Deep inside one of the world’s largest corn mazes, where the tri-tip sandwiches and soft-serve ice cream purchased at the concession stand have become but a memory and all that can be seen in any direction are dirt paths and dead-end walls of green plants whispering in the breeze, people tend to reveal themselves.

From humble beginnings with a not-very-impressive pumpkin patch two decades ago, a farming family in this Solano County town decided to move into the corn maze game, hoping to have some seasonal fun and earn a little extra cash. And then, fueled by corny ambition and creative use of Excel spreadsheets, the Cooley family of Dixon went big. Really big.

Their Cool Patch Pumpkins corn maze has caused traffic back-ups on Interstate 80. It has prompted a frenzy of 911 calls to the Solano County Sheriff’s Department from people who find themselves lost in the labyrinth. It has twice earned a Guinness World Record as the world’s largest corn maze. And in doing so, it has become “a big part” of the farm’s revenue, according to Tayler Cooley, despite the vast acreage the family farms year-round.

Over the years, the maze has also served as a towering 60-acre experiment in human psychology.

“You can learn a lot” about a person from how they behave in a corn maze, said Brett Herbst, who said he built the first one west of the Mississippi in 1996, and now has a company, the Maize, that designs and builds them each fall for farmers around the country. (Cool Patch is not one of his customers.)

Some people, it turns out, approach a hokey seasonal activity as they would an Olympic race: Speed is the goal. They grip their paper maps with tight fingers and fierce concentration. They blast around corners of corn, barely dodging small children. Woe to anyone in their group who wants to take a rest.

Others like to wander. They turn this way and that through the rustling 10-foot stalks, laughing when they get lost, and pausing for chats, snacks and selfies atop the four elevated bridges that connect different parts of the maze.

Sit quietly amongst the ears of corn, and it becomes easy to spot who is who:

“Guys, pick up the pace,” a young woman from UC Davis screamed at her companions as they ran by on a recent afternoon, explaining that they were racing against another group and could not pause to talk.

Contrast that with Amari Moore, 22, of Sacramento, who was taking a nice long break at one of the bridges. “I’m getting a little tired,” she said.

And then — and there is no nice way to put this — there are the cheaters. These are the people who, despairing of finding their way out honestly, simply smash and bash their way through the corn willy-nilly.

Or, those who lose all hope of escape and in their panic call 911 to plead for rescue from sheriff’s deputies. (The dispatchers tend to counsel waiting for help from on site — or taking the cheater’s route out.)

“You can learn a lot” about a person from how they behave in a corn maze, says professional corn maze designer Brett Herbst.

(Tayler Cooley)

Mazes and labyrinths have been around for thousands of years. In Greek mythology, the Minotaur — with the head of a bull and body of a man — was imprisoned at the center of a labyrinth in Crete and ate anyone who couldn’t find their way out. Theseus managed to kill the Minotaur, but still needed help from a princess to escape.

The farm town of Dixon, population 19,000, made its mark in mazes about 20 years ago — about the time corn mazes began to take off across the U.S. thanks to new computer programming that helps farmers plot out massive labyrinths with a sinuous web of passageways.

Matt Cooley, a second-generation farmer of walnuts, tomatoes, sunflowers, wheat and alfalfa, decided to grow a few pumpkins for Halloween and sell them by the side of the road. Then, someone gave him the idea to create a maze.

The Cool Patch maze, which rises from the flatlands near Interstate 80 just before the Sacramento Valley rolls up into the Vaca Mountains, got ever larger and more creative. Tayler Cooley, Matt’s daughter-in-law, is the designer. Each year, it has a theme. This year, the words “A House Divided Shall Not Stand” are carved into the corn, along with “God Bless America.” Is it a comment on the coming election, and the country’s profoundly divided electorate?

“This year we encourage our visitors and society as a whole to band together for the greater good of our nation,” the Cooley family explains on the Cool Patch website.

In recent years, the farm has also become famous for a symbol that people can get behind no matter their political persuasion: the minions of the “Despicable Me” film franchise. In recent years, one of the farm’s employees, Juan Ramirez, has crafted giant minions out of hay bales that are visible from the freeway.

Some scholars think mazes embody paradoxes. And it may be a paradox of modern agriculture that the Cooleys’ farm is not the only one that now brings in a substantial portion of its income from a maze that sprouts for only a few weeks each autumn. (The corn from the maze is harvested in November, Tayler Cooley said, and becomes animal feed.)

Four elevated bridges connect sections of the massive corn maze at Cool Patch Pumpkins in Dixon.

(Tayler Cooley)

Farming is a tough business, especially for small- and medium-sized farms, which can be rocked by the weather and fluctuations in commodities pricing and fuel costs.

When it comes to agritourism, corn mazes once lurked in the shadows of pumpkin patches, U-pick berry operations and apple orchard hayrides. But, perhaps because of those mythic roots and their ability to test the human psyche, they’ve exploded in popularity.

Herbst, founder of the Maize, said the first commercial corn maze he knows of was grown by a farmer in the early 1990s. Herbst built his own in 1996. These days, his company prepares maze designs for hundreds of farms. For an additional charge, his crew will carve out the maze.

“Corn maze has become a staple word for October, just like pumpkins,” he said.

In 2023, according to Guiness, a farmer in Quebec usurped Cool Patch for the title to world’s largest maze. But for the thousands of people who now view a trip to Dixon as one of their autumn rituals, it hardly matters.

“I grew up coming here,” said Becca Invanusich, 32, who was visiting on a recent Saturday from Santa Rosa with her fiance and two friends.

As a child, her maze style was to cheat: “I would just shoot right through it,” she said, gesturing to the rows of corn.

But as an adult, she said, she savors the mental challenge. Her group planned to solve the puzzle, no matter how long it took.

If you go: Cool Patch Pumpkins is located at 6150 Dixon Ave. W, off Interstate 80 in Dixon. Fall hours are daily, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., weather permitting. The entry fee runs $22 per person. Children under 5 are free and so is parking.

A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life. I was a typist at an insurance company. An English teacher in Japan. I drove a bar cart around a golf course. I’ve worked at a whitewater rafting company and an art gallery. What I’m saying is it took me more than a minute to figure out what my thing was. You know, I’m frankly still figuring this out to some degree. And I am a grown-ass woman.

Other people get this gift early in their lives. A door opens. They go through it and that’s it. They’ve found their place, their purpose, their thing. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to Gael García Bernal. His dad was a film director and his mom an actress. So Gael was thrust into the business really young. He starred in a Mexican telenovela when he was just 13. Then came theater school in London and a role in the film Amores Perros, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. And that changed everything.

Next came his iconic role in Y tu mamá también, alongside his lifelong friend Diego Luna. There had never been a coming of age movie like this one. It challenged all the norms around masculinity and sexual discovery. And in that movie, we see the beginnings of a long career for Gael García Bernal, one that would be filled with surprising, magical roles that upend the audience’s expectations.

Just like in his new limited series on Hulu called La Máquina. With each new film or show, it’s like he is just as hungry as he was in the early stages of his career. Acting came for him early and it stuck. And we are so lucky it did.

This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

Question 1: What’s a place where you feel like the best version of yourself?

Gael García Bernal: I grew up in the theater with my parents. It felt like when I was a kid, theater and life were very intertwined. The stage was just a step away. So in a way, I realized growing up that I was born into something special — into a world that is very unique. And the more I grew up, the more I saw the difference. There was the outside and there was inside. There was my home and there was the world. And there was a big moment in my adolescence that I didn’t want to be an actor.

Rachel Martin: Oh, is that right?

García Bernal: I was completely and absolutely reluctant to do it because that’s where I was born in a way. That’s the place that was handy for me. So I wanted the challenge of something else. And I had other curiosities with archeology or sociology or anthropology, philosophy, and I studied philosophy in the Mexican National Autonomous University. And so I tried my best to not become an actor. And it was impossible to escape it. For me, it isn’t the acting, it isn’t being on stage. It is the smell of the place. It is like a temple kind of thing. It is the place where I know that everything will be OK. There is this moment of incredible tension and excitement before going on stage, you know, before appearing. And then when you’re there, everything is amazing. Everything is just incredible. So I think I’m the best version of myself because, first of all, I don’t know who I am. So I guess the best of myself, kind of — not shines through, but that’s what we see in an actor when we look at their performances, we know they are someone else.

Martin: I had never thought about it that way, though, that it can seem counterintuitive to say I am the truest, best version of myself when I am acting. That seems like a major contradiction.

García Bernal: Yeah. I think it took me a while to come to terms and also to come at peace with that, because I was reluctant about that. I saw acting as something else when I was young and I started to find like, “Oh, this is quite an existential journey — to interpret someone. And therapeutic as well and cathartic and you can sublimate so many things.”

Question 2: What have you found surprising about getting older?

García Bernal: Now I know how to do things better, but my body’s not responding as it used to, no? So, for example, with football — I play a lot of football and I just gave up because now it hurts. And I get hurt. But I think I play better than ever because now I know where to [go and] what position to be in.

Martin: It’s so cruel.

García Bernal: Yeah, it’s so cruel. So cruel.

Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna speak at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards in September.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

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Question 3: Have your feelings about death changed over time?

García Bernal: Oh, yes, yes. It’s changed a lot. Definitely. I guess the first time for me, and must have been for many, many people as well, is becoming a father, no? Like, for example, somebody the other day was telling me, like, “Does anyone remember the name of the grandfather of your grandfather?” And I was like, “No. I don’t think no one remembers that I know.” Like, wow, it’s crazy how all these things that we’re going to build and all these structures that we fight for or try to achieve…

And so therefore, you see that transcendence is something else, no? And definitely with a baby transcendence is there, no? There is something that is there and will continue and will live and will reproduce and will be something else and you will just admire.

But it is similar to what we do in films, as well. I mean my approach to doing films — and it might sound a little bit presumptuous — but it’s like trying to do something that hopefully has some transcendence. You really want these films to kind of transcend and hopefully be seen in many, many years, because that’s who we were at that point.

Martin: So what does that transcendence mean for you? Like, if you were to be able to convey one thing that lived on after you expire. What is the thing?

García Bernal: Well, fortunately many of the things that I’ve participated in have helped amplify the dimensions of many discussions and of many conversations that had to happen in my time. These films have been emollients or catalysts of something, or have been accompanying certain issues — very interesting concepts of, “What is democracy?” For example, I recommend that film No by Pablo Larraín. We did it in Chile a few years ago and it is about the moment where they ousted Pinochet, the dictator, and it’s incredible the whole sort of anthropological game that is played there because it is a project about democracy. What is democracy, no? And I love doing that. So I wish that all these projects have transcendence that I’m able to grasp as well and to feel, but that when I’m not here anymore, they will be seen as kind of like, “Oh, these guys made their best effort. These guys really tried to do something.”

Question 4: Do you think that there is a part of people that lives on after they die?

García Bernal: Yes, I do. If I don’t enjoy — not believe — but, like, enjoy or dwell on the mystery of things, then I think I wouldn’t be an actor. Because if I had the certainty and I would be like, “I’m only about the facts,” then I would read the phone book. That would be my wonderful, kind of like, joy of reading the phone book. That is real. It’s super real.

So I love the mystery and the poetic behind all of it — but not as a believer. Mostly like that kind of enjoyment or curiosity. Nothing ends. Everything transforms. And that’s a law of physics. And I can feel it.

I mean, there are so many examples I can say, some of them are incredibly personal. But when we knew that my daughter was — that we were pregnant, my father passed away. So it was that kind of, like, tag team (laughs). Yeah.