My good friend and farmer-neighbor Lavell Smythe spilled the beans the other day while we were sitting out on my deck watching twilight settle in across the Heber Valley.
"Lookee down there," he said, pointing at a field just east of us. "See those circles?"Indeed, below us were some orblike patterns in the otherwise regular striations of Emir Wilson's alfalfa crop. It looked like somebody had been cutting doughnuts with their hay mower.
"I've been practicing," Lavell said proudly.
"You mean . . ."
"I'm a crop-circle hooligan," he said.
"No."
"Hey, it's an interesting diversion on dull summer nights," he said, going on to explain how since late spring he and his farmer-cousin, LaVarr, have been loading up a John Deere tractor after dark and driving off to other parts of Utah to create cosmic mayhem in the pastures and fields of their fellow agrarians.
"But why?" I said. "Why prey on the deepest fears and hopes of the human race for the simple thrill of a prank that, quite frankly, is more suited to high-school kids than grown men?"
"Well . . . it's fun! And besides, it addresses the profound spiritual vacuum that's befallen so much of Western civilization since the Industrial Revolution."
"It addresses it how?"
"By bringing it up, that's how. There's a whole religion that revolves around UFOs. Some people just need to believe."
"But you offer no answers," I said. "You merely toy with it. And in a mean way, I might add. Plus I don't particularly like seeing people monkey with the media."
"But it's so easy to do," countered Lavell. "LaVarr and I were watching television do its coverage after we cut the big trident design up in Cache County and we just laughed our butts off!"
"That's a lot of laughing," I said.
"And then we almost died when we read in your newspaper that that woman up there said she felt a change coming - `an Earth change or something' - I believe was the quote."
He took a moment to laugh again, long and low.
"I feel a change coming myself," he said. "A cash-flow change. An increase, to be specific."
"Stop it, Lavell. Surely you're not considering cutting a crop circle in your own field up here and then charging people $1 apiece to step inside its borders like they're doing up in Cache County."
"Are you mad?" he said. "It's going to be $5 a head. And then we'll franchise it out across the country and have a whole chain of crop-circle sightings. LaVarr and I plan to license it quietly to co-conspirators and market it much like the Starbucks coffee chain, which has proven wildly successful in its near-complete domination of the collective java conscience. In fact, we're calling it Starcircles."
I was too aghast to speak and could only stare at him with mouth agape.
"Hey, you're not going to print any of this, are you?" Lavell said, the crow's feet around his eyes taking on big wrinkles of suspicion.
"I don't know, Lavell. Nobody said this was off the record. Were I to keep it quiet, I would need a percentage."
"What kind of percentage?"
"Half at least."
"I'll give you 10 percent."
I laughed, knowing that I had him over a barrel.
We dickered on into the evening, even going out around midnight to cut a circle down on LaRen Provost's place.
There we were whooping it up beneath a big full moon, me, Lavell and LaVarr on LaRen's back 40, making big turns in the alfalfa while we talked business.
I had a pretty good time but never could get them to concede my 50 percent.