The two sisters looked relieved, if a bit pink in the face, as they staggered to the top of the wooden observation deck.
Eleven acres of cornstalks surrounded Kristen and Jennifer Hewer of Stevensville, and as the grade-schoolers took a look around, the dense crop felt as ominous as the seas around a desert isle.
"If we didn't have a map," said 9-year-old Jennifer, her eyes wide, "this would be very freaky."
To many, corn is something you eat off a fresh cob at summer picnics. But to the growing hordes who wend their way through corn mazes in Anne Arundel and other counties in Maryland this time of year, it's a bumper crop of delightful dread - and an increasingly popular means of celebrating the end of summer and the looming fall.
Even Jennifer and Kristen, 11, weren't sure how they'd gotten to the bridge at the center of the maze at Maryland Sunrise Farm in Gambrills, one of the biggest and most elaborate of the several now open for business in Anne Arundel.
It wasn't a natural sense of direction.
"You follow your path and think you know where you're going, and then you hit a wall, and you panic, and you have to go back and retrace all your steps," said Jennifer, a wrinkled map in her hand as she, Kristen and their father, Chris, took a break atop the bridge, the lone site where visitors can orient themselves above the 11-foot-tall stalks. "Even if you follow the map, you can be fooled. It's scary!"
From Daedalus to the Duke
What's the appeal of getting lost in the midst of shrubberies, hedges or walls? File it away, perhaps, with our love of horror films or scary rides at an amusement park.
We do know human-scale mazes have been with us for eons.
Greek myth tells of Daedalus, a craftsman who built the Labyrinth at Knossos on Crete to contain the half-man, half-bull monster, the Minotaur - and made it so difficult that he barely escaped it himself. (The archaeological record shows such a structure did exist in about 2000 B.C., though it was probably used for ceremonial dancing.)
Topiaries, or hedge mazes, appeared on the grounds of the wealthiest castles in Belgium in the 13th century, probably as amusement for royal families, and became popular across Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. William III created a hedge maze at Hampton Court Royal Palace in 1690 that still exists. Its shrubberies, like the corn in today's mazes, stood higher than most visitors.
