The soda machine ate my last dollar with a reluctant mechanical groan, and threw out my Orange Crush with a clunk. This was the fourth time in two hours it had taken my currency, and now the machine seemed set to mock me. It was as if, every time I gave it money, it replied by saying “Still haven’t found a way out yet?”
Wiping sweat from my face, I grabbed the soda, leaned against the nearest wall, and took a seat on the ground. The bottle opened with a hiss, and I put it to my lips and took a long pull. My face was flushed with heat, and I had neglected to bring any water into the maze with me. I had had no idea I would be trapped inside for so long.
“Well, this tastes like extortion.” To be fair, it also tasted like citrus.
It was the middle of the summer, I had just graduated from eighth grade, and I was a few miles from Mount Rushmore at a tourist attraction with my grandparents. We had stopped in on our tour of the western half of the country, which remains to this day one of the best experiences of my life. I put the now empty soda bottle on the ground, and stared at it. After being trapped for two hours in a giant human-sized maze, I was still thirsty. The soda machine stood still, asking me if I had confessed enough weakness.
I put my hand into my pocket, trying to figure out if I had enough money for a second soda and came up dry. This was a problem, as the only thing in the maze I could find on a consistent basis was the soda machine. I was not so young to believe that this could possibly be a coincidence. Blatant extortion aside, I had no idea where the exit might be, and hadn’t seen my brother Bryan, my cousin Kalyn, or my cousin Vince since we’d broken up fifteen minutes after entering.
My thirst temporarily if incompletely assuaged, I stood back up. In the four corners of the maze, raising high in the air so that they were visible to taunt me, I could see four towers. I took a crumpled piece of paper out of my pocket with a sigh. It had been given to me at the entrance. It was a crude drawing of mount Rushmore without any of the faces. I was supposed to navigate my way to each of the four towers, find a stamp at the top, and fill in the face. So far the only face I’d managed to collect was Abraham Lincoln’s. I found this to be particularly discouraging, as I have always found him to be the ugliest of the presidents. After a moment, I put the paper back in my pocket and decided that it was time to find a way out of the maze even if I hadn’t filled in Mount Rushmore.
I was thirsty and alone, and I didn’t feel particularly disposed to keep playing a game I hadn’t even particularly wanted to play in the first place.
Observing that the sun would still be baking me at a simmer for at least the next several hours, I kicked my soda bottle in frustration. The bottle skipped across the ground, under the wooden walls of the maze. Excited, I got down on my hands and knees next to where the bottle had disappeared. I was a big kid… almost my adult height… but if I sucked it in and really tried….
I put my hands forward like a diver and scrabbled. My body worked through the pebbles and dirt like a worm, until finally I emerged on the other side. Taking my bearings from the sun, I crossed the next boundary. I stood up, covered in dirt and smiled at the open sky. The maze, which I had feared I would be struck in for another hour yet, suddenly seemed navigable.
“Daddy?” what sounded like a small boy said from the next partition over, “how come we don’t just crawl under the walls?”
“Because son, we’re not cheaters.” The father replied, gruffly.
Aside from the ironic timing,* I paused to consider that a small child had seen such an obvious flaw in the maze before myself. If anything, I felt dumb. I heard the family stalk off, and then climbed under the next wall. As how I had no intention of pretending that I had not climbed under the walls, I did not feel particularly dishonest.
I continued, not unlike a dolphin in the open ocean, diving and rising again only to return to the ocean in a dive, I spent several more minutes making my way to the exit. My tongue had a distinct flavor of dirt. When I stood before it, my palms freshly scraped with pebbles I took a moment to promise myself I would never, ever enter a human-sized maze. I had never felt so much like a lab animal in my entire life, and had no desire to repeat the experience.**
I took a moment to brush myself off before entering the campground. My grandfather was sitting at a picnic table, and he pointed at his watch when he saw me. My cousin Vincent was showing off his completed picture of Mount Rushmore to Bryan and Kalyn, who could not have been more disinterested. If they’d gotten out much earlier than me, they’d no doubt grown tired of seeing it, but Vince was the kind of kid who would brag about taking a dump for months.
“What took you so long?” My grandfather asked. I could tell that while he was not angry, neither was he particularly pleased to have been sitting idle for so long.
“I got lost. I just climbed under the walls at the end.” I helped myself to an unopened soda at the picnic table.
“It took you this long to figure that out? Kalyn and I did that after like thirty minutes.” Bryan proclaimed. Kalyn nodded that this was true.
“Yeah… I’m sorry guys. I just got to Abraham Lincoln on my own, and figured I would try for the rest.” I turned to Vince. The entire front of his body was covered in dirt as if he’d just crawled out of his own grave.
“Haha… how long did it take you to give in, Vince?” I asked with a smile. Vince was bigger around the middle than myself and the mental image of him crawling under the walls was hilarious.
“I didn’t. I did it all by myself.” Vince replied. A few grains of dirt blew off his shirt into the wind.
I rolled my eyes. After being cooped up with him for weeks on end, I’d heard enough of Vince’s lies to last me a life time. “And how long did that take you?”
My grandfather snorted, “He was out in about fifteen minutes.”
“Eleven.” Vince corrected. “I did it all in eleven minutes.”
“And you got all the faces?” I asked.
“You’re darn right I did.” I noticed a few tiny pebbles stuck in Vince’s shins. His shoelaces were brown.
“You do realize you’re covered in dirt, right?”
“No I’m not.” Vince replied. As I regarded my cousin in his bold-faced lie, I thought that he was so covered with Mother Earth that he looked like the fucking Swamp Thing.
“Vince!” I shouted, having forgotten my thirst. “You couldn’t run from tower to tower in eleven minutes if they were sitting there in the open. If you murdered someone in front of the supreme court and they tried you for murder, would your defense consist of you just saying ‘nope, I didn’t do it!’” While I don’t enjoy being lied to, I absolutely cannot tolerate a stupid lie. A stupid lie is told only when someone disrespects you so much they think you’re too dumb to see what is right in front of you.
“Whatever, man.” Vince said.
“Vince… if you were doing this to try to be funny… if you were doing it because you got some kick out of it… if you were doing this for ANY reason other that you’re full of crap-”
“That’s enough.” My grandfather whispered. “I’ve been sitting at this goddamn picnic table for two hours now. It’s time to hit the road.”
As we walked back to the motor-home, Vince and I managed to flip one another off behind my grandfather’s back a half a dozen times or more.
He changed his clothes at the first opportunity. My grandmother had told him to when she realized how filthy he was.
*Most ironic timing in my life: I was waiting for someone in a parking lot scanning though the FM band. I got to a country station, a cowboy walked out of the building. I got to a rap station, a person in gangsta clothes walked out of the building. I got to an evangelical station, and a prudish woman in a sweater walked out of the building. It stopped working after that.
**I did, and got lost in a corn maze for about an hour and a half. Fuck human-sized mazes.
