From the air, it looks as if a giant, heavy hand reached down and touched this spot, leaving a set of fingerprints in deep, grass-covered grooves of earth. On the ground, it's impossible to see that the circular forms make a straight line; each one is obscured from the others by the rolling contours of the Sierra Nevadas. Standing at the head of the path, the structure resembles a turf maze -- a winding, unbranching path that twists between two earth walls to a small open space in the center.
James Sanders
The seven-ring Cretan labyrinth.
James Sanders
Dr. Alex Champion.
James Sanders
Dr. Alex Champion.
James Sanders
Dr. Alex Champion.
James Sanders
Champion walking the labyrinth at St. Mary's Square.
James Sanders
The ribbon cutting at St. Mary's Square.
James Sanders
Champion walks the labyrinth game he designed for
the Chinatown Playground.
James Sanders
John Thomas, a landscape architect for the city and
longtime supporter of Champion's work.
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Dr. Alex Champion stands at the beginning of one of the labyrinths he has built. Before he takes the first step, he pauses a second, murmurs something under his breath, and dangles a pink crystal from the end of a silver chain. The semiprecious pendulum -- a carnival trinket to most eyes -- hangs still, then starts swinging around in a slow clockwise circle. Champion nods, puts the charm into the breast pocket of his maroon flannel shirt, and enters the turf-walled walkway, his boots carrying his sturdy frame forward in a swift, even stride.
Champion, 62, was once a microbiologist, and is now one of the most recognized names on the shortlist of modern labyrinth builders in the world. He dug this structure himself, with just a shovel, two decades ago, but the design -- a seven-ring-style labyrinth named after the Greek island of Crete -- is ancient. These patterns have appeared through the ages in art, architecture, literature, myth, and religion; this particular one represents the labyrinth at its most primitive. The spiraling form appears in etchings and artifacts of cultures around the globe -- from native North Americans to the indigenous peoples of Scandinavia. The shape appears everywhere to Champion -- in knotted wood grains and constellations, in cloud formations and DNA. And it appears here, a few hundred yards from the front steps of his home in the hills above the Anderson Valley near Philo, its waist-high walls made from a few hundred thousand pounds of dirt, the whole structure a few hundred feet wide.
Champion's "earthworks," as he calls them, are most easily understood as enormous, interactive turf sculptures. Most of them fit the traditional definition of a labyrinth: a single path that winds from the entrance to the center. Unlike a maze -- which obscures the route from Point A to Point B through confusing choices (like the hedge maze at the end of The Shining) -- a labyrinth is made from one lane that you follow to the center and then retread to the beginning. Though the exact purpose of ancient labyrinths is unknown, today people walk them for religious or spiritual meditation, creative stimulation, and stress relief. In Champion's signature labyrinths, the trail is formed between grassy mounds about 4 feet high. The Cretan design that he walks today is a sentimental favorite -- and one that he believes holds mystical, sacred power.
Champion walks the path at least once every day, usually with his wife, Joan, to meditate and exercise, pray and plan. His life has taken him from the quantifiable pursuits of science, calculated under a microscope, to ones with more metaphysical goals. His current project is his biggest yet: a series of public art projects that will span the United States at the 39th latitude, with the aim of inspiring an extensive cultural awakening though labyrinth walking. Champion has earned a reputation among the rapidly growing society of enthusiasts as the "grandfather of the labyrinth movement" in the States; he has built 40 such structures in the Bay Area, two within San Francisco. In a field in which eccentricity is nearly a prerequisite, he is an eccentric among eccentrics. "He doesn't march to the beat of his own drummer," says Gael Hancock, board member and public relations chairman of the 800-member international Labyrinth Society. "Alex doesn't even hear a drummer."
When Champion approaches the first turn, he slows a bit. "Now see, here," he says, reaching to the top of his head, where his youthful dark brown hair stands in haphazard disarray. "I'm starting to feel something." Often when he walks a labyrinth he feels nothing special; the walk is just a tool for meditation. But sometimes the stroll brings Champion to the outer reaches of metaphysical rapture: He'll be overwhelmed by the sensation of energy from the earth or local spirits, or he'll have visions.
"A labyrinth experience happens when you don't expect it to," Champion says. "Those are the nature of labyrinth experiences. Those are what people keep coming back to."
Though Champion will concede that he is into "some pretty esoteric stuff," he comes across more as a cheery, chubby retiree than a New Age mystic. He wears jeans and work boots, flannel shirts and a gray stocking cap. He enjoys The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, the occasional Bombay Sapphire martini, the San Francisco 49ers, a good meal followed by black coffee, and pointing his white Toyota mini-pickup toward Ukiah for a movie every once in a while. He refers to himself as "independently lower middle class," in part for comic effect, and laughs hard and loud at his own jokes.
As he walks through his labyrinths, he points out the new vegetation that has sprung up using genus names: Arctostaphylos, Anaphalis margaritacea. He picked up this habit as a boy growing up outside Dayton, Ohio, where he and his father, a doctor, kept a garden together and scoured the hills surrounding their home in search of rare violets. This is what inspired Champion's interest in the natural sciences, which led him to study biochemistry at Cornell University in upstate New York and eventually brought him to the West Coast, where he got an advanced degree at UC Berkeley under the notable microbiologist Michael Doudoroff. It was outside Doudoroff's office one spring day in 1970 that he noticed a young secretary named Joan and asked her to lunch. After Champion finished his postdoc work -- which produced his most widely published contribution to the scientific world, a heady document titled "Evolution in Pseudomonas Fluorescens" that ran in the Journal of General Microbiology -- he and Joan married and moved to a little house in Albany, where they raised Joan's two children from her previous marriage and had a daughter of their own, Becky.
After a few "wandering years" in which he took odd jobs as a carpenter, Champion entered the corporate world of science, studying blood platelets at Berkeley's Cutter Laboratories. Joan, an artist, got work doing technical graphic design for scientific publications. When Champion talks about his career in the sciences and the straight-laced suburban life, it's as if he's speaking about a different lifetime. It is hard to imagine this man -- who can speak earnestly about the power waves of mound energy while wearing an oversized flannel shirt and well-worn jeans -- in the lab coat of his past.
"A scientist has to be able to learn things slowly, to make trial and error and study those errors closely," he says. "That's the nature of science. But there was so much wasted time, and gradually it just began to rub me the wrong way. Besides, I get much more satisfaction out of the physical world. I've always enjoyed working with realthings. I enjoy doingthings."
In the fall of 1986, Alex and Joan were introduced to labyrinths while vacationing in England. Immediately Champion likened the ancient, twisting forms to the natural structures he knew at the micro level -- the hexagonal composition of ice, the tetrahedral form of a molecule made of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms, the alpha helix of proteins.
Soon after the trip to England, Champion built a small labyrinth garden next to his house in Albany, then left his job at Cutter to make a profession out of his obsession. "The progression was sort of gradual," he says. "I had worked in academia, and that rubbed me the wrong way, too. You're either an assistant professor or you're garbage." After studying and visiting the Great Serpent Mound, an ancient Native American burial mound in southern Ohio, he decided to make his labyrinths from embanked earth.
One of his first clients was his next-door neighbor, Nobel Laureate Kary B. Mullis. ("I was his TA at Berkeley," Champion boasts playfully. "And I only taught him 10 percent of everything I know.") Champion started building his structures for friends around Northern California, at New Age retreats and community centers. With a motto of "Have shovel, will travel," he founded Earth Symbols, the first professional turf-labyrinth-building company in the country (today there are a handful of landscape architects who double as labyrinth makers), and started seeking commissions at about $1,000 apiece.
Some of his designs are simple -- painted forms on concrete small enough to be walked in a few minutes. Others, like the set outside his home in Philo, are landscaped patterns that span thousands of square feet. He has created nearly 100 major labyrinths around the world, including one on the shores of Lake Merritt that got the attention of the New York Times.
"In the late '80s the labyrinths became central to my life," Champion says. "I literally became obsessed with them."
"I never questioned what Alex was doing," Joan says. "Because I knew Alex, and I knew he was doing something he thought he had to do."
Local author and labyrinth facilitator Ulrica Hume understands Champion's transformation. "You don't just find out about labyrinths," she says. "They find you."
Alex Champion had been found.
In creating a new labyrinth, Champion follows a procedure of his own invention. He uses a technique called dowsing -- an ancient practice most commonly associated with detecting underground water sources, similar to the Chinese practice of feng shui -- to find the right location and orientation. Then he draws the shape on the ground with spray paint, digs dirt from the path with a shovel, and carefully shapes it into the walls with a special tamper that he designed. He places PVC pipes throughout the mounds to provide drainage channels, and lines the paths underfoot with a special mesh to discourage a labyrinth builder's biggest adversary, the gopher.
After years of designing, building, and traversing the forms, Champion can walk the Cretan labyrinth outside his Philo home with his eyes closed. This was the first labyrinth he ever shaped out of the ground, and he finds small flaws as he walks: The path is a little too narrow here, the turn a little too sharp there. He first cut the shape into the grass with a lawn mower and later dug it out alone -- a backbreaking process for one person given that the walls are made from an estimated 120-plus tons of dirt. Champion has since learned to bring in others to help with the construction.
He jokes about what he calls the "All-Labyrinth" team -- based on NFL commentator John Madden's "All-Madden" team -- a group of assistants he has had over the years. He rattles off the names and laughs about their valuable characteristics: the husband of a patron in Santa Rosa who was president of a meatpackers' union, a team of burly lesbians in Livermore who helped him dig out a form in a day, an assistant to his installation in Oakland who had a tireless dual capacity for digging and smoking weed.
Champion keeps a bound scrapbook of his projects on the coffee table in his study, with hundreds of other books lining the walls from floor to ceiling. There are volumes of James Joyce and Don DeLillo, scientific journals, books on New Age spirituality and religion, the complete set of Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations With Godseries, and a copy of Macs for Dummies. He thumbs through the scrapbook, pointing out projects that were memorable for one reason or another, but admits that without it "they all kind of blur together."
Some of the designs are archetypal forms with long historical traditions, like the Cretan labyrinth; others are Champion's own -- combinations of natural geometric shapes that improvise on traditional patterns, like the "Seven-Pointed Star W Circle," and his recent darling, the "Flower Wand." The sheer number of Champion's creations is a big part of the reason why Northern California is a hub of the labyrinth movement, but his experimentation with the form has him somewhat at odds with the practice's historians.
"Alex is one of the pioneers of the labyrinth field in America," says Jeff Saward, an Englishman who is, by many accounts, the pre-eminent historian in the field. Saward's Web site (www.labyrinthos.net) is an authoritative source for the international community of labyrinth scholars, as is the periodical he edits devoted to the study, Caerdroia (the name refers to the map of the seven-walled city of Troy). Though Saward and Champion have sparred about the classification and nomenclature of traditional labyrinth styles, Saward respects Champion's designs. The two men met first at the Labyrinth '91 conference Saward hosted in Saffron Walden, England, when, according to Saward, Champion "was still a 'new boy' on the labyrinth scene, full of his boundless enthusiasm." Saward goes on, "All these years on, he still has that enthusiasm!
"Many consider themselves 'old hands' if they have been working with labyrinths for more than five years," Saward says. "Alex has been on the case for nearly 20 years. Alex is merely continuing a long-founded tradition of continual change and evolution in labyrinth design, but a tradition that is forever revisiting its roots for inspiration and the key elements that make certain groups of designs appealing to a new generation."
One key person in that new generation is Dr. Lauren Artress, a local Episcopal priest who, after reading Champion's self-published first book, Earth Mazes, met him at his home in Philo to learn more. Artress went on to found San Francisco's most visible and accessible labyrinth community at Grace Cathedral in Nob Hill. In the early '90s, she led the church in installing a permanent indoor labyrinth on its floor and an outdoor replica of a labyrinth found in the cathedral in Chartres, France, in its meditation garden.
Since then, Artress has formally educated more than 1,500 people about the history and spiritual rewards of labyrinth walking, and informally introduced labyrinth walking to countless others who have happened upon the structures at Grace Cathedral. "She is more responsible than anyone else for getting the labyrinth back into the church," Champion says of Artress. Now she splits her time between her priesthood at Grace and her company, Veriditas ("The Voice of the Labyrinth Movement"), a society that holds informational seminars to educate the public about labyrinth history and train people to install and manage labyrinths when they return home.
Artress concedes that some of Champion's contemporary designs and his esoteric spirituality might be a little daunting to mainstream types, but she believes that the quality of his permanent structures puts him at the head of a small field of expert builders. "It's very important to teach people about what labyrinth they're walking and the differences between walking the archetypal, ancient labyrinths and the other, contemporary labyrinths, like the ones that Alex designs," Artress says. "We know what the archetypal labyrinths can do -- it helps people organize chaos, to find order within themselves or with the outside world. [The contemporary labyrinths] are more difficult. We really don't know the effect of them."
Artress' work has been crucial in bringing labyrinths into everyday culture, and she sees the public interest growing rapidly away from the fringes of the New Age movement. Two weeks ago, for example, she held a seminar with 50 participants from as far away as Australia and as near as Oakland.
"It is an effort to help people sort out what a labyrinth is," Artress says. "But that is still something that can be hard to understand for the public. My purpose is to educate people as to what they can be, and ground them in the understanding of the labyrinths. Alex is a builder and a designer. He creates the tools. I teach people how to use them."
When asked about the growth of the labyrinth movement that Champion introduced her to almost a decade ago, her reply is simple: "It's huge."
"It's growing by leaps and bounds every day," Artress says. "Locally, what happened was, once we put a labyrinth in at Grace Cathedral, it really grounded the experience for people. People had a reliable place to go -- and they had a place they could go whenever they wanted to. But Alex's work was a precursor to all of that."
On a surprisingly sunny day in Chinatown, Champion leads a small parade through a labyrinth of his own design commissioned by the city of San Francisco for the renovation of St. Mary's Square. The design is much different from the ones that surround his home in Philo; it is flat, painted with red, green, and yellow tennis court paint in a public area at the back of the park, in the shape of a huge seven-petal flower, a design he calls the "Seven Petal Vesica." He tromps around the elaborate path, leading the Rev. Norman Fong and a small congregation of onlookers having what appears to be their first labyrinth experience.
Champion wears the same outfit he wore when we toured his home -- an oversized maroon flannel shirt and jeans -- with two exceptions: In place of work boots are his "fancy shoes," a pair of leather dress shoes, and under the flannel his T-shirt is decorated with spiraling Cretan labyrinths. When we meet he proudly unbuttons his flannel to show off the T, sticking out his chest and holding his shirt open for a second like a superhero displaying his emblem.
John Thomas, a landscape architect for the city and county of San Francisco, watches nearby. To Thomas, a soft-spoken civil servant, the parade might seem a little absurd, but he has long been a supporter of Champion's work, and over the past decade they have become friends. Champion's role in the $1.3 million renovation of St. Mary's was thanks in part to Thomas, who first came to know the labyrinth maker when they worked together on the Lake Merritt project.
"The most interesting and beneficial aspect of [Champion's works] to me is that you can use them or interact with them in so many ways," Thomas says. "Someone who is familiar with the history of the mazes might ... know how to walk it, but what's so beneficial from the standpoint of their public use is the range of ways they can be interpreted by the public. It has an open-ended quality."
After Thomas helped secure funding for the project on the shores of Lake Merritt, he commissioned Champion to design a paved labyrinth on the Chinatown Playground (three blocks from St. Mary's). For Champion's commission at St. Mary's Square, which blooms among the concrete skyscrapers of downtown, Thomas recognized that the large pattern would also benefit those in the offices above. With the completion of this latest work, Thomas is now seeking approval for a Champion labyrinth at San Francisco's Potrero del Sol Park, on 26th Street in Potrero Hill.
"The multidimensional uses are key to understanding the mazes in public spaces," Thomas says. "It is playful, but there is gravity to it -- which I think in a way are qualities that Alex himself has. There is a playful, youthful quality to Alex, as well as the biochemist, who understands these forms in a much more scientific sense. To me that is interesting about Alex and his work. His work is rich in the varieties of cognitive ways that you can interact with it. A 4-year-old might say, 'My God, look at this colorful pattern on the ground,' and simply run around the edge of it. Or you can have someone who has a more learned understanding of what they're encountering, who might interact with it as Alex would intend. There is no admission requirement except to enjoy it."
As Alex Champion makes the final, seventh turn of the Cretan labyrinth at his home and approaches the center, he's meditative, concentrating on the massive amount of work that lies ahead. With his most recent project, which he calls the "Art Line," Champion aims to organize the construction of a series of public labyrinth installations along the 39th latitude -- first across the United States and then around the world. The idea came to him after he saw an aerial photograph of his home and realized for the first time that the sites of his labyrinths made a perfectly straight line. After tracing the line from California to New Jersey, Champion realized that it intersected other existing labyrinths in the country, including the Great Serpent Mound.
"I dreamt of the line, with [a labyrinth] on each end," Champion says, "and how powerful the energy from a project of this scale could be. I saw light descending down from the top of the Earth. Sometimes when [I'm on the line] I close my eyes and I [get] this vision of energy coming down from above and entering the top of my head and going out through my feet and recycling in a loop. The whole goal of this thing has to do with the energy pulses."
The line also intersects the White House, the National Cathedral, and the Naval and Air Force academies, all of which affirmed its significance and power to Champion. "We originally wanted to call it the 'Peace Line,'" he says. "But we knew the White House wouldn't want anything to do with peace."
The practical goal of the project (aside from the energy pulses) is to facilitate the installation of a large-scale public art piece in each of the 15 states that the 28-mile-wide line intersects. But its goal, to Champion himself, is much bigger than that.
"When I looked at it, I saw enormous energy pulses and knew that we needed to build it," he says. "I know there would be so much energy in this thing and it would light up."
It's more difficult to scoff at such statements than one would think because of the conviction with which Champion says them. "I know some of these things might sound crazy," Joan Champion says, "but I also know Alex, and I know he is not crazy."
Lauren Artress hardly considers the "Art Line" crazy. She values it as an important symbol of the growing interest in her practice. "Something like [the 'Art Line'] would help ground the movement across the country, help raise awareness about how labyrinths can be a real part of people's everyday lives."
So far the Labyrinth Society has embraced the project, and Alex and Joan Champion have signed on a team of 12 other artists along the line to assist local construction efforts. They are currently seeking nonprofit status and lobbying for commissions in communities across the 15 states.
"I have followed the progress of the Artline Project since its beginning and I am always fascinated to hear of new sites being added to the line," Jeff Saward writes via e-mail. "The installation of circuitous labyrinths in a linear alignment across a continent will surely enter the folklore of labyrinth legend in the future."
"Alex is a very determined person," says the Labyrinth Society's Gael Hancock. "Sometimes he's so stubborn that you want to hit him with a frozen fish, but it's [because of] that stubbornness and determination to see his plans through that he completes what he sets out to do."
Regardless of whether the "Art Line" fulfills Champion's mystical vision, he has already achieved something extraordinary. His works are at once hills of dirt reshaped into compelling artworks and allegorical monuments to others like him, seekers on a meandering path. With his labyrinths, Champion has -- literally and figuratively -- made a lasting signature.
As he reaches the center of the Cretan labyrinth, he looks east and faces his own shadow, growing longer with the angle of the afternoon sun, rising and falling across the deep grooves of the earthwork's walls. Soon he will return to the head of the trail, where he began, but first he pauses for a moment to gaze in the direction of his other labyrinths, which form a straight line that points across the Anderson Valley, toward the tireless Sierras and the dark plains beyond.
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