A-Mazing Grains

After three hours of pacing in confined quarters we were tired, frustrated and actually pleading for mercy. Finally, when my wife, Gina, and I worked our way free, we wanted a taste of revenge.

So we ate our captors.

Or, at least, their ears. With a dash of chile-lime butter, they were delicious.

It was all part of the experience at the Amazing Maize Maze, a labyrinth cut into a four-acre cornfield near this Ventura County city and the first stop on our swift tour of an area where farms and nurseries aren’t necessarily considered “undeveloped” land.

Not exactly known as a tourist destination, Camarillo was too close to Los Angeles and the beaches of Ventura or even Santa Barbara to make it an enticing stopping point. But now the corn maze was luring us in, and the idea of getting “lost” just an hour from our home in the San Gabriel Valley was appealing.

As we drove down the Conejo Grade on U.S. 101 early on a Friday afternoon two weeks ago, low clouds and fog obscured the view of the flatlands that stretch inland from the Pacific shore. When we exited the freeway in Camarillo and rolled down the car windows, we could smell the sweet fragrance of coastal agriculture: earth, salt air and crops, in this case, red bell peppers.

The Amazing Maize Maze cornfield sat about four miles south, next to a sod farm. From the outside it looked peaceful--a little like a Venus flytrap that’s just had a meal. The land belongs to Pacific Earth Resources, a supplier of sod, trees and landscaping products that commissioned the American Maze Co., which has been operating corn mazes since 1993, to create a maze in Camarillo.

As Gina and I entered the courtyard outside the maze, we saw rambunctious schoolchildren playing on wagon wheels and haystacks. Inside, we were given a game sheet with maze rules, along with a “team flag” on a long plastic rod (“Carry it upright, not jousting style,” a guide said) so that a maze overseer on a centrally located observation tower could monitor our progress. If we got into trouble, we could holler up to the tower through a long plastic tube called a “telestalk”; it’s like talking through a giant vacuum-cleaner hose.

The idea is to search through the two miles of dusty paths to find either the exit (if you’re lucky) or 12 mailboxes (if you’re winning-the-lottery lucky). Each mailbox holds a piece of paper with part of a maze map. Find all 12 mailboxes and you’ll have a complete map of the maze, which theoretically will allow you to find the exit.

How maze-savvy were we? Well, we could have gotten out after an hour, when we stumbled upon an area near the exit. But we were happy wanderers at that point, so we continued through the corn corridors. We also could have extricated ourselves at the two-hour mark, but by then we were crusaders, on a mission to collect the final, elusive piece of the map.

Some crusade. Half an hour later we were openly talking about sneaking out through the emergency exit. It wasn’t corn anymore, it was a crinkly green prison, and the plants seemed to be, well, stalking us.

It took two calls to the maze overseer to get us pointed in the right direction. We clocked out in a sluggish three hours, 20 minutes, then trudged up some stairs to a walkway that led to freedom. Still, if another maze takes root next summer--and that’s the plan, employees told us--we’d gladly go back.

Gina bought us cold drinks and a couple of ears of corn at a concession stand in the courtyard, and we pushed on to our next destination. The AAA guide offered a choice of several sound-alike Camarillo-Courtyard-Country-Comfort-Quality lodgings, all next to U.S. 101. We chose the Courtyard by Marriott; our room was drab but surprisingly quiet.

Much better was dinner in Camarillo’s Old Town at Ottavio’s, an Italian restaurant I’d noticed many times from the freeway. It’s a family-run place where customers know the waitresses by name, and it’s popular too; we had to wait 40 minutes for a table.

Gina ordered a steaming dish of baked ziti; I looked hard at a plate of roasted lamb served with peppers but bypassed it for an old-fashioned combo platter of spaghetti and ravioli. Both meals, served with fresh-baked rolls, hit the spot perfectly, and by refusing to clean our plates we left enough room for a smile-inducing bowl of chocolate-cappuccino spumoni.

The next morning we returned to Old Town for a stroll. Unlike the unrelenting shopping centers sprouting on the other side of the freeway or the jammed outlet mall a mile away, it has a small-town feel, laid-back and unpretentious. As the regular Saturday morning farmers’ market wound down, we stopped to check out its selection of fruits, vegetables, baked goods and crafts. They all looked fine, but we had bigger game in mind.

Squeezed on nearly three acres between the 101 and still another cornfield, the Growing Grounds Nursery & Tree Outlet is one of the first landmarks motorists see at the bottom of the Conejo Grade. With my autumn garden tune-up in mind--an event that usually coincides with the post-Halloween festival of the Day of the Dead--I selected a few six-packs of snapdragons and pansies.

After a lunch at the Habit, an agreeable burger-and-sandwich joint, we drove to the nearby community of Somis. Along a six-mile stretch of Los Angeles Avenue (California 118) we counted 11 establishments selling fruits, vegetables, nuts, plants, trees or cut flowers.

At the Somis Produce Mart, an eye-popping display of deep red strawberries and tomatoes lent some vibrancy to a misty white day. Gina found dried flowers for our living room, while I bought a jar of locally produced honey.

Just around the corner is the Underwood Farm Mart, which not only sells produce but gives customers free recipe cards too. We purchased a watermelon (even I don’t need a recipe for that) and, out of curiosity, a jar of pumpkin butter. Outside were pens for a collection of rescued animals--rabbits, burros, a pig named Piggy Sue and three goats who like to climb a series of ladders and walkways and stand guard on a shed roof. People aren’t allowed in the pens, but we could feed the animals through big plastic pipes in the side of the fence, and animal feed was available in old gum ball machines for a quarter per handful. We bought some chow for the goats and also fed Piggy Sue, who wagged her tail vigorously.

So far on our trip we’d been trapped by corn growing in a field and bought plants and fruits from stands; now it was time to go one step further and try picking something ourselves. So we made our last stop at the Tierra Rejada Family Farms store and farm in Moorpark, about 10 miles east of Somis on Moorpark Road.

Armed with bags and cartons and lugging a wagon supplied by the farm, we picked a veritable traffic light of bell peppers--green, yellow-orange and red. Then we zeroed in on the squash, hoisting a monster 2-foot yellow shillelagh into our wagon. We also pulled five ripe tomatoes off their vines and filled half a bag with black-eyed peas. Beyond the anticipation of some fresh eats was the pleasure of being in a field and seeing, for a change, just where all this stuff in grocery stores and farmers’ markets comes from.

“I grew up in farm country, and I’ve never done this,” Gina said, pulling our wagon.

It was almost 6 p.m., closing time. We headed for the cashier; our nearly 10 pounds of produce cost less than $8. Best of all, we had no trouble finding our way out.

Brian Hanrahan is an editor with the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.

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Budget for Two

Maze admissions: $16.00

Lunch at maze: 7.50

Courtyard by Marriott: 86.11

Dinner, Ottavio’s: 36.41

Breakfast, Old New York Bagel and Coffee Co.: 8.21

Lunch, the Habit: 11.03

Gasoline: 21.50

FINAL TAB: $186.76

The Amazing Maize Maze is expected to remain open at least through October, conditions permitting; closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays; tel. (805) 495-5678. Tierra Rejada Family Farms, tel. (805) 529-3690.