she says of the roast, “but I can’t remember what.”
“An ice cream social?” I say, but immediately think no, the ice cream socials on the Methodist church lawn I remember from adolescence in Altus, Oklahoma, were genteel, tea-partyish affairs—no beer.
She shakes her head no. I can tell she’s looking back a few decades.
“Did they have town festivals like that in Gettysburg?”
“Well, we did have a rabbit feast….”
All she remembers about it, though, is that the Masons put it on and the men went out and got the rabbits and did the cooking. There were always men who loved to cook, she says, “like the ones who fry the fish on Friday at the Elks Club.”
She thinks they might have had pheasant feasts, too. At least they used to eat a lot of pheasant back then, in the 1930s and 1940s. In those days, pheasants, which have been steadily declining in recent years in South Dakota, were almost as plentiful as corn.
Kathryn Paulsen’s prose and poetry have been published in New Letters, West Branch, The New York Times, et al., and may currently be read in The Smart Set, Humber Literary Review and Saint Ann’s Review, among others. She also writes for stage and screen and earned an MFA in film at Columbia University. She currently lives in New York City, but, having grown up in an Air Force family, has roots in many places and suffers from chronic wanderlust. Her novels are represented by Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory. See her occasional musings at ramblesandrevels.blogspot.com. This piece originally appeared in the Travel section of The New York Times on June 5, 1988.
Lead image: O.C. Gonzalez