Getting Lost

I don't know how often I've been lost in my life. Once, when I was four or five, I was at a school program with my family and, when the play or whatever was over, I became entranced with the pumpkins on the stage. After staring at them for awhile, I looked around and couldn't find my family in the crowd. They must have gone out to the truck, I assumed. So I left the auditorium and went to find them in the parking lot. Nope. I remember crying and then mashing my face into Mom's shoulder when I tracked her down back inside. (Hmm, come to think of it I guess I knew where I was the whole time.)

On road trips, maps haven't always been friendly. I've stopped with friends and family to ask for directions, but we never stayed truly lost. Then there was that night I was following my best friend through Portland to her mom's house and I made a wrong turn, thinking I was still behind her car. Downtown Portland at night with no clue isn't so fun. Fortunately with a little God-help-me and the fact that I had been to my destination many times before (with someone else driving the car), I was able to get back on the right path.

A few Sundays ago, Luke and I participated in fall's favorite way to get lost: we wandered through a corn maze. Since I couldn't convince Luke to go through the maze at night, we compromised and went the next afternoon. Rather than risk any sort of adverse outcome, we allowed two expert guides to lead us through the maze. Call them blonde Sacajaweas, the grade-school sisters sometimes disagreed about which way we should turn but ultimately got us to the other side and out into the open field. In fact, it was too easy. I didn't really want to get lost, but I had expected more of a challenge. So we went back in.

This particular maze, the genius of my husband's aunt and uncle, had ten multiple-choice questions about corn staked on signs throughout the maze. With our knowledgable guides leading us, we somehow only passed three of the signs. We wanted to find the others. The older sister got tired of the maze, picked out a pumpkin, and went back to the booth at the start, finished with guiding but ready to welcome newcomers. That left one sister determined to help us find the signs. We took left turns, split up at times, felt like we were going in circles, faced many dead ends, found more corn questions, and finally went out through the in passage. But three signs remained hidden to us.

Now of course if we had really gotten lost, or panicked from claustrophobia, we could have crashed straight through the stalk walls and found our way out. There might be a large enough corn maze out there to get lost in for hours while waiting for rescue, but it seems one could just follow the rows to an end. Oh well, at this point I can't wait to get lost all over again next year.