I Must Protest! From the Editor's Desk...

Since its inception one tenet of The Ripple's loosely structured mission statement was to avoid topics political. Some readers might think this post hypocritical

in that respect. However, I prefer to view the following post as a health issue subject because it addresses the health of all Americans, in particular our country's school children .

I grew up in the 1960s, a decade of social turmoil that was an amalgam of burgeoning civil rights movements, the war in Vietnam, and a counter-culture whose anti-establishment mantra was "Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out." The conflict in Vietnam was insidious, an all consuming cancer at all levels of American life. Our evening meals were spent watching news feeds from the killing fields: napalm fireballs, helicopter gunships, fire fights, medics treating blood soaked wounded, blood soaked themselves, flagged draped caskets. Casualties mounted; the daily "body count" became as routine as today's stock market report. Enemy soldiers were shot and killed before our very eyes...before we had dessert. In May of 1968 I followed a U.S. Army bus for miles to my hometown, unaware the entire time it was carrying the burial detail for my twenty-year old brother-in-law who did not survive the Tet Offensive.

Yet I never participated in a single protest march. I never joined peers who laid their bodies on freeways, splayed out, snarling traffic. Never once did I think about joining the radical groups that commandeered campus buildings; blowing up buildings was the farthest thing from my mind. I never marched; never carried a sign. I still have my draft card. The first year I taught, four college students were shot and killed on the campus of Kent State U, their lives taken by young Americans much like themselves. The difference being one side wore National Guard uniforms and carried rifles loaded with live ammunition while the other was armed only with words and perhaps a few rocks. You might say I was in survival mode of another kind in those days, studying to pass the next midterm or final exam, struggling to buy groceries, pay the next rent bill or quarter's tuition. During those years of fury and ferment my only protest was against a landlady who refused to fix the leak in our apartment roof.

For thirty-one years I taught in the state's public schools. Toward the end of my career I became aware of  unsettling changes nationwide, especially those that spilled over into my line of work. There was the bomb threat that shut down my high school for a day.

Then a couple of lock downs which, thank god, proved false alarms. Unbeknownst to me a student in one of my classes had a loaded handgun in his backpack.

Fortunately the handgun was later discovered and the student subsequently suspended...a loaded gun concealed in a backpack in my classroom for an entire period. Sometime later a student holding a handgun threatened a colleague in the school parking lot. And a former student was gunned down in Colorado, shot to death in a dispute over a parking space. One year before I retired, the Columbine High shooting occurred, the first high school mass shooting in the Nation's history. For the first time in my career I felt a twinge of fear when a colleague warned me a student whom I had reprimanded in class said that I "...had better watch out." As retirement approached, I told people half jokingly: "I hope I get my gold watch before I get a lead slug."

And then the incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School. School children, many of who had yet to lose their baby teeth, massacred in the sanctity of a public school classroom. This is inexcusable, I thought. These were children. But nothing was done. Those who had the power to do something...anything...those who most certainly had children of their own, any of who, but for good fortune, might have been in a similar elementary school classroom, turned a blind eye to the carnage, the blood, the loss of young lives, the future of our country. And on and on it continued....

And continues yet today. And so I decided to attend my first protest, the March for Our Lives event held over the weekend in Seattle.

I hand printed a sign and joined my daughter and thousands of others who marched nearly two miles ("plodded,"in my case) in support of kids at risk from gun violence. I didn't chant. I didn't cheer. I didn't sing. I held my sign high and let it speak my message. I marched for some sanity in a Nation fraught with gun violence. I marched for its victims and those yet to become victims. I marched for the students I had taught, thankful they never had to flee their classrooms in terror, leaving dead classmates and teachers behind. I marched so the message raised by today's youth will continue to resonate. I marched for them in the hope they effect commonsense change. I marched for the young boy holding a sign that said: "When I grow up, I hope to be alive...."

The Day's Grind...

                                 
                                  Some folks say a tramp won't steal
                                  But I caught two in my cornfield. 
                                  One had a bushel,
                                  The other had a peck.
                                  One had a roastin' ear tied around his neck.

                                        Lloyd "Cowboy" Copas

My dent corn, the entire fifty foot row of it, produced a good yield this past fall. Last year was a crop failure, due in part to a poor choice of seed corn. This past spring I planted a row of "Earth Tones" dent, a short season shelling corn that produced nearly two ears per stalk of mottled, earth tone hues. A year ago I received a corn grinder for a Christmas gift but because my corn crop failed I had no chance to try it out. In late September I shelled out over two gallons of variegated kernels and set aside the cobs for fire starters. Now that I had corn to grind, I was anxious to put my grinder to the test.

The journey from seed to meal was not without adventure, the first of which involved some pesky resident blue jays. As soon as the seed sprouted, the jays would pluck out the sprouts, cast them aside and feast on the kernels. To discourage the blue bandits, I placed a few short stakes down the row and strung mylar tape just above ground level. I knew the jays were after the seed, not the sprout and once the seed had sprouted to six inches or so, it would not be worth their effort to exhume what kernel remained. The strategy worked and over the summer the corn thrived. In fact most stalks were twelve to fifteen feet tall.

As the ears matured, I shucked and brought them inside by the wood stove to dry, which led to the next challenge: shelling the ears. My friend Jim Tunnell happened upon an old corn sheller at our local fair a few years back. He reconditioned the machine, made a few adjustments, and put the contraption to work. Jim also had a grain grinder and made his own flour and cornmeal ("Corn Prone," 3/23/2015). He kindly shelled and ground some of my corn crop that year, but Jim has moved to a different part of the state. The sheller and grinder went with him.

My brother improvised a corn sheller from a short tube of two inch PVC. He set a couple of screws in the tube, screwed them in so the tips protruded a short distance inside. Using an electric drill as a power source and an improvised drill bit on which he impaled the cobs, he spun the ears inside the tube where the set screws dislodged the kernels. Simple enough to build-- if you're handy. But tinkering is not my strong suit, so I resorted to the Old School, hands on method: grip and twist. I would "start" an ear by plucking loose a few kernels at the base of the ear. Then a strong grip with the left hand and repeated twisting with the right, I shelled the corn into a gallon plastic bucket. A dozen ears at a time was about my limit. And my hands were sore for only a day or two after each session. (For you manual corn shellers out there, having a good football game tuned in makes the task far less tedious.)

I discovered the "grip and twist" method yielded a considerable amount of chaff and bits of cob. To remove this excrescence, I went Old School again, waited for a blustery day. Come fall in this neck of the woods one needn't wait long for a stiff breeze to roll in from the southwest. The process is called "winnowing," and you don't have to be handy to put it to use. Holding the grain bucket a foot and a half above a five gallon bucket, I slowly poured the kernels and let the wind work. The chaff drifted away downwind while the heavier grain cascaded into the five gallon bucket debris free. Three or four transfers later and my corn was free of chaff and ready for grinding.

I assembled the grinder, followed the instructions step by step (by the way, if you're not handy, instructions always are) and readied it for action. My brother has a year's experience on me and gave me a tip or two.

He advised that a light grind for the initial run would make successive runs easier. After each run I tightened the grind plate's adjusting screw and cranked the crushed kernels through the auger another time. I experimented with the first hopper, a series of four runs, but found the grind was more like flour than meal.

I backed off the pressure until I found a courser grind to my liking. For the remainder of the first bucket I did a three series run and was satisfied with the result. The final run of each proved a workout. Even in the cold shed I broke a sweat on number three. I felt like an overweight hamster laboring away on its treadmill. Turning the crank proved quite an aerobic workout and my muscles ached for three days after.

My afternoon's sweat session produced nearly five quarts of fragrant meal. The result proved to be an earthy, gray color, I'm sure very much like the mortar and pestle ground product early Native Americans prepared as a foodstuff. And just as those peoples looked ahead to the next harvest, I've already set aside enough seed for this season's cornmeal crop.