Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [17]
Now, erosion is nothing new on the Mississippi; erosion, in fact, is one of the things that Twain loved about it. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck eavesdrops on a party of river men arguing “about differences betwixt clear-water rivers and muddy-water ones. The man they called Ed said the muddy Mississippi water was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of the Ohio; he said if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to three-quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom. . . . The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to.” And in Life on the Mississippi, Twain claimed to have seen a steamboat so thickly coated with windblown dirt that “her hurricane deck would be worth a hundred and fifty dollars an acre” in New England. “The soil on her forecastle,” he wrote, “was quite good—the new crop of wheat was already springing from the cracks in protected places. The companionway was of a dry sandy character, and would have been well suited for grapes. . . . The soil on the boiler-deck was thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing purposes.”
But the affection of Twain and his characters notwithstanding, the best soil is soil that stays where it is. And destroying the old root systems meant that more soil went sliding down the muddier Mississippi than ever before. Today Iowa can lose as much as six bushels of earth for every bushel of corn produced; an equivalent amount of prairie would lose only one-eighth as much, while simultaneously adding a great deal more to the loam from its own constantly dying and regrowing root system. Since the beginning of corn’s reign, Iowa’s fabulously rich black topsoil has shrunk to about two feet deep—still thick by worldwide standards but about half of what it probably was when prairie grass held the loam in place. In the Great Plains, tiny “postage stamp” prairies sometimes tower as much as three feet above contiguous plowed land, pedestal monuments to the scars left by the plow.
Twain wanted corn bread, and “green corn, on the ear,” and corn “cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper.” He also wanted the prairie chickens that those foods displaced. When I think about this, I start to feel that Twain’s feast is at war with itself. But that’s actually wrong; the sad truth is that modern, industrial corn has almost nothing in common with the sweet corn Twain loved. In fact, the vast majority of corn grown in this country is completely inedible to humans. When it does appear in our food chain, it’s indirectly, after being fed to cows or pigs or processed into soda or Twinkies or a thousand other things that look and taste nothing like corn.
So corn and prairie chickens don’t have to be completely mutually exclusive, as the long decades of prairie chickens thriving alongside cornfields showed. But having a truly diversified landscape requires a deep shifting of priorities—beginning with the decision to grow . . . you know, food, instead of something that can be ground and bleached and manipulated into something that looks like it might be food, if you hold it just so in exactly the right light.
When it comes to the prairies, the effect of America’s subsidizing of industrial corn has been nuclear, reducing thousands of species to one, or at best a handful. Strikingly, even our modern monocultures still shadow the old ecosystems, the ancient patterns of grass. A single tall grass, corn, has replaced the thick tallgrass prairies of Illinois and Iowa; the mixed prairies of Nebraska and Kansas now hold winter wheat; the western, shortgrass Great Plains, where millions of bison once grazed, have been made over as cattle