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Meet the man who turns cornfields into incredible mazes
American Timothy Day isn't exactly sick of corn by the end of the summer, but ... "If I got a dollar every time I've heard, 'This is a-MAZE-ing,' I'd certainly be rich by now," he said with a chuckle.
Over the past couple of months, Day has cut more than 50 corn mazes. Someone else does the designs, but there's definitely a lot of skill and artistry in the way he creates them. "My paintbrush is a rototiller," Day said.
In the U.S. and elsewhere, corn mazes are associated with Halloween, but the work starts long before October. Day's season began in June. Since then, he and his partner have been as far north as Ontario, Canada, as far south as Florida, and to "almost every state between here and there."
"It's not out of the ordinary for us to drive over 6,000 kilometers in five days and cut out 10 or 12 corn mazes in that amount of time," said Day, who's been doing this since 2005. "Our truck is our hotel. We sleep in the truck most of the time. One of us is always driving. We never stop moving."
Day cuts the mazes for a company called Maize Quest. Hugh McPherson, the owner of the business, is known as "The Maze Master." He and Day have to stagger the cutting schedule to catch the corn at just the right growth stage. If it's too mature, the plants will grow back in the paths he's cut.
Day likes to cut the corn when it's about waist- or chest-high, but that's not just for practical reasons. He's actually allergic to corn once it tassels — when the flowers emerge at the top of the cornstalk. "Basically, anywhere that the pollen touches me, I just get a really itchy rash," said Day, who ran into that problem this year outside of Memphis, Tennessee. "Sometimes it can get really painful."
Once Day gets to a farm, he drives around the field's perimeter to establish the boundaries for the GPS system. Then he fits the design into that shape, and the computer does the rest. "There's very little room for error in our corn mazes," he said. "The trails are close together. So a little mistake breaks through a whole wall and changes the whole maze."
With some intricate designs, Day has to go in with a lawnmower. And occasionally he'll arrive to find that the field's not quite big enough to accommodate the artist's vision. "And then I have to do a little bit of design on the fly," he said. "But it's kind of fun when that happens, too."
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