On Apollo 11 moon landing anniversary, an astronaut and a farmer meet on a Pa. cornfield of dreams | Maria Panaritis

RONKS, Pa. — This was the last place to be grilling an astronaut about what it was like to dangle high above Earth: But there he was, onetime fighter pilot Alvin Drew, weaving through 10-foot-high cornstalks Thursday, and all because a Lancaster County farmer named Jack Coleman had decided to pay tribute to the 50th anniversary of the moon landing in a spectacularly super-terrestrial way.

Drew, a kid from Washington, D.C., was 7 and drinking Kool-Aid when he watched Neil Armstrong become the first earthling to walk on the moon, on live TV, the night of July 20, 1969. Coleman was 14 and living in central New Jersey as he watched Apollo 11 make history. But thanks to a 5-acre corn maze created this year at Coleman’s Linvilla Orchards-like farm, the two boys met as men to commemorate the otherworldly milestone that so many Americans experienced together a lifetime ago.

We were all sweating buckets in Thursday’s suffocating heat here in Amish country. But there was no better place to be in anticipation of this weekend’s big anniversary.

I was on the same Pennsylvania dirt as a 56-year-old former space shuttle astronaut and a 64-year-old farmer. In our own way, each imagining the world beyond our world. When that happens, there is magic in the air. The things that might divide us instead melt into the horizon of the vast unknown.

Coleman’s corn maze, in the works since last year, was its own extraordinary feat of human ambition: designed and masterfully pruned to resemble, from overhead, a mural of an astronaut, an American flag, and planet Earth.

“When I was flying jets," Drew said as I walked alongside him, "no matter how big or how powerful they were, I always had a satisfying illusion that I was in control of that aircraft. The throttles were making 100,000 pounds of thrust because I was commanding them to do 100,000 pounds of thrust. It was flying 500 knots because I was telling it to go 500 knots.”

But rocketing off a shuttle launchpad toward the heavens? That was some craziness.

“When those rocket motors lit on that shuttle," he said, "I didn’t feel like I was some guy with a silk scarf and a throttle in my hand. It felt more like a tiger kitten in his mother’s mouth being carried along, just kind of limply being pulled along [and thinking], ‘This thing’s either going into space or the Atlantic Ocean. There’s not a thing I can do about it.’ ”

It was a moment, much like when he first spotted the Amazon rainforest during his first space walk, that forces even a ferociously disciplined human into a state of absolute, gobsmacked awe.

“It felt like a magnitude 6 earthquake underneath me at the time," he said of his first takeoff, in Shuttle Endeavor in 2007, chuckling as he recalled the one thought that flooded his Air Force colonel’s mind: “My God, what have I done here?' ”

Amazing in its own right is the story behind how NASA miraculously caught wind of the corn maze at Cherry Crest Adventure Farm, a 300-acre agritainment destination right along the historically preserved (and still running) Strasburg Railroad line. (Drew came up with other NASA folks this week to help the farm honor the space agency this weekend.)

Coleman is a religious man who has been building corn mazes for over two decades on a farm that he and his wife, Donna, bought initially to run as a dairy. For no reason he could trace the origins of, Coleman explained, he had viewed NASA with derision. As an example of government waste.

Until one night late last year.

“I was wrong,” he said. “Dead wrong. NASA benefits every living person on this earth.”

Coleman was an honoree at a local Chamber of Commerce banquet when the man sitting next to him at dinner introduced himself: NASA deputy chief technologist David Steitz, there to give a speech on ways that NASA’s extraterrestrial breakthroughs had led to technology now helping farmers.

Coleman was amazed, just as Steitz, whose own parents were self-employed, was jazzed to hear about the family farm that employed some 200 people.

“You know,” the NASA man told the farmer, jokingly, “you guys should think about doing a corn maze about NASA.”

Coleman stared back at Steitz. “We are,” he said.

“You’re what?” Steitz replied.

“Yeah. We’re doing one for Apollo. We do corn mazes based on great moments in history."

A friendship was born as misconceptions died. And the maze — the farm chooses an elaborate new theme each year — sprouted, too, as the weather warmed.

The sky is a wondrous frontier, which is why the space shuttle era delivered such an adrenaline rush to my generation. We experienced the first shuttle (Columbia, 1981), then the shuttle that exploded in midair while we watched as kids (Challenger, 1986), and all that came after. I told Drew how my jaw dropped last year when I saw, in a Northern Virginia annex of the National Air and Space Museum, the Space Shuttle Discovery with its beautifully blackened belly.

This was the stuff of dreams, you know?

“That was my shuttle,” he said. “The last crew to fly that was my crew.”

On that very shuttle after a long day in space, Drew told me he would spend a few minutes with his legs crossed over its moon-roof windows as they faced down toward Earth. He’d put iPod earbuds in and dial up some music. Then, “watch a lap around the Earth.”

Imagining our world. From beyond our world.

Magic.