The haunted trail through the cornfields
was supposed to be the be all and end all of terrifying Halloween experiences.
At least according to the extremely loud radio commercials that seemed to air
every ten minutes. Instead it was long lines, crowded groups of annoying
teenagers perfumed heavily with booze and pot and extreme dampness. The only
horrors to be found were in the ticket prices and the amount of mud we’d have
to wash off of our clothes. It just wasn’t scary. Nothing seemed scary anymore.
The real world had proven to be a more terrifying place than any cheaply
concocted corn maze.
We made our way back toward the area
where our car was parked. It was another muddy field to walk through. There
were no lights overhead so finding the car amid the rows of hastily parked vehicles
was to be a challenge. Jennifer and I weaved through row after row of dark
colored cars trying to find ours. She was pressing the key fob on and off so
the alarm would beep on and off as a way to essentially echo-locate it. She was
not pleased. She was irritated. She was cold. She was wet and it seemed like
she wanted to murder me.
She had mentioned a week or so
prior to our cornfield excursion that she wanted to do something scary for
Halloween. She wanted a little fright to spice up our usual tradition of going
to a friend’s costume party and then just going home. She couldn’t stay awake
for a horror movie usually and she always felt like the whole day was sort of a
waste. It just wasn’t like her childhood Halloween’s so she asked me to come up
with something scary.
I do not much care for
Halloween. I don’t like costumes and I don’t really like the pomp of it all. I
have an aversion to the smell of Halloween make-up. I hate the crowds of costume
parties. I despise the one couple, the one that every couple knows, that really
goes all out on their costume putting everyone’s cheaply/homemade costume to
shame. It bugs me that they’ll spend $300 on a costume but only bring a
six-pack of beer to the party. So, I was actually sort of pleased to come up
with something different to do.
The evening started pleasant
enough. A small candlelit dinner between Jennifer and I at a nice fall themed restaurant.
We could talk to each other normally over the gentle background music, instead of
yelling at full volume at some party or in a bar. We held hands and professed
our love for each other and how much we enjoyed spending this kind of quality
time together. We both had hectic schedules and lives so having these few
moments to just be with each other was nice. She was excited about the prospect
of the Haunted Corn Maze of Doom too. Which made me feel like I had actually
done something that makes her happy. Instead of just mildly not annoyed with
everything I do. She seemed genuinely happy.
Her mood started to darken as we
pulled into the parking lot for the Maize Maze of Doom. It was just dusk and
the air smelled slightly of pig manure and rotting leaves. There were a lot of
other people it seemed who had a similar idea of a haunted trail and it was already
crowded. They walked in front of the car like we weren’t even there, milling
about like zombies, as we tried to find a place to park. We finally pulled next
to a row of cars and reminded each other to remember where we parked. Jennifer put on a brave face when I asked her if she was ready to go in and if
she was prepared for the horrors of corn that awaited. I was similarly
enthused.
Our tickets were scanned by a
young woman woefully under-dressed for the tepid Autumn temperatures. Jennifer
and she exchanged a strange look in the language that only women speak to each
other while also being extremely overly polite. I asked her what that was all
about but Jennifer said it was nothing. I know better than to pry too much into
those deep evolutionary inner-workings.
We made our way to the line and
began our hour long wait. The Haunted corn maze was a sprawling complex of
trails and fields in which there were various stations of horror set up. You were
to wind your way along the paths, unguided, and have your fears realized by the
denizens of this cursed field. Jennifer
said she wished I had told her to wear different shoes. I said that I told her
we were going to be outside so I assumed she would wear outside shoes. She was
wearing thin sort of tennis shoes without socks. Her smile had completely faded
now, replaced with tight while lines where her lips usually are.
The line to go to these various stations of horror was backed-up with
families, strollers, small children that shouldn’t be going to a haunted trail,
teenagers with nothing better to do, high teenagers wherein this was the best
they could do, and adults in various stages of inebriation. There was so much chatter that I couldn’t tell
one conversation from the next. As the sun was setting the chill in the air
thickened as did the dragons breath wafting up from the cold crowds. I rubbed
Jennifer on her shoulders to keep her warm and assured her that as soon as we got
moving, she’d feel better.
At last our time came, along
with a group of 12 other people, to enter the Corn Maze of Doom. I felt
relieved that we would finally get started and maybe build some solid Halloween
memories. Something different than the routine. An adventure of sorts to reminisce
about absently on Halloween’s when we are old people. We tromped through some
underbrush and emerged with the group in front of a large plywood vampire,
painted with various rules, regulations and health warnings. A person in a
hillbilly costume, or an actual hillbilly as it was hard to tell, informed us
of the path we were to take and to have a Spooktacular time in the Corn Maze of
Doom. He pointed towards a dirt path and off we went.
A woman in our group immediately
sprained her ankle as we took our first few steps onto the dirt path. She
screamed louder and more terrifyingly than anything we had seen to date. She
fell into the arms of the man she was with. I turned to Jennifer and shrugged
and encouraged her to just move forward. That lady shouldn’t have been wearing
sandals anyway I said to Jennifer.
We wound our way with our
smaller group through the rather short maze. By short I mean that the corn wasn’t
very high, considering there had been a drought all summer it was no surprise
that we could easily navigate the corn maze of doom. The doom within the corn maze was mostly
teenagers stopping to make out with each other and poorly designed horror
stations, one guy with a chainsaw, one guy with an ax, one guy in a police
uniform, who might have been an actual cop. Jennifer never screamed, jumped or
seemed at all scared by any of the lame attractions. She pulled me along as I
stopped to laugh at the shoddy and unbelievably cheap decoration and set ups.
The shocks and scares were pale in comparison to all the real-world events we
were trying to escape from; no amount of Hannibal Lector’s or Jason Voorhees,
could clear actual life from our minds.
We reached the end of the maze
in under 20 minutes and Jennifer was done. Her feet were wet and she was
probably never going to want to hang out on Halloween with me ever again. She
hit the car key fob again and to our delight, our car was finally located just
a few feet away. We hustled over to it
and jumped in. I started the car and immediately turned the heat on.
“I’m sorry this was such a disaster,”
I said, “I’d hoped this would be a fun thing to do. You know, something
different. I get the feeling you were pretty miserable so I’m sorry. If it’s
any consolation, I hated it too.”
Jennifer was quietly rubbing her
cold feet. Her hair just poking out from under the hood of her sweatshirt.
“I’m glad we did this together.
I’m glad we both hated this,” she said, “I wouldn’t have wanted to hate this
with anyone other than you.”
She leaned over and kissed me. A
sweet warm kiss despite us both being cold. It was a marvelous kiss, the sort
you replay over and over in your memory until you die.
She leaned back into her seat,
still rubbing her feet.
“Happy Halloween,” she said, “Now
let’s get the hell out of here.”
I smiled, thinking; sure,
perhaps the world is a really terrifying place, but no amount of fear and the
horrors of our times could ever be bigger than the love between two people; who
hated stupid Halloween activities together.
