Spies thinks the mazes are growing in popularity because they give families a reason to enjoy themselves far away from today's noisier forms of entertainment.
"It's different - in a good way," he says.
The Sunrise maze has drawn more people each year, including last year's 8,000 customers, says events coordinator Oksana Bocharova. This year's opening weekend drew 180 more than last year's, so if the weather is good, "it should be our best year," she says.
The farm wouldn't share figures, but Spies said the maze earns more money per acre than the farm's crops do, and Bocharova called the proceeds "essential" to the farm's financial health.
The Hewers are among 600 or so who will ply the maze today - a healthy number given that the maze, now in its fourth year, just opened for the season Sept. 12.
Attendance tends to peak in mid-October. Last year, as many as 1,800 visitors a day went during that period. Like most of the state's 50 or so other corn mazes, most of them much smaller, Sunrise's is open weekends through Nov. 1.
"Every year, word has spread a little more, and more people come," says Bocharova's son, Nikita Bocharov (the family is Russian, and Oksana's surname, unlike her son's, bears an "a" at the end to denote gender), who wears the yellow T-shirt of a "corn cop," a guide/security guard.
It's not that complicated getting through, Nikita says, though he has an unfair edge: He has been working as a corn cop for years.
His workplace is the bridge, a vantage point from which he can spot visitors who might be waving distress flags. Today he had to help a child who thought he was lost. He could see the boy was only a row away from his family and quickly straightened things out.
"Once in a while, I do have to rescue somebody," he says. "Once somebody tried to cut through to another path. He got stuck in a dense thicket of corn. He was panicked."
The Hewers make out better. Maybe it's because they used to visit another, smaller maze on the Eastern Shore, or because their dad, Chris, was once a helicopter navigator for the National Guard.
But they circumnavigate the design, including the baffling tractor wheel and a complicated cow's head, in about an hour.
The secret, Chris says, is focus.
At first, they couldn't seem to get where they wanted to go, he says, but once they got systematic and paid attention, they began detecting patterns.
"We've had fun with this," he says. "There is some order in the madness."
