Corn Fields in the Darkness

Corn Fields in the Darkness

by Andrew J. Perez

The day wasn't as warm as it ought to have been, though there would be no hint of complaint from me on that front. The cooler the day, the better the ride.

I was meticulous about packing my backpack. I made sure I had everything I'd need to last me the better part of a week: extra clothes, toiletries, provisions for the road, tools for my bike; everything. Once the packing was completed, I loaded up, strapped on my jacket and pack and departed. As the garage closed behind me, the engine between my legs roared to life, sputtering and exploding like a lion in the heat of battle.

I'd allotted around ninety minutes to make the fifty-or-so-mile trip given the time of day I'd be passing through several cities. The last thing I wanted was to end up an hour late and disrupt the timing for the rest of the day. Ergo, when I arrived barely an hour after I'd departed, needless to say, I was somewhat dumbfounded.

As I sat outside the house at which I was to stay, I was entertained in the interim by watching the neighbor and his friend and daughter attempt to park a boat in the side-yard of his suburban cul-de-sac house. After some time and post-parking, he wandered over with a bottle of water for me and some pleasant conversation about his thirty years riding motors with the CHP. As he walked back across the obscenely well-trimmed lawn, between the perfectionistic shrubberies to his own home, my acquaintance arrived. With a quick change and fast turnaround, we were into her SUV and on the road for another ninety minute drive. Or so we thought.

It wasn't until we actually arrived at our stated destination, impressive enough given the directions we'd had to guide us, that I realized the extent of the oddity that was to ensue simply by attendance at such an event. The said event, know as the social event of the year, the largest celebration in the small bay area suburb, is best not embellished but stated plainly without hyperbole or further perturbations of plot or verboseness in dictation. Therefore, without excessive extrapolations on the subject of the three-day-long celebration, I present to you, the tale of the Brentwood Corn Festival.

The wait in line was nigh unbearably extended. Apparently, as we learned late into our patient vigil to the corn, an edict had been enacted that allowed only one person in for each two people out in order to thin the crowd, as it were. Sadly, by the time we approached the gate, after nearly three quarters of an hour of watching a small boy play some seemingly-pedophillic game of leap-frog with a gray-haired man and taking note of the bafflingly-clad Twi-hard tweens wandering throughout the crowd, the odds of getting inside had gone from two-to-one to twenty-to-one. Thus, next in line, we stood counting forty patrons to the corn in their exit patterns before entering the fantastic, the fabulous, the overwhelming and overzealous Brentwood Corn Festival.

The most notable aspects of the Festival were the fireworks and the beer garden. I say the beer garden not for its extensive selection (corona and bud), nor for the rarity of the beer garden amidst the carnival rides and games, nor for the delicious smell of fermented wheat and barley between the scent of corn and port-a-potties, but for the fact that the damn thing closed five minutes before we got to it.

Thus, in place of beer, we had carnival games, a rather impressive cover band and, eventually, the aforementioned fireworks - somewhat of a let-down as there were no corn-shaped fireworks to be seen. However, as we exited the park at the completion of the festivities, the painfully patriotic red-white-and-blue finale confirmed that the rallying cry for the night was to be "America!"

We walked to a car, probably somewhere around a mile from the park, and took a drive. Not knowing where we were headed, I simply soaked up the surrounding area. We passed through what felt like endless corn fields. Corn to the right, corn to the left, corn ahead of us as far as the eye could see and nothing by corn behind us. When we passed through downtown Knightsen, I remarked on the three buildings in the city, all of which proudly served Budweiser, the King of Beers.

Suddenly, the car made a left turn onto an unlit dirt road. Cutting between trees and corn stalks, a metal barn appeared before us beyond a gnarled old tree and a wooden sign that informed the passengers of this car that we were entering the Tripple J Ranch.

"Dear god," I thought to myself. "I'm actually being taken to a corn field in the middle of the night."

As it turned out, I wasn't killed nor raped or maimed in any way. I was merely introduced to several horses; Peewee, Honey, Cat, Jaws, Teddy, Emma, Beau, Harley and one very proud and American rooster with a mighty American crow.

After some time of star-and-horse-gazing, we departed and returned to Brentwood, gathered our SUV and returned north after a failed attempt at a meet-up with who promised to be an entertaining individual with an excessive amount of foliage lining the front of his home.

When we arrived back at my friend's house and prepared for some much-needed rest, I realized that in my fervor for preparation for this sleep-over trip, I had managed to pack everything plus the kitchen sink into my backpack, excluding, rather ironically, any pajamas. I proudly donned her pink and black pajama pants and crawled under the covers.

I departed in the cool of the morning after a hearty bowl of shredded wheat and returned home. Not, however, without learning valuable lessons about pajamas, the corn fields in the darkness and the popularity of atrocious beer.