Corny New Year Musings

A new year.  A perfect time to reflect on…. Why you drank so much last night after midnight and why you are too tired to think coherently today.  The last thing I remember from last night was the thought that Congress would probably cancel the stimulus check and just send out t-shirts that said, “I Survived 2020”.

No, this is not yet the day for tackling anything new.  I’ve been thinking about the past for most of the day.  And my email today indicates that many of my friends are thinking about the past, too.   A childhood friend of mine, just posted on Facebook about the time his wife ate a dozen ears of corn at a party and suffered all the next day.

About thirty years ago, I was in Tegucigalpa doing historical research on a revolution that had taken place about eighty years earlier—one of those nameless little revolutions that swept through Central America about as regularly as summer rains.  This revolution had profound consequences—until a counter-revolution fourteen months later succeeded in returning everything to the antebellum status quo.  

Having exhausted all the sources about the revolution available in the United States, I had flown to Honduras to pick through the archives there.  I can give you a valuable tip about the value of archives in a poor country—there isn’t much.  When a country runs out of money, libraries and archives are the first agencies to shutter their doors.

Arriving in Tegucigalpa, I had a reservation at the nicest hotel in the city, but when I arrived, I discovered the hotel was also the town casino and there was a sign that said locals weren’t allowed:  the hotel and casino were only for tourists.  (And members of the Honduran military—as some animals are more equal than others.)

I found an alternate hotel.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly as nice: there was no casino, the electrical power went off so frequently that the desk clerk gave me a candle and matches when I checked in, and the water ran only two hours a day, early in the morning.  Bigger hotels had water tanks on the roof that allowed twenty-four-hour usage, but mine didn’t have that luxury.

When the town water supply was turned on every morning at 5:00, the air hissing out of the pipes and faucets all over town made an eerie moaning sound that was responsible for a very high local birth rate. (Five in the morning being too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep).

The town was short of water because it wasn’t raining, even though it was summer:   I spent weeks in Honduras during the rainy season, and it never rained once.  It appears that if you cut down most of the rainforest, you lose both the rain and the forest.  In the years since I was there, the water is now turned on only once a week.  I wonder how this has affected the birth rate.

Tegucigalpa is actually two cities divided by a river, the Choluteca River, which crosses the city from south to north, physically separating Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela.  There is a series of bridges that crosses the river, and since there is no rain, the river is about as dry as Lubbock on Sunday night.

Besides Catholicism, the other two major religions were lottery tickets and soccer, and of the three, it is arguably true that the latter two had the most adherents.  Honduras is so lottery crazy that for a while, when Louisiana outlawed lotteries, instead of shutting down, the state lottery just moved to Honduras and continued to sell tickets.  

Lotteries are not much fun to watch, so one Sunday when the libraries and government offices were all closed, I went down to one of the bridges across the Choluteca and watched a spirited soccer match.  Since the riverbeds below the bridges were not otherwise engaged, soccer fields had been bulldozed in the dry ground between the bridges.  Spectators were gathered along the river and up on each of the bridges at the ends of the field.  

I would normally rank my interest in a soccer game slightly below my curiosity about Nigerian waste treatment plants, but I was encouraged by an enthusiastic crowd of spectators, who cheered and whistled and screamed periodically.  I was even more encouraged by the incredible number of street vendors selling exotic food to spectators.  

Street vendors selling exotic food are a strict travel no-no—a wise rule I have violated with gusto on multiple continents.  I would rather eat street tacos from a truck than dine in a Michelin rated restaurant.  Some of the best meals in my life were from curbside carts in Hong Kong, at canal-side stands in England, and from street peddlers throughout Central America.  Yes, I have paid a small price for these indiscretions a few times—I remember longing for death in an airport restroom in Hong Kong after eating coffee flavored peanuts—but that is a small price to pay for great food.  The old Takee-Outee Chinese food stands in the French Quarter that had ginger curry chicken kabobs…

In any case, on that bridge in Tegucigalpa, I ignored all the peddlers selling various forms of bananas as in the previous week, I had eaten them prepared just about every way possible.  It was damn near impossible to get a meal without them.  But, there was this guy roasting fresh ears of corn that caught my eye.

This was fresh sweet corn that was being roasted over a charcoal fire in a six-gallon galvanized trash can right there on the sidewalk.  The ears were cooked inside the shuck, then peeled and roasted over the charcoal fire until the kernels were just starting to blacken, then doused liberally with fresh lime juice and dusted with chili powder and salt.  Wrapped in a paper towel, a fresh hot ear could be purchased for less than a quarter.

I was definitely this vendor’s best customer, because I slowed down eating that corn only long enough to drink from the bottle of real cane sugar Coca-Cola I had purchased.  I have no idea how many ears I ate in a row, but I know that I only stopped eating when he ran out of corn.  

The next day, Monday, I spent the morning working in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras library, hurrying back to the bridge for lunch.  Unfortunately, the street vendors were nowhere to be found.  Over the course of the next week, I went to the town market, a couple of basketball games, and a fiesta, but never found anyone else selling fresh roasted corn.  

Before the next soccer game was held, I had to ride the only remaining railroad left in the country to the Chiquita Brands banana plantation to finish my research.  I can assure you that when you visit one of the largest banana plantations on the planet—one so large it is guarded by the Honduran Army, while there is an overabundance of yellow food—none of it is corn.

I’m still looking for that roasted corn.  If any of you run across someone roasting fresh ears over a galvanized trash can—don’t hesitate to let me know.  And Ruthie, tell Kent to stop teasing you about your love of corn.  (We corn aficionados stick together!)