slow food nations 167country where those qualities have slipped from our paddock of everyday
virtues, over to the side of “miracle.” I couldn’t say.
/It was dark by the time we headed back through the cornfield to Elsie
and David’s house. At low speeds our car runs solely on battery, so it’s
spookily quiet, as if the engine had died but you’re still rolling along. We
could hear night birds and the tires softly grinding dust as we turned into
the fi eld.
“Stop here,” David said suddenly. “Pull ahead just a little, so the head-
lights are pointing up into the field. Now turn off the headlights.”
The field sparkled with what must have been millions of fi refl ies—the
most I’ve ever seen in one place. They’d probably brought their families
from adjacent states into this atrazine- free zone. They blinked densely,
randomly, an eyeful of frenzied stars.
“Just try something,” David said. “Flash the headlights one time, on
and off.”
What happened next was surreal. After our bright flash the fi eld went
black, and then, like a wave, a million lights flashed back at us in unison.
Whoa. To convince ourselves this was not a social hallucination, we
did it again. And again. Hooting every time, so pleased were we with our
antics. It’s a grand state of affairs, to fool a million brainless creatures all
at the same time. After five or six rounds the fi reflies seemed to fi gure out
that we were not their god, or they lost their faith, or at any rate went back
to their own blinky business.
David chuckled. “Country- kid fi reworks.”
/
We sat in the dark until after midnight, out in the yard under the cher-
ries, talking about the Farm Bill, our kids, religion, the future, books, writ-
ing. In his spare time (a concept I can hardly imagine for this man) David
is a writer and editor of Farming Magazine, a small periodical on sustain-
able agriculture. We could have talked longer, but thought better of it.
People might sometimes wish to sleep in, but cows never do.
In the morning I woke up in the upstairs bedroom aware of a breeze