Enter the Labyrinth

More than one photograph of the maze interior would frankly be unnecessary.

I wasn't really sure what to expect when we planned to go out to the Davis Mega Maze this weekend. Ever since I was very young I've loved the idea of mazes, and there was one in a park that we used to go to occasionally when I was in primary school, on the rare occasions that we were there during the fifteen minutes a year that it was actually open - but that's the only one that I had ever actually been inside, and while it wasn't trivial to find the way to the centre, it was reasonably small. This one is cut into an entire field of corn (missing the golden opportunity, therefore, to call it a maize-maze) that's mowed down and replaced in a new design every year, and boasts more than three miles of passageways.

I took along a notepad and a pencil, as a bit of a joke at first, but once we had been in there for about five minutes, I felt like we would be absolutely dead without them. Even if you've seen an aerial view of the maze, once you're in among the eight foot tall plants it becomes a collection of twisty little passages that are all alike, and it's near-impossible to navigate without any idea of where you are or how close to the edge you might be. Even with the opportunity to scribble down each branching path as we walked along them, cartographing a maze is extremely difficult when it's not on a 90 degree grid, and my completed collection of drawings (which spans eight pages of a notepad) are full of notes saying that this path leads to point B on page 2, or that this bridge is actually the same one as on page 1 and to refer to that page instead from this point forward.

The situation wasn't helped when we were on one of the bridges above the maze (which aren't as helpful as you might think, because more than about five metres away the definition of passages just becomes corn in all directions), and we heard an announcement saying that they were going to change the maze. At that moment, it suddenly started feeling like being in a huge Rubik's Cube - throughout the maze, marked by Xs on my map, are barriers with No Entry signs on them, which can be moved about to change the configuration of the maze day by day. They're only a couple of feet high, but when inside and you're in the mindset of playing the game, it's strange how you get a game-character-like instinct not to go over or otherwise around these insurmountable waist high fences. Fortunately, when we found ourselves back at a part of the maze we recognized, it seemed that none of the ones that I had already written down had been moved, so my landmarks had been left intact. Otherwise we might still be in there.

Even in a corn field - F.O.E.!

As you can tell, we did eventually make it back alive. Our time, as recorded by electronic stamps at the entrance and exit - two hours and six minutes of walking around in there, mostly going around in a very wide circle a couple of times and trying different new passageways until we had to ask one of the attendants for a hint on how to get out. Given another hour, I probably could have continued mapping and made it out entirely unaided, but it was getting well past lunchtime and nobody else felt like going out and then back in to make a second expedition that day. But we'll definitely be going back there with my parents in a couple of weeks' time, when it will have been reconfigured once again - perhaps I can come up with a better way of recording forks in an unknown passageway by then...