I have never appreciated a corn maze.
Growing up in Connecticut, I witnessed many examples of extravagant wealth. Big houses. Gluten free without celicas. Water imported from the exotic island of Fiji. And yet nothing quite said I have too much money like voluntarily paying to have your entire family dawdle in what other parts of the country just called agriculture. Appreciating labyrinths of corn, like so many in my neighborhood, was more a puzzle to me than trying to escape one. And it is beside the point that the one redeeming quality of corn mazes – time spent outside –was squandered when the activity squeezed itself inside, into what we now call Escape Rooms. When I explain this autumn tradition to my Italian hosts, their incertitude is comforting, “wait, no capito. Why do you pay for this?”
Patience for mazes was no greater in 2004, when I was eight. A beautiful autumn day. Leaves painted every frame the car window shaped while on our way to a family farm thirty minutes down the road in a town called Suffield. A crisp breeze infused with the smell of the orchard welcomed you as you stepped out of the car. Apple flavored everything. The smell of hay when horses weren’t around. That was the magic of the hayride. The flannels. The freshness of the air. Autumn in New England was a good thing – until you’ve had your fun, and suddenly everyone wanted to pretend they were in 1984’s Children of the Corn.
My family, giving me too much credit, neglected to explain the objective of a maze. I figured, reasonably I’d still argue, that the idea of the maze was not to escape but to hide. In other words, to get dangerously lost. There is no quicker way to get stuck in a maze than to look for a good hiding spot. It was only by some grace of the agricultural gods that someone found me just before I defecated.
Now when I denigrate corn mazes, my mother reminds me it was for the caramel candied apples we went for: the autumnal novelty. I see her point, but it’s not like wandering aimlessly in overgrown shrubs complimented the saccharine and sourness of the candied apple. If anything, it made it a consolation for needing to be rescued. When I think back on that day, I see it in aerial view and I laugh. From this view I can see my family all at once, my brother eager to make record time, my parents exhausted walking behind him just trying to provide a normal childhood, and me hiding, squatting, both scared and impressed with the spot I found myself in. “They’re fun if you have the right attitude,” my mom says now.
It was her voice I heard as I threaded the narrow alleyways and canals of Venice. It was during these moments, both in Venice and Suffield, where you’d be on a narrow path, look right and left, dumbfounded you couldn’t even tell which which way you came from, and rely on your attitude to make light of your own folly. But with Google Maps, the rock climbing harness of contemporary life, we tread only for a moment, open our phones, and go on our merry way. Attitude gives way to pragmatic direction following.
Once my friend, who was both diligent and well acclimated to the winding ways of Venice, left my brother and me, and our phones inevitably died, we finally had to look to our attitudes to help enjoy independent guiding. At the beginning, spirits would prove easy to keep high when navigating the beautiful archipelago, no matter how lost we were. In Venice, being misguided is hardly unfortunate, as it is enchanting, like you’ve entered an all too real fairytale. The need to stay on course was easy to compromise when, if you took a wrong turn, you’d run into a piazza filled with people in 15th century costumes dancing along the canal. That’s the magic of Venice. It can turn the most sensible, matter-of-fact kind of person into a romantic, even if only for the duration of their time there. Venice is a miracle for the spirit in this way. To build a city where it is impossible to build a city – well that madness alone deserves to uplift any soul, no matter how off track.
But despite its mystical aura, there are only so many wrong turns you take before you begin to hate the world. We were back in Suffield again. Dead phones were no longer a charming relic of the past, but a source of self-loathing rooted in lack of foresight. Two days earlier we had been cruising on a speedboat wearing capes and gowns and masks, on our way to a Masquerade Ball, and now, we were suffocated between bricks that seemed to crepitate inwards by the second. One moment you’re an epicurean nautical getaway on the Adriatic or you’re sinking your teeth into a decadent candied apple, and then in the next, you’re lost and those pleasures feel so far like a part of someone else’s past. This also was not to mention we had had enough of each other, my brother and me. We already passed that gelato shop, he said at one point. No we didn’t, that was a different one because this one serves coffee mocha and that other gelato shop was too classy to serve such a redundant flavor, I snapped back. My mother, who is no better a navigator herself, would have totally ignored her sage remarks on attitude had she been there. She’d have fired a flare gun in such a situation.
The Venetian sun set above us and we scurried every which way like rats in a maze. I don’t know how much time passed before we found a familiar landmark and set back on course. Probably 40 minutes. Writers have a tendency for melodrama but so does life.
When I return to the States in two months, there will be people who inevitably ask, with a sense of irony, abroad totally changed you, right? I’ll likely list off a few things they expect like things I learned: some recipes or linguistic commonalities and there will be nothing wrong with those answers. But for those with whom I feel close enough to make sense of the world, I’ll bring up mazes and stories of getting lost. Because it is getting lost that inevitably changes you and you’re more vulnerable to lose your way when you set out far from home. When I think back on the mazes of my past, like hiding in Suffield, navigational errors one winter in Brussels, or when someone I knew so well and saw every day left my life, or being unable to wind through the streets of Venice correctly, I can see my own evolution. In those moments we shed a piece of ourselves. We desert the part of us that insists on being precisely who we thought we needed to be. When you’re lost in a maze you can be anyone. If your body isn’t accountable to knowable coordinates, why should your temperament? My mother is right about attitude when you go into a corn maze, you just need to know what question to ask: are you going to be okay with letting a part of yourself go when you set out to be lost? A good navigator gets from point A to B, but a good traveler – they accept the differences between the distance.
I don’t think I’ll go back to a corn maze anytime soon, nor will I go to an escape room, I seem to be finding those naturally as it is. But I’ll admit, I can’t help but smirk and shake my head in dissaproval when I picture what corn mazes must look like today. Families huddled around a smartphone, simply following the next audible instruction, finishing in minutes. I never wanted to be lost in a maze in the first place, but if you’re gonna pay the entry fee you might as well get your money’s worth.
Just an ordinary picture of a Venetian man or woman.
JonnyPoppins 