When Bill and Jack Swets decided to plant a maze in their cornfield an hour and a half north of Denver, they thought their biggest problem would be finding a way out once they stepped in to enjoy it. Designed by a Utah agro-artist, it's a complex work of wonder, with three miles of trails detailing a stegosaurus, a cursive-script "Colorado" header and a border of head-spinning angles and turns. But unfortunately for these retired Larimer County farmers, their maze of maize wasn't nearly as difficult as the labyrinth of regulations laid out by the county they've lived in for more than fifty years.
Just days before the Swets brothers were set to open their novel business venture, Larimer County officials put a legal scythe to it, threatening fines and civil penalties if the brothers opened for business.
As a result, the brothers are now wandering through a stack of unanswered questions as high as the stalks in their ten-acre field of dreams. The struggle has turned each of the two men into a corn-fed rebel eager to give the county an earful. "My brother and I, we're kind of mavericks," says Bill Swets, a muscular 57-year-old whose handsome apple-pie face frequently explodes into a smile. "So we just told 'em to shove it--we're gonna open it anyway. This is a case of bureaucracy gone wild, and this thing is too beautiful to waste."
Since August 14, the Swets have opened the gate to their embattled endeavor (located east of I-25 and Harmony Road, just near Fort Collins) on a free-of-charge, weekends-only basis to allow the community to see firsthand what the county wanted to turn asunder. And while the move has meant losing out on bushels of bucks, the brothers say they're making up for it with heaps of praise from the local citizenry.
"Look at these," says Jack Swets, 61, whose country-boy countenance and spectacles hardly make him look like a candidate for civil disobedience. "These are some of the cards from our comment box." The notes offer a slew of rave testimonials from the estimated 1,400 attendees the maze has averaged each weekend since opening: "I always wanted to be in a maze," reads one, while another declares, "I thought we'd never get out--wonderful!" Many more feature the word "awesome," while a heartfelt offering from a preschooler consists of five crudely drawn smiley faces.
"This tells you the feelings of the people that come through here," says Bill Swets. "We haven't had one negative comment from anyplace--except the county!"
Such positive words are nothing new to the Swets siblings. Three decades ago they helped found the nearby Timnath Volunteer Fire Department, building and repairing the company's trucks, fighting fires and saving lives of the folks in their rural community. For the past ten years, Bill has amazed area residents with his "Swetsville Zoo," a collection of 150 homemade metal sculptures of dinosaurs, mutants and other strange creatures, all made by Bill from scrap collected off local farms. Some of the pieces are up to 20 feet high and 35 feet long, and a few of them are kinetic. It's an astounding attraction, free to all visitors, that's been celebrated around the globe for its sense of whimsy and Swets's command of design and construction--despite the fact that he's never had an art or welding class in his life.
According to Bill Swets, the birth of these bizarre creatures was fueled in part by his efforts on the Timnath fire squad. "You come home at two o'clock in the morning after scraping someone off the interstate or cleaning up a suicide, you can't sleep," he says bluntly. "Some guys can handle that. I can't. So I'd go out to the shop and work off my frustrations. A lot of these things were built between two and six in the morning."
Since retiring from the fire department several years ago, such horrific scenes are now behind Bill, leaving him more time to tend to his metal menagerie and the adjacent maze, which is built of a hybrid brand of Pioneer high-yield corn.
The Swets began by planting a dense grid of corn rows instead of the usual parallel ones. Then, agro-artist Brett Herbst staked out the field and marked his pattern with green dye. When the stalks were a foot high, weed killer was applied along the pattern of the dye. The result, after the dead corn is trampled down, is an intricate, orderly pattern.
When Bill and Jack make their way into the maze, blackbirds scatter from the eight-foot-tall stalks, which glow in the light of an early morning sun. As they walk the trails, they exchange comments on the state of the crop. "We have to explain to people to be careful about what they say in here, because there are so many ears listening," Jack says, bursting into a half-minute fit of laughter that ricochets between him and Bill. "I'm a kid, and I don't ever plan on growing up," Bill reveals.
A few minutes later, as the men head for "Colorado," a small plane appears in the crystal-blue sky over the maze, tipping its wings as it bisects cotton-candy clouds. "He's coming over to look at it," Bill whispers excitedly. "See him? He's laying it over so he can get a good look. Hey," he shouts in mock fear while waving his arms at the plane, "we're lost. Get us out of here!" The brothers break into another fit of tag-team guffaws as the plane continues to circle the field, wings cocked to one side.
