Ticket to cornfusion

By ARLINE and SAM BLEECKER

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 30, 2000

Here's one way to find youself in high corn - negotiate a maze cut through maize. Yes, it's corny, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

Over a loudspeaker, perched somewhere inconspicuously above a four-acre corn field, Renee Moyer was informing the Punch Buggies, a father-and-son team, that they weren't quite as smart as the average lab mouse.

"Corn-gratulations to Punch Buggies for finding our back bridge . . . for the fourth time," Renee's disembodied voice teased the duo.

Renee is "cornmander-in-chief" of Howell Living History Farm's corn maze, in Titusville, N.J., where you plunk down $6 for the privilege of getting lost for what you hope is just a few hours.

On this sunny Saturday afternoon, a few hundred day-trippers -- including us -- challenged the maze, two miles of twisting, turning, dead-ended trails that, by day's end, seemed more like 200. And getting lost was, well, kind of the whole point.

The Titusville maze, cut into a field of corn, is a gigantic depiction of Washington crossing the Delaware, after that famous 1851 painting by Emanuel Leutze. (It's just as well that Washington didn't take the same route we did through this historic New Jersey farmland.)

We arrived at about 1 p.m. and trekked a dirt path to the admission tent, where a sign read "Buy Your Ticket to Get Lost."

Cute.

The ingredients for the day were simple: lots of drinking water, a flag of many colors, two watchtowers from where lookouts monitor participants' progress (or lack thereof), a stubby pencil and a blank map.

A blank map? "Isn't that an oxymoron?" I asked Russ, the volunteer who gave us our marching orders.

Russ explained the deal: Ten mailboxes are scattered strategically, and in no particular order, within the four-acre maze. Each mailbox holds one piece of the puzzle. Paste all 10 pieces onto the appropriate blank space on your map (there's even cellophane tape in the boxes) and you've done the maze.

Okay, sounds easy.

"Your choices (of pathways) will determine how long you remain in the maze," Russ noted with impish understatement. The average time is about 45 minutes, and "most everyone" completes the maze. Which begged the question: Where are the ones who didn't?

Before heading into the corn maze, each team selects a brightly colored flag, to be held high. Ours was half passion-purple, half cherry-red, fluttering on a long white pole as flexible as a fishing rod.

And, finally, each "team" registers a nickname for the day, yielding such oddities as "Eat More Chicken" and "Kernel Sanders." The title for day's best name was no contest: "Radioactive Cow Udders." Don't even ask.

These oddball monikers would sound especially weird when Renee refers to them over the loudspeaker. We chose "Children of the Corn," and our circuit began. We were officially clocked out at 1:34 p.m.

A small group ahead of us headed right. We went left.

First stop: dead end.

Already, we wished we'd brought a compass.

Little groups moved through the maze independently -- going hither and yon, flags bobbing up above the corn.

Aw, shucks. . . We zigged again when we should have zagged.

It wasn't long before we were willing to ditch Washington's quest for independence and just navigate out of there.

Though the cornstalks were only 5 feet tall, due to drought, you can't navigate the maze by sight. You might glimpse, say, mailbox No. 7 from here, but getting there is the problem. Progress is more by happenstance. When we hit upon our first mailbox and pasted the piece onto our map, we tried to figure out where we were and where we could go from there. But after an hour, with only three mailboxes under our belt, we felt pretty stupid.

We're not quite sure when it all turned from a carefree outing into something where grit and determination dominated. Various groups reconnoitered to commiserate; at some point, beating the maze became a matter of honor.

In the eagerness of one of us (think male ego) to prove the map incorrect, we twice went in a circle . . . we think. And we got so excited at finding mailbox No. 6 that we accidentally left our flag at the spot. Now, how the heck do we find that mailbox again?

We had not a clue if we were retreading the same path -- or, if so, how many times.

Even as our map finally began to take shape, we still were clueless in the corn, with plenty of time to mull about mazes. The ancient Greeks and Romans called these intricate systems "labyrinths" and connected them to the myth of the Minotaur. We doubt the ancients ever considered corn mazes, but ours was the brainchild of Don Frantz, a former Broadway producer for Disney.

Frantz created his first farm maze in 1991 as a kind of back-40 theatrical, turning a working cornfield into something that can be enjoyed as a game, an amusement or just as a visit with nature.

The clever folks who actually carve the mazes first plant the entire field. When growth is about 4 weeks old, two dozen or so people with hoes, stakes and ribbons spend four days inscribing the maze into the cornfield.

By our sixth mailbox, our enthusiasm for the challenge rekindled. For some, though, this was like Hansel and Gretel -- as written by Franz Kafka.

"Where the hell is mailbox No. 9?" we heard some guy growl.

And when the Punch Buggies team passed us for the nth time, we noticed they needed only one more piece to complete their map. "Yeah, but we've been looking for it for an hour!" one of them complained.

"Daddy, why do we keep going back and forth?" whined a girl of about 9.

"Hush up, honey," the father said, not lifting his eyes from his map.

Hesitate and you could be a goner. Teammates get swallowed up in a second, as they disappeared into the labyrinth. Lots of disembodied voices shouted "Where are you?" But the answer -- "I'm here!" -- usually was of no help at all.

After a frustrating effort to find mailbox No. 8, one woman muttered to her partner, through gritted teeth: "We should've escaped when we were at No. 10."

Finally, we found our last mailbox. Then came the really tough part: How to get out of here.

That nettlesome back bridge on the far end of the maze, somewhere around Gen. Washington's foot, is also aptly called the Mystery Bridge. It held a major key to the puzzle and most of us repeated forays over it to find our way out.

And we did -- in 2 hours 20 minutes, total.

-- Sam and Arline Bleecker are freelance writers living in New Jersey.

If you go

Nine Amazing Maize Mazes dot the U.S. map, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, New York, California, Virginia and, naturally, Iowa.

The maze closest to the Tampa Bay area is 15 miles north of Charlotte, N.C., the Rural Hill Farm, at 4431 Neck Road, Huntersville, N.C. This is close to U.S. 115, east of I-77.

You can stalk corn mazes on weekends from early summer through late October. Moonlight mazes also are offered.

Admission: $6 for adults, $4.50 children ages 4-12.

For more information: The Titusville, N.J., maze is about two miles south of Lambertville; call (609) 397-2555. The Web site is http://www.AmericanMaze.com

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