The best I can offer you

I had a great time with my kids today at this old timey historic re-creation farm thing. There were lots of lovely flowers, and cute animals - oh my god! piglets! - and some metallic blue dragon flies, and my kids were very snuggly during the tractor ride portion of our day.

We walked by some corn fields and I remembered when I was a kid there was lots of running through the cornfield next to the house, sometimes with my cousins and sometimes with my dogs and sometimes both. If you’ve never run though a corn field you might not know that the leaves can cut the shit out of you, like the kind of nasty paper-cut you can get from the edges of cardboard boxes, but cornleaf-cuts did not deter my cousins and I from playing hide and seek out there.

If you ever happen to be playing hide and seek in a corn field and you’re the one hiding, here are some tips:

1. Be shorter than the corn.
2. While the person who is going to do the seeking is counting run as far away from that person as you can.
3. When they stop counting, stop running.
4. Continue moving slowly away from the person doing the seeking. Have your pace be about the same as any rustle from the wind. If there isn’t any wind, lay on the ground.

This is complicated stuff so you may want to bring a print out of these instructions, in case you can’t get reception on your spacephone.

If you’re the one doing the seeking, it helps if you’re looking for someone with a dog, because you can listen for the dog or call it and try to get it to bark. If the field is small or narrow enough that you can walk the width of it, do so, by walking diagonally. Look down the rows as you do so, to see if you notice anything, and if you get to one edge of the field, go back the other direction. Be sure to keep listening for rustling faster than the wind, or the sound of stalks breaking.

If you’re playing with people following the advice I listed above, like my cousins, or me as a kid (like say you time traveled back in time and want to give kid-me a cool gift from the future like a jet pack or an invisibility cloak or some money to spend when he/I becomes middle aged, and by the way if you’re a charitable time traveler looking for somewhere to spend your future money, I would just like to say that I can recommend without reservation past-me as a candidate for unearned time traveler rewards), then what you really want to do is run as fast as you can down the side of the corn field, outside the field I mean, because the people you’re looking for have been running inside the field. They’ve got a head start on you but they’re running slower than you can run in open grass or on the road, so if you run a ways outside the field you close some of the distance. You might also see or hear something that gives you a clue about where they are in the field.

If on the other hand you are hiding and you are playing with someone following the advice I just gave about how to find someone (like say you time traveled back in time and want to stop the other time traveler from finding kid-me because it turns out that the so-called gift is actually going to cause something terrible to happen like nuclear winter or catastrophic global warming or a hailstorm where the hail is hard spider eggs that hatch upon landing or a Rush reunion tour and you get there first and you’re giving instructions to kid-me on how to hide most effectively) then the thing to do when you really don’t want to be found is when the person who is doing the seeking starts counting go outside the corn field and run as fast down the road as you can for almost as long as the person counted and then cut into the field and keep running away. The result will be that no time traveler finds you and neither do your cousins.

Being out in a corn field by yourself until your cousins give up on trying to find you and then you walk home and maybe by then they’re sitting on the back deck drinking Pepsi or home-made lemonade and your grandma says “there you are! they said you were hiding!” as you come in for a glass and some ice and you can brag at your hiding skills is fun once or twice, maybe three times if you have your dogs with you and you’re used to spending a lot of time alone except for your dogs, but after that, it gets kind of dull because it’s basically the exact same as when you walk around in the corn field by yourself on the days when your cousins don’t come over except your stupid cousins are making so much noise that they’re scaring off the raccoons and rabbits and pheasants that you and your dogs sometimes run across when your cousins aren’t there, and the absence of wild animals disappoints a little and also you will eventually begin to suspect your cousins didn’t even look for you but instead skipped straight to the deck and the sugary drinks.

If it gets to that point maybe instead try hiding in the small stand of trees behind the corn field except for you’re probably gonna get muddy, or else try looping around the front of the house - because the person counting will probably be up on the deck off the back of the house, lounging in comfort on one of the soft deck chairs while they count, and if it’s one of your lazy teenage cousins they may have already gotten out a Pepsi and lemonade before even finishing counting - then head back toward the barn. If you do that you gotta be sure to open the barn door slowly and quietly and you also gotta remember to close it afterward.

There’s a bigger chance of getting caught with barn-hiding comparing to corn-field-hiding but if you pull it off it’s worth it because while no one’s finding you you can pet the barn cats and look for mice or for litters of kittens hidden up in the hay loft and you can stare at your grandpa’s tools in the work room area and it smells a bit like oil and gasoline which is a bonus and depending what time it is maybe the horses are in the barn and you can pet their lovely soft noses. And after you do that enough times your cousins may start to check in the barn after they give up on the cornfield, and when they find you that way it feels more like winning than when you’re never found at all.

When I got older I began to joke about my cousins and myself as children of the corn, after the horror movie Children of the Corn, and I would sometimes pretend the cornleaf cuts on my forearms were from the weird looking kid with the knife. I watched that movie with my dad one time (when, in my opinion now as an adult, I was too little to see it) and at the time I became very worried about whether or not the backdoor was locked so my dad got up to check and told me that even if the weird looking kid with the knife was there he could take that kid out and that not to worry, it had taken at least a dozen serious stab wounds to kill Rasputin (which apparently is inaccurate, according to Wikipedia - I just checked - so I guess I was in even more danger than I realized at the time [lesson learned, always fact check your parents, your safety may depend on it]). I did not find the idea of my dad requiring so many stabbings to kill a reassuring thought because it involved the thought of my dad being stabbed and also the thought of that weird looking corn kid and his big ass knife. When my dad came back in the room he shouted “HAAA!” and I jumped and screamed and he laughed.

Many years later when I was an adult my dad would tell me that he had a phobia of home invasions and had for his whole life, and that he always checked that all the doors were locked before he went to bed. This habit has thus far proven adaptive insofar as no funny looking field-dwelling child has come into his home and stabbed him to death with a big knife. I know for a fact that this is true up until about 1pm on the day of this writing. I can not say for sure if this pattern holds after 1pm. No system is fool-proof, after all.

In the interest of honesty I feel I should add that I also can not say with great conviction that the tips above will help you escape a cult of maniac corn children but I bet it will make you live longer than if you don’t follow my advice, like say if you just run screaming or otherwise make a lot of noise, then you’re very likely to be totally fucked. If you follow my advice you’re also likely to be totally fucked, those corn kids are vicious, seriously, but you’ll be fucked later on instead of right away. If you’re with other people who run away screaming and you follow my advice you will probably live longer because the corn children will catch your friends first.

So basically what I’m saying is follow my advice and you may have a chance of seeing your friends murdered by psycho religious rural minors. That’s the best I can offer you. If it’s any consolation, you will have at least upped your hide-and-seek-in-a-corn-field game.

You have now learned all I have to convey that is possibly of any use to another person. Good luck out there.