The Corn Husk

In one of my funks and barely able to function, I lay on my back a sultry afternoon atop the propane tank that fuels the heater in my dad’s shop. The day was relatively calm for Kansas—at the surface, at least—with winds of maybe five or ten miles an hour. The sky was mostly clear except for a few puffy cumulus clouds dotting vast expanses of blue. From my position, most of what I could see was sky.

Then I noticed it. At first I thought it was some type of alien visitor, bright and flat and distant in the sky to the northeast. It looked white but for a slight gold sheen. It was undulating ever so slightly, as if it were some airborne spirochete screwing itself up toward heaven. Soon it began to pitch and roll, gaining tens of feet in altitude, then dropping again before being lifted back up, all the while tracking to the southwest, opposite of the surface winds, light though they were.

The object continued its strange motion for quite some time, for ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps, before it was close enough for me to discern that its flatness was pronounced. It looked, now, like a vaguely tannish ribbon, and it became clear that it really was twirling about on columns of air, rising and falling with the vagaries of the thermals and the winds at that altitude. When it was almost directly overhead, I could finally recognize it for what it was: a single dried husk from a stalk of corn.

I’d heard of corn husks showing up in unlikely places, of course; we all had in the Midwest and Plains states. We’d heard they’d been spotted on the beach or the desert or falling on downtown Chicago, far from any field. I’d never really believed the stories that much. But I’d also never really considered the powers at work. A surface-level vortex—a dust-devil, say—could quite easily lift something as light as a corn husk up off a field somewhere and suck it high enough to get caught up in mid-to-upper-level currents. On a day like the one I describe, such vortices are common when a cool northern air mass aloft passes over a warmer one on the surface. With just a little more energy or instability, you’d have a thunderstorm. With a little more than that, you’d have tornado weather. Likewise, with the sun heating the ground, massive upwellings of air, thermals, could easily keep a corn husk aloft. Add a good following breeze, and the husk will ride from thermal-to-thermal for miles, and certainly across my field of vision as I lay on my back and observed.

Thermals have much more power than we typically realize, but none of us think anything amiss when a hawk circles one to gain altitude with nary a flap of her wings. She knows the boundaries of the rising air, and circles in order to use the solar energy instead of her own, banking precious calories for the kill. And while a hawk is relatively light for her size, she is still hundreds of times more massive than a dried husk of corn.

A few years later, I would experience this lift firsthand. My father’s airplane is a simple fabric and steel-tube affair, small and light enough to be hauled around by hand when it’s on the ground, and one choppy day while we were flying south of Wichita, I was startled to see the altimeter winding upwards while the engine speed held steady.

“We gained a couple of hundred feet there,” my dad called over the radio. “We’re at the edge of a big thermal coming up off that field over there,” he continued, “and the black of the plowed ground sucks up a lot of heat. The air over it heats up too, and when we fly over it–” my dad then pointed up with his thumb.

The husk went up too, as it crossed the treeline to the south of our property and hit the thermal over our neighbor’s plowed ground. The husk took at least a half an hour to track completely across my field of vision, maybe ten or twenty miles all told, on its way to plunk down in maybe Oxford or Winfield, or unobtrusively in the quiet of a pasture, prize fodder for some hungry cow.