First Corn
Laughter and butter dripping from chins as Vermont EMTs/Paramedics create an impromptu festival around the first sweet corn of the season.
Read by Author / Listen along : https://trowbridgedispatch.iamaiken.com/p/first-corn-audio
Story told by Al
My bruddahs at the Leeds Vermont ambulance station celebrate First Corn. Infectious enthusiasm. The ersatz holy-day emerges from the back of A-2 where that crew pencil-whips the daily checklist.
“I’m gwanna eat so much corn, I’ll shit kernels ’til Thursday.”
From his partner, “The butter and salt will drip down my chin.”
With my checklist for A-1 in my hand I sing an old song my mother taught me:
He said:
A couple of you will grease my chin
before I leave this town-o, town-o, town-o,
a couple of you will grease my chin
before I leave this town-o.
Of course, the song is about a fox stealing a goose from a farmer. Greasy chins are greasy chins.
Our station is on Route 5. Who knows how old Route 5 is or what it was originally called. It follows the Connecticut River’s Vermont banks. In this low-lying land between the Green Mountains and the White Mountains, Route 5 hides some of the best farmland in New England.
In the springtime, we watch the apple blossoms on the hills to the west knowing that 121 days later, we’ll eat apples. We see the raspberries blossom in late spring.
Holiday, real or fake doesn’t matter. People dial 9-1-1 and tend to expect an ambulance to show.
“Whaaa-m-bulance,” says this crew emphasizing the whine.
Not every caller is a whiner, or a frequent flyer. Even some frequent flyers become friends-of-a-sort. We start the same old arguments the same old way using the same old words.
“Fresh Picked Corn ¢50”
We had all seen the hand-lettered sign as we drove to our shift.
No doubt Brighid would have something to say about the punctuation there on that sign with the cents symbol before the numbers five-zero, instead of after as per tradition. She still buzzes about the lettering on the town barn. The Town Boys mounted an old snow plough blade at the opening. They gave it a paint job and lettered the address with a hand-held paint brush.
“1123 Post .Rd”, with the dot before the abbreviation “R-D.”
I’d swear she’s the only one to complain. Most of us would never have noticed. She did.
We’ve watched the corn grow in swaths between Vermont Route 5 and the Connecticut River all summer. Some till their fields, some don’t. Some disk the fields. Each to his own. In June, lil nibbins of green leaves pop from the soil.
With each shift, the crops change. Toe high, ankle high, knee high.
I know that A-1 has Boss-dar, the boss version of radar, with trackers in the rigs. I’d also swear that he, the boss, sits at his desk watching us.
“You spent 20 minutes at that store.”
“You drove at 78 miles per hour on the interstate.”
“How come you crossed into New Hampshire?”
Whaa-whaa-whaa. Even bosses whine about whaa-m-bulances.
We all saw the “Fresh Picked Corn” sign on Route 5.
He said:
A couple of you will grease my chin
before I leave this town-o, town-o, town-o,
a couple of you will grease my chin
before I leave this town-o.
Our station is a piece of shit, a badly built barn on a concrete slab. The massive belches of diesel fumes fill the day room with our television and kitchen. Black soot smears on the fridge door. And don’t leave food on that table. You get used to the summer flies. But the buck-toothed marks of mice is annoying as hell, and so are the holes they leave in bags of potato or corn chips. Who knew that mice could read?
Even with da boss staring through his computer monitor at his ambulances moving on his maps on his terrain, we’ll find a way. It is a Holy Day, given it is the first day of harvest.
Brie is as funny as shit. She’s breezy cool. There’s this flower-child barely hidden inside. Then you see that no-fucks-given attitude. Not attitude, life. She’s all sandals and skirts. Then she’s got blood up to her elbows. I actually witnessed her do something with a slotted spoon, a toilet, and well, I’ll stop there. She tried. The docs were impressed with her effort of trying to do whatever. She knew the importance. So did the docs. Then, once at a call she came out of the woods after a search-and-rescue. While we all faffed around the patient/lost-guy at the back of the rig, she went to the front bumper and squatted. Peed right on the paved road. She’ll show up to scenes in her big truck and pull EMT pants up under her skirt right there. From hippy-chick to warrior in a second.
Brie texted us the other day “Happy Lúnasa.” As if?!? Like WTF hippy-chick, am I supposed to look that up?
In her picture she held a stainless-steel bowl of blackberries. “Blackberries are on. Come pick.”
I also should have gone over to her place to pick blueberries when she texted about blueberries. They were in season. It was a hot day, and I felt hot, and standing in the hot sun to pick blueberries seemed like actual work.
That’s the Vermont summer here. Peas, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, corn, then apples. After apples, it is hunting season, and we all fill our freezers with food.
After her text, I bought some grocery-store blackberries. Huge. Firm, and plump. They cost about a million dollars for a handful. No flavor. No zing. With a silent acknowledgement of the A-1 map-location showing us sitting on a roadside, I did stop and pick blackberries at the first chance when I saw them growing in a hedge. Da boss probably wondered, what is A1 doing? What? Not like I am going to tell him I am berry pickin’. That’s a rap I’ll never shake.
Our blackberries are so good. Little seeds kinda get stuck in the teeth, but not as bad as raspberries. Pick and eat. I fill two blue nitrile gloves with berries. Our gloves are the cleanest thing in our ambulance. Everything else is disgusting. We’ve got either MRSA or some other nasty living on every plastic surface and diesel yuck everywhere else. Ten-year-old plastic gets sticky. And who knows how well crews clean the bodily fluids from the corners.
At another stop alongside the road, a stop that the boss will notice with a bit of impatience at his desk, I buy eight ears of fresh-picked corn at fifty-cents per. We then pull into another farm that raises critters. Y’know nobody really likes seeing an ambulance pull in their driveway, unless of course they called 9-1-1.
My partner parks near a three-sided lean-to. I hop out to study their three freezers. I select one pound of ground beef. I overpay the honesty-box. The farmer comes with a bit of a shuffling run from her goat pen.
“All good ma’am, we’re just buyin’ some beef.”
With gloves full of berries, local corn, and now local beef harvested from the side of the road, I am the modern hunter-gatherer. The feast-giver of old.
At four in the afternoon, the crews of A-1 and A-2 light the Webber. One of the guys does like the Calvin-sticker you’d see on the back of a Chevy pickup, but instead of directing the stream at a Ford, he squirts lighter fluid on the coals. I think all four of us are also firefighters in our hometowns. But, boys are boys, as they say. A-2 bought their beef from a small store, so it is also wrapped in white butcher’s paper. They also bought one pound of meat.
Our station covers 250 square miles of hilly terrain in Vermont and New Hampshire. But instead of watching yet another Law and Order episode, we create a party to celebrate First Corn. I rinse a sticky plastic salad bowl for the berries that then I spill from my medical gloves. I jazz our beef with a bit of garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne powder, salt, and pepper. I put the unshucked corn in the almost clean sink and sprinkle salt from a cardboard container that pictures a little girl holding an umbrella.
A-2 had bought a pound of new butter. Who knows how old the shit is in our station fridge or how many mice gave it a lick when it sat on the counter. A‑2 also bought eight ears of corn, enough for both crews, just like we did in A‑1.
The first comment of the morning echoes: “I’m gwanna eat so much corn, I’m gonna shit kernels ’til Thursday.”
They had shucked their corn. They decide to grill it directly on the grate. That is our appetizer. Two a piece, each with grill marks. They did up their burgers. When A‑2 released the grill, I lay on another eight ears of corn and our two burgers. I grill our corn inside the salted-wet husks. Yeah, a half-pound burger for me and my partner. And another two ears of corn.
We make fun of each other for our corn-eating skills. The spinners eat around the ear. Liners who eat their corn in straight neat lines. Regardless of technique, both types of eaters fill their mouths completely with warm sweet corn. Eat down the length of the ear or eat around in a circle. You get it all in, then chew.
I am a liner. I make lines. It is also how I butter my corn. I had unwrapped my stick of butter then sawed my corn back-and-forth over the full length of the butter. Salt. I had kernels at the corners of my mouth and dripping down my uniform shirt, plus distinctive dark spots of butter and burger grease.
Beer would make it better. Beer makes a lot of things better. Someone is about to dial 9-1-1 somewhere. And we can’t have beer. And da boss would likely prefer we don’t haul patients with grease-stained uniforms and corn kernals falling from the collar of our shirts. I don’t care. It was a Holy Day. It’s First Corn Day in Vermont.
And a couple of you greased my chin, yes you did. For that, I offer thanks. My belly thanks you. I thank you.
About Trowbridge Dispatch
Trowbridge Dispatch is a set of short works that take place with the characters, places, and settings established in the novel The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County, the first in the Trowbridge Vermont series, published by Flare Books, an imprint of Catalyst Press. These short stories are part of that series and will be published in the months between the novels. For each written work, the readers ought to be able to find or purchase the audio version. Like the novels, the short stories are read by the author I.M. Aiken.
Stolen Mountain, a novel that takes place in the same town with many of the same people will be available in September of 2026.
If you like this story, please go buy a book.