Hey Team,

Sorry for keeping you guys in the dark during the whole crop circle adventure. I’ve been living life without the internet all week and let me just be the first to say, “A life without the internet is no life at all.”

Now I’m in the backseat of a Subaru with two spaniels named Bo and Carl jockeying for lap position with Charley. More importantly…I have an internet connection!

Here’s the short version and I’ll give you an update with pictures later tonight or tomorrow morning:

I spent the week in Beulah, MI where I had permission to destroy 80 acres of cover crop (Russian Knapweed) in an effort to “create a crop circle.” I checked out the field in the daylight the first full day I was in town and was super pumped about the prospect of creating my own hundred foot high design in plant life. The crop was waist high and on the dying side and looked like it was going to be perfect! AND, when I walked off the field I discovered it was about 250 ft wide by 2100 ft long so there was plenty of room to do whatever I wanted.

Which was the first problem. When I was confronted with such an open ended blank page full of so many possibilities I suddenly couldn’t decide what to create. Lots of tossed out doodles and MANY suggestions via the twitter faithful later it was coming down to the wire. Darkness was upon us and all of the preparations for the circle had been made…but I still didn’t know what design to imprint on the Earth…

Rough drawings in hand, Team Amtrekker (composed of Amber, Colton and Brandon with Andy joining in later) headed out to the field under cover of night in an effort to be as genuine as possible. The rest of the team pulled out boards and rope to start making our stomping tools while I took a ruler to an extremely rough sketch in an effort to figure out the dimensions of this soon to be nightmare.

As soon as we laid out our first line and started stomping the evil commie weed we knew something wasn’t right. Despite repeated stompings the plants would slowly but surely rise back up like we had never touched them. Ignoring the problem we continued to stomp a large portion of the outline until frustration finally set in. Close to midnight we packed up and decided to reevaluate the situation in daylight.

But of course the next morning when I showed up to the field with Amber and Colton it was impossible to tell we had even been there the previous night. Armed with new tools but unsure even that would work we stared at the field for awhile listing all of the problems…including, even if we DID find a way to make it work how in the world were we going to get a picture of it?!

As a side effect to my rampant optimism, when I’m confronted with that many problems at once I tend to break things into tiny pieces until I find something I CAN do.

“Okay, let’s take the twine and stakes and lay this out.”

“But how are we going to get the plants to lay down?”

“Don’t know.”

“How are we going to get a picture of it when we’re done.”

“I don’t know. Where’s the twine?”

I’ll leave you there for now, Team. Carl seems kind of fed up with all the attention Charley is getting.

I’ll be back soon.

Brett.

Just for the record. Bookingbuddy really is a pretty rad website if you’re looking to plan a trip. It actually allows you to search most of the top website from one location. Pretty handy! But more importantly…our new affiliation with bookingbuddy.com means all you have to do to help out Amtrekker is click on one of their ads and sign up for an awesome newsletter filled with travel deals! Thanks everyone!

Thanks!

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 3:52 pm.