this is true but i cant articulate how your perception of corn in particular changes when you start spending real time in a corn field. like ive talked about this before on here, but i had a job a few years back working in experimental corn fields as manual labor, and despite having been born and raised here I realized that, in iowa at least, much of the corn you encounter is over your head when fully grown, and it….kind of forms a weird liminal space very different from what it looks like on the surface.
like, we were regularly going out in 80 and 90 degree heat in full body protective gear, but when youre in there its actually cooler by a couple degrees because of the rainforest effect it has. almost nothing grows on the ground in a corn field because the corn blocks out all the light. you need to wear the protective gear that i mentioned because the leaves will cut you if you do not wear long pants, a long shirt, sunglasses/some kind of eye protection, and in our cases one of those hats with a protective net that goes over your face. we wore those backpacks with the watering tubes because we were traversing the fields on foot and once we went in we would not be coming out for 4-5 hours, moving through them all the time (those fields……are way bigger than they seem from the outside).
and when it gets really windy, and the whole field is bending at once around you? holy shit. ive never experienced anything like it tbh. like the day im thinking of that summer, they were hurrying our group along with our measurements because a storm was coming, and the whole field was listing to the side in the wind, but like….it’s still above your head. and in terms of proximity, you cannot walk anywhere in a cornfield without touching corn, which sounds obvious, but it practice it creates this weird illusion of a static maze. it’s like you’re in a really dense forest that you can only comfortably walk through by following narrow trails laid out in a grid. when it’s all bending like that at once….it’s wild, like i was tripping over my feet because it was really fucking with like….. my brain knowing where to walk lmao. i couldn’t really see the ground in front of me. i couldn’t see the rows. like, maize in it’s essence is a giant grass, so it’s like when you see those meadows and there’s wind blowing them and it looks like an ocean? like that but giant and ur inside.
also i can 10000% confirm you can literally get lost in a corn field. it is that vast and uniform. and i don’t mean like, haha corn maze, i mean like you can get actually lost, and when you try to yell for help the corn eats up the sound. i have no idea what people did before radios.
