Sunday, October 5, 2008

Vermont Corn Maze

Yesterday I went to what is known as the Vermont Corn Maze. The name already explains much of what the place is, that is, a maze inside a field of corn. Have you ever been inside a field of corn? Starting from the summer the corn is so high that it is not much different from a wall. But what is the maze? I had no idea until I actually got inside there.
Together in a group of seven people I went to this touristic location north in Vermont. Upon arrival I entered this big field of corn with the simple belief of how hard could it be to get through a a big field of corn? It is going to be very easy even if the designer was trying to make it as hard as possible. It turned out that I was right only about one of the previous statements. You can imagine which one.
The main problem is that the simple two-dimensional structure was complicated by a couple of bridges going on top of multiple corn paths and after wondering around for a while you could actually get the feeling that no matter how hard you tried you were not going to easily succeed at going through the paths going under the bridge. And this really kept building up your frustration.
While you are inside a corn field everything looks the same. Even on top of the bridges, from where you can see the whole field, you cannot see where the paths go and about twenty meters from you every starts looking like a gigantic field of corn. The sun can help you orientate but it is still very hard to measure how far you went in one direction. I confess that after a while I gave up trying to outsmart the designer and I started to turn left at every fork. It took a long time and my brain gave up trying to build up a map but it eventually worked. I could feel it when I finally ended up under the bridge I tried to go under for so long.
When I finally came out, more than two hours after I entered, the sun was almost sunsetting. I felt defeated and when I looked at the aerial photographs I actually could feel that the designer really managed to outsmart me and all of my friends. It was a good feeling.
After sunset and a long dinner with my group, I returned to the corn field for an adventure night in the corn. A different corn field was set up for groups of people to go through at night while props dressed with horror faces would try to scare you. It was actually not so scary after all but it was so dark that you could not see the props jumping out of the crops. The design was impressive. Imagine yourself going through a narrow path inside a corn field with red candle lights scattered around and corpse like some of which were faked and some of which were real people. Moreover, you could also feel the constant screaming of people in front of you and behind you, mainly girls who seem more easily impressed. And finally the sky on top of the field was full of stars and so clear that you could see the whole milky way.
It might have not been exactly like you could imagine an horror movie but it is probably the as good as you can get experience possible. I will never look at a corn field the same way. Did you know, by the way, that corn was imported to Europe from the Americas? Yes, you probably did. But did you know that corn is that big because it was domesticated by farmers in the Mesoamerica trying to reuse only the plants yielding the most? If not, then check on the internet to see what a wild type corn looks like. If this still doesn't make you feel the magic of corn then go to the Vermont corn maze. Farmers have not run out of ideas on how to play with corn.