Children of the Corn

We visited our first-ever corn maze over the weekend. It’s a very autumnal right of passage, along with pumpkin patches, steaming cider, bushels of exotic apples, cinnamon sticks, pumpkin doughnuts, fudge, caramels and those painted plywood caricatures with holes where the faces should be. Throw in a few farm animals and you have a fun family outing. All of this signals the onset of darker, cooler times, the cozy blanket of fall and the approach of seasonal dormancy, both human and vegetable.

At this time of year corn is no longer knee-high-by-the-Fourth-of-July. Not even close. It rises overhead, eight feet or so in height, dense as a bamboo room divider with leaves, tassels and cobs woven throughout the towering stalks in shades of green, yellow and brown so thick as to prevent views of adjacent rows. It is nature’s drywall. For the record, we visited Tanner’s Orchard in Speer, Illinois, about thirty minutes north of Peoria.

I don’t know how they grow or trim corn mazes into the complex shapes that form pictures when viewed from above. I suspect tractors use GPS guidance to get this done. The maze we entered was sculpted to form Albert Einstein’s portrait, wild white hair and all. But from ground level when we entered at the point where his shirt collar meets his sweater, we simply faced a green wall of impenetrable plants. We had the choice to go left via three avenues into a winding grid cumulatively over two miles long, or right into another that was perhaps half that distance.

Well, this is easy, we thought. We took the leftmost corridor and got lost within two minutes.

Fortunately the four of us remained together. Splitting up would have lengthened our stay, or forced us to start communicating with each other by cell-phone. The journey was startlingly confusing, twists and turns disorienting the traveler despite a brilliant overhead sun that should have provided a clue as to compass headings. Also overhead, a windmill slowly rotated in the distance. That was a fixed marker in closer proximity. But wait, as I turned to get my bearings, several other windmills appeared, scattering the compass points I had placed on my mental map.

The feeling of being surrounded by corn is not unlike being in an extremely dense forest. But a forest canopy rises overhead, whereas corn is consistently obscuring all the way to ground level. Kalampokiphobia is the fear of corn. Autophobia is the fear of being alone. Cleithrophobia is the fear of being trapped. Corn mazes trigger an unexpected soup of all three. The accompanying anxiety is not unlike claustrophobia, but with the vast blue sky overhead and rows opening before and behind you, less immediately crushing and harder to explain.

Comparing the small printed map we were given with the compass app on my phone was no help. I launched the program “MapMyWalk,” thinking it would scrawl a red tracing identical to the image of Einstein’s face. Had I started the app before entering the maze it may have proved useful. Instead, it just rendered a childish fingerpainting of a random, wandering set of adults.

At one point I consulted my weather app to find out when the sun would set. The thought of being lost in the corn after dark made my heart skip a beat. That’s when all the really scary stuff happens, as in the 2010 movie The Maze and I’m sure dozens of other horror films. Children of the Corn came to mind, and I don’t even remember that story. Would they come looking for us? Did they even keep a record of who entered and exited?

After about 45 minutes, we stumbled out of Einstein’s ear and into the adjacent field, a bit sweaty and definitely having had enough.

Dear Bucket List: please enter “Corn Maze” as a line item and immediately check it off. Thank you.

How Dry I Am

In the frosty North I suffered during long winters from skin on my legs and arms so dry it itched and flaked despite my best efforts to moisturize. Nosebleeds were common and usually poorly timed – as I was walking out the door, late for an appointment. Lips chapped and cracked, even after applying candlewax-like amounts of Chapstick, and my scalp shed snow in direct proportion to that falling outside.

And then summer provided temporary relief.

Here in Florida there is a different hydrating challenge. There is an intense heat and humidity during southern summers that ratchets up your body’s natural cooling system to little effect. You sweat profusely. A short walk with the dog leaves you glistening within about ten minutes, and suffering from “swamp ass” (yeah, gross but it happens) after twenty.

I’ve heard it said that if you want to better understand how it feels down here, take a long hot shower, then put on your clothes without drying yourself off. Multiple daily clothing changes are routine no matter how little you wear. Long pants or sleeves feel like the chemical hot packs you might carry to football games in a Green Bay winter.

Extended time outside requires sunscreen of course. The sun feels like molten copper, blanketing your head and shoulders with the broiling intensity of a Weber grill. And you’re the meat. But the other danger is rapid dehydration.

Our bodies are made up of approximately 60 percent water. Losing ten percent of that amount results in physical and mental deterioration. So you can survive fluid loss via perspiration much longer than the equivalent rate of blood loss.

A good sweat is something for which we enter a sauna or steam room. It’s therapeutic and invigorating when the duration is controllable and optional. But venture outside during August in Florida to do some yard work as I did recently, and it quickly becomes clear that your body’s attempt to cool you requires lower ambient humidity and a nice breeze. The amount of sweat developing on your forehead isn’t readily apparent until you touch it with a swipe of a finger. It then coalesces like the condensation on a cold bottle of beer, cascading and rolling in a gathering wave, surfing toward your eyebrows and spilling onto both sides of your eyeglasses.

Dehydration sneaks up on you, leaves you feeling depleted for the rest of the day, and can cause leg cramps overnight. How do you know you’re headed for a literal melt down? The obvious clue is your t-shirt. There aren’t just embarrassing little patches of darkness under your arms, around your neck and down your chest and back. Your shirt has changed color. Whatever it was before, the entire thing is a dark shade of that color now.

A bit later your hands begin to shrivel. They look like you’ve been soaking in a hot tub for an hour, all prune-like and resembling your ancient aunt Edna’s fingers, through no fault of her own, on a normal day. Pinch the skin on your arm between thumb and forefinger and you’ll notice that it molds like PlayDoh, not bouncing back to its original shape. And eventually, if you lean over to pick a weed, when you stand up, the world begins to spin. The dizziness is a result of low blood pressure. You probably didn’t notice, but your body quit producing urine more than an hour ago. Now you’re headed for heat stroke, and for that there is one treatment: go inside and drink water.

Carrying a large water bottle postpones the above effects, but even several bottles into this experience I’ve found that I have limits, and have staggered into the house in surrender more than once. Along with water, you’re shedding electrolytes that help your tiny sub-cellular mechanisms continue operating. You need to replenish those too. The makers of Gatorade profess that their product helps with this, but studies don’t support the claim. I’ve even heard that football players drink pickle juice, but I have no idea if that’s true.

During a recent visit, my son regularly went for one-hour runs. Even if I could run, I wouldn’t do that. He came through the house, leaving a mop-worthy trail of sweat behind him and then jumped directly into the pool, appearing somewhat frantic. My Haitian neighbor once asked me why I was working outside in the middle of the day. I had no good answer. Lack of experience?

So, why would anyone live in a Godforsaken Hellscape like this? The answer requires a certain amount of gloating about our endless summer, the more pleasant version between November and May, that we get to enjoy when northerners are staying hydrated by taking out the garbage, causing the water in their veins to form ice crystals that time-release moisture back into their organs. This assumes that they haven’t fallen on the ice and broken a hip or had a heart attack shoveling wet snow. Their skin is another story.

You might consider becoming a “Snowbird” if you have the means, enjoy paying two of every bill, and feel like starting up, shutting down and worrying about two properties. It is estimated that 80 percent of residents along the Southwest Gulf of Florida are transitory. But if you stay all year you get to enjoy lighter traffic, available seats in restaurants, and a perpetual thirst that had best be taken seriously. Pickle juice, anyone?

Time Flies

It was almost four years before I retired when I downloaded a countdown app and entered a date on my iPhone. The number was around 1400 days. Sometimes I would check the app daily. Other times a week would go by before taking a look. But the number dwindled at a painfully slow rate. It seemed as if it would be forever before I left my desk for the last time, looking down the hallway I’d traversed for 27 years. I imagined there would be tears in my eyes, the same ones that caused my eyes to brim with moisture when my first child got on the bus for kindergarten. Wait, absolutely not. Nothing like that! I would head off with the closest approximation of skipping that my petrifying body could muster and never look back. I would become young again, live an active lifestyle, lose weight and do all those things I’ve been putting off for lack of time.

1399
1398
1397

Well, imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that the app is still running on my phone. At some point I reset the text it displays to reflect the date we moved to Florida, our retirement destination. And here it is:

I did not fear retirement, I longed for it. But even while ticking off days to that eventual goal, I had a nagging feeling that I was also counting down the days of my life. What if I didn’t make it? What if something horrible, counting down on some unanticipated app loomed menacingly between now and then? What if my wife developed an aneurysm and needed brain surgery at day 1030 (she did, and she’s fine). And ultimately, whatever the days would bring, they were days that I only got to live once. And here I am with 2237 days less than I had way back when I started counting (1400 plus 837).

We all have a timer relentlessly ticking off the days we have left on Earth. It’s best to make the most of them. Live each day without regard for the number of days until Christmas, the end of school or a nice vacation. There’s no guarantee that waking up today is repeatable tomorrow. Counting them is just, well, a waste of time.