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.