The green walls of corn tower 12 feet high, swaying slightly as the wind rustles through the leaves and tassels. You can't see anything but rows of cornstalks as you wander along a twisting path, trying to maintain a sense of direction. The eight-acre field is laced with identical paths, meandering, turning back on themselves, sometimes intersecting other paths or coming to a dead end. There is only one way out of this maze, but many opportunities to make a wrong choice.

More than 10,000 people passed through the corn maze at the Davis family's farm in Sterling, Mass., last summer. The average visitor took about two hours to solve the puzzle and reach the center of the maze. Some took as long as five hours. "People with dumb luck might come out in half an hour," says Doug Davis '88.

Davis and his brother, Larry, are the sixth generation to work this farm, which the family has owned since 1846. The two brothers and their father, John, have tried "pretty much everything to do with farming," from cattle to Christmas trees, in order to hold onto the family heritage. When the idea of building a corn maze and charging admission to visitors occurred to them three years ago, they already had a successful agritourist business at Davis' Farmland, with the nation's largest collection of endangered breeds of livestock.

Creating a maize maze is a daunting proposition. The Davises begin by setting up wooden bridges in several locations around the field, so visitors can climb above the corn and get a three-dimensional view. Corn and sorghum are planted in late May, and the Davises divide the field into a grid, marked by stakes set 120 feet apart. When the plants are a few inches high, they weed them out of the narrow paths that form the maze pattern -- a Celtic dragon in 1998, a pirate flag's skull and crossed sabers last year. This year's maze reflects a visitors-from-space theme.

The Davises and their helpers have only the grid marked by the stakes and a sketch of the maze pattern to guide them as they make the paths through the corn seedlings. The paths have to be laid out perfectly. "From the sky, it should look like art. You can't go through and mow the corn; you have to pull the plants by hand," Davis says. Like any kind of farm work, this is labor intensive and a lot depends on the weather. Planting two kinds of grain helps: corn won't grow when the weather is cold and wet; sorghum shrivels when it's hot and dry.

The Davises open their maze to the public in July, when the corn is four feet tall. It remains open until mid-October, when the crop is harvested for animal feed. On a busy day, hundreds of visitors descend on the farm to see if they can find their way through the maze.

"Once we're open, there's nothing like it," Davis observes. "People come here for an adventure. Helping them have that adventure is such a blast."