England has its crop circles — large mysterious disks of flattened grass in otherwise pristine fields. Chile has the Nazca plain, with its giant earthen drawings that are only visible from the air.
And Sebastopol? Well, Sebastopol has the Crop Circles of Furlong Road, thanks to property owner Neil Davis, age 87, who has been busily geo-scaping his property for the amusement of local pilots since 2011.
Though he calls them crop circles, the earthworks on his five-acre farm west of Sebastopol are little more Nazca-like in style and, like the Nazca lines, they’re only visible from the air.
“From ground level, it just looks like a bunch of weeds,” he told a reporter back in 2011, when his quixotic exploits landed him in Leah Garchik’s column in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Davis has created three crop circles thus far, though only two are complete. Those two feature geometric lines and circles interspersed with random symbols — hearts, a yin-yang sign, a ribbon for breast cancer awareness, what might be a spider web, and simple, cheerful words like “Love” and “Hi.”
Davis, whose name you may recognize from Sonoma West’s letters column, carved his crop circles using a riding mower and a weed eater. “Hours and hours” is how he described his experience making a crop circle with a weed eater.
His riding mower remains his tool of choice.
“Who knew when my tobacco-chewing Uncle Wysong in Indiana would let me ride on his hay-baler when I was a little boy that I would pay it forward with my 4-year-old grandson Nicholas, sitting on my lap, steering my mini-rider mower. There is no greater joy,” he said.
Davis said he “primes his canvas by hand-sprinkling pasture grass seed to get an even growth.”
How did he make all those nice straight lines? His answer may solve one of the great mysteries of the Nazca plain.
“My daughter Jama would stand over on the horizon, waving her arms so I could get a straight line of sight,” he said.
“Crop circles are done blind,” Davis said. “To see them takes an airborne village, plus a flight plan and even then it’s chancy.”
“There’s a short window of good light,” he said, noting that the pilots have to fly over during the brief time when there are no shadows.
Davis got his first good look at his handiwork in 2011, when Melinda Gay, the marketing coordinator at Charles M. Schultz Airport, enlisted her husband, photographer Garry Gay, and pilots Bob Gallagher and Larry Wasem to fly over and snap some photos.
In thanks for their help, Davis dedicated a corner of his next crop circle to the airport and decorated it with planes, a tower, a sky lounge, and Charlie Brown-like interjections like “Fooey” and “Augh!”
Pilots came out and took pictures of those as well. (You can see versions of these two crop circles on YouTube. Search on “Neil Davis Crop Circles.”)
A few years later, he got really ambitious and tried to do a “Downtown Abbey”-themed crop circle. Davis said he roughed it out, but “My bad shoulder gave out doing the 70-some windows in Highclere Castle, plus the weather changed.”
He figures he’s got one more crop circle in him. What’s the theme going to be? He’s not saying.
“Stay tuned.”
