Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
A Hedge Maze
Posted on December 14, 2004 in Gardens
Yesterday, while pushing my bones along the Oso Creek trail, I discovered a token offering to local culture and color by the city of Mission Viejo: a hedge maze.
You can find it near the Peace Monument which has so far escaped defacement in this militarist county. The shrubs stand not even as high as my knee. For anyone levelling off at more than four feet seven inches, the plan in its entirety is visible at a glance. There is no mystery to the route, no inducement to horror as one makes her or his way through the labyrinth. From start to finish, you can see where you have started, where you are, where you will end up, and where in the design you stand — a bit like the career maps that high school and college employment counselors tell you exist in the real world.
In other words, Oso Viejo Park boasts a symbol for our age, dumbed down and mediocre.
When I was a child, I used to draw mazes for my own entertainment and as a way of interacting with my friends. I drew them freehand. The lines and rounded corners crowded to the very edges of the paper: I left no pointless white space. My mazes were more difficult than the ones that appeared in popular books: for this reason, my classmates sought them out. A few people refused to try them because they did not want to risk failure. It was not too unlike the character of the adults who surround me today who avoid setting aside time to think because they are afraid they’ll look lazy or come up with ideas that others will ridicule.
By making it clear and unambiguous, Mission Viejo has triumphed in an effort more than forty years in the making. It has trimmed an art form into a manageable size, taken out the surprises, and restored us to a humanocentric universe. In this park billed as an “open space” with all its implications of “natural” beauty — where much of the landscaping consists of foreign imports such as roses, pampas grass, green lawns, and eucalyptus — the illusion of a simple universe revives. Just say Peace in all languages that count (I failed to see Arabic) and it will happen. Keep to the paved paths. See everything as circular. Whatever difficulties you encounter will always be temporary. Head for the center, which will always be in your sight, open and empty of meaning, reason, and life.
Whatever the challenges, Mission Viejo’s hedge maze declares, they must be kept well-trimmed and easy. Ultimately, it tells us, what is beautiful is junk and not worth the effort of fabrication. The gardeners must be kept bored and disinterested in their work. What is public must be petty and not inspire us to greater effort or improvement upon our knowledge, our intellect, or our wisdom.
All that was missing was a wall around the Peace Monument, shielding us from the ugly sight of the possibility we no longer and probably never believed in.
Farther down the creek, between La Paz and Maguerite, I saw the broken remnants of a sidewalk dumped in a section where they didn’t have enough rocks and concrete to complete the entombment of the watercourse. Ah, I thought. So this is what this corridor is for: hiding the failures of public works behind brown water, yellow ashes, and bewildered ducks.
