The Great Black Swamp by Patrick Wensink

Author:Patrick Wensink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2025-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

CORN CITY

This afternoon, I am sitting somewhere very familiar: Deshler’s Edwin Wood Memorial Library. This small, one-room brick building was among my favorite places as a kid. Once Mom started working here, I was often stuck waiting around after school for her shift to end, reading Shel Silverstein or a Guinness World Records book or the Haunted Ohio series, or just wandering the stacks, plucking books at random to see what was inside. While I often complained that I was bored, I secretly loved it. I would wander blindly from romance novels to histories of flight, poetry, cookbooks, and How to Build a Robot by Steve Lindblom, which always fascinated me.

Today, everything in the library feels a lot different than back then. Mom retired a few years ago, Deshler Elementary has been torn down next door, and the space feels more claustrophobic than I remember. Every spare inch of space is being utilized, most noticeably with hardbacks stacked on flat surfaces like a funky used book shop. One librarian tells me they have been awarded a grant for an expansion, but construction hasn’t begun yet.

I settle into a spot I vaguely recall as a child. I remember wondering if the gray-haired old ladies operating the hulking lightbox screen of the microfiche station weren’t playing some video game I didn’t understand. It is a game, sort of. Kind of a scavenger hunt. I sit down and start scrolling through ancient editions of The Deshler Flag. The paper was founded in 1900, during the town’s Deadwood era, but those issues of the paper aren’t nearly as exciting as I’d hoped. I am hunting for eye-popping yellow journalism about barroom brawls, muddied faces, maybe mysterious wagons selling miracle tonics. Instead, the newspaper’s editorial staff was already more focused on that transition into being a hardworking, low-drama place to call home.

I continue scrolling forward through the years, black and white images blurring by like a high-speed train. Every time I stop there always seems to be at least one article about a recent automobile injury or death, often alongside church bake sales and high school science fairs. I am reminded that I once conducted an experiment where I tried to prove that playing Nirvana’s Incesticide album repeatedly would help a plant grow faster. Results were inconclusive, and as I remember, so was my grade. Every one of the Flag’s front pages for years also features a sidebar called “Corn City Kernels,” where the editor gives out folksy bits of first-person town news, including one that mentioned with great enthusiasm the sighting of two deer, which apparently had become extinct in these parts after the swamp was drained and the timber felled.

Sometime during the early half of the 1900s, the town had earned the nickname the Corn City, which is appropriate, but also odd, since we are far from being a city. If they are counting individual stalks of corn as citizens, we must rival Mumbai and Mexico City for population. Along the way, we picked up a second nickname, too: the Crossroads of the B&O, but I prefer the corn one.

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