Hey! Is this heaven? It's Iowa. Three and a half thousand miles of driving ends in a cornfield. The Field of Dreams. Pretty as the picture but harder to get to.
Getting there. Up through Illinois. Across the Mississippi into Iowa, trundling through the broad still fields to sleepy Dyersville. Is this heaven? Perhaps. If the town has a Norman Rockwell innocence about it, well in the late evening when the dark red barns in the fields have shadows playing on them the whole place looks like an Edward Hopper painting.
This is pre-depression America. They have communities and neighbours and preachers and John Deere tractors and all sorts of things that are extinct everywhere else.
Out the way you go, till you find Lansing Road. Then it's just a task of following the signs till you hit the field, a perfect green baseball diamond with red dust paths between the bases and walls of corn marking the perimeter. There are a couple of picturesque wooden bleachers and just across from first base Don and Becky Lansing's farmhouse home looms with improbable grace.
The baseball diamond was created for something as phoney as a Hollywood movie. A carful of movie types saw the fields and knolls here and screeched to a halt. They knew they had arrived at the soul of America. Given that they were about to make a movie as dripping with sentiment and nostalgia as Field Of Dreams they knew they had found perfection.
So Kevin Costner came and sat on the swing on Don and Becky's porch (although Don hadn't met Becky then, but it's a movie story), and Shoeless Joe Jackson and the disgraced 1919 Chicago White Sox walked out of the corn and began playing, and James Earl Jones smiled and everyone shed a tear.
The field has survived as a sort of shrine to serenity and nostalgia. If you care about sport and yearn for the old days when it was about decency and love and honour, then this little field has come to symbolise defiance. Odd.
The movie was released late in the April 1989 and on May 5th, scarcely two weeks later, Don Lansing looked out his window and saw a man standing gazing at the field.
Being an incurably friendly man, Don strolled out to meet the stranger. He was a New Yorker, driving across country and had travelled a deal out of his way to come and inhale the serenity here. Fancy that. Don shook his hand and the fellow was scarcely gone when the stream of people began driving through Dyersville looking for Don's field. Hard on 60,000 a year come here now, which isn't bad given that Dyersville is a good day's drive from the middle of nowhere.
By their thousands Americans drive up dusty Lansing Road and walk onto this little green baseball diamond and just stand and reflect on their lives. They cry, they hug, they take their baseball gloves out of their big cars and they toss the cowhide around in the sunlight.
What's it about? Not Kevin Costner and not Shoeless Joe. It's about touching a simpler past, about watching the shadows lengthen across a baseball diamond, hearing the crickets sing and the brook flowing, it's about fathers playing catch with sons, it's about knowing the world your grandfather knew. It's nostalgia, atonement, reconciliation, a little arbour where America isn't quite so 21st century, where the world isn't quite so striving.
America is a young country but pushing on now and this is the youth it claims for itself: Dairy Queens and homecomings and pastures filled with shy, good men in shirtsleeves playing baseball when the work is done.
Hey! Is this heaven?
It's America. America 2000.
There's trouble in paradise, of course. When the movie people came here they loved it. Just love it Don! Phil Robertson, the director, made his deal with Don Lansing and was content until he saw his first sunset. Then nothing would suffice but to move the diamond to the west a little so that the light would last longer and shine more golden until the sun dwindled behind the little hills.
So now, all the bases are on Don Lansing's land but left of centrefield belongs to the Ameskamps. An electricity line runs over the field and marks the dividing line. It has become border.
When you turn in off Lansing Road you have two options, two parallel roads which you can choose. Head for the little red concession stand which Don Lansing runs and which matches the rusty colour of his majestic barns, or head for the somewhat gaudier and more sprawling affair run by the Milwaukee conglomerate to whom the Ameskamps have sold their interest in the field.
Must be something in the way we were reared but we head straight for the big ugly shop and buy some big fizzy Cokes.
The woman in the shop is Ole Minnie Hustle, beside herself with hunger for dollars. For five bucks she'll take your picture in a Field of Dreams baseball uniform. She has T-shirts the logos of which change colour in the sun, the corn goes from green to yellow, men step out of corn fields etc, etc. We explain that we don't have sun in Ireland, but she is undeterred. Maniacally she whips down a T-shirt, begs us to look at it and then runs out to the sunshine to achieve the full effect before sprinting back in breathlessly shouting "the men come out of the corn. See."
Ah yes.
"Or maybe you all would prefer this one." And she's gone again.
Finally she corrals us into parting with a fistful of dollars for the chance to wander through the Field of Dreams maze (sponsored by Garst). The maze is cut into the big cornfield which borders left field. Wandering lost through the corn on a hot summers day in Iowa could be fun if you weren't paranoid about bugs and insects that bite.
We grasp one of the little maps on offer and march into the corn following the directions painstakingly as we swat at flies, mosquitoes and other things which are threatening us with Hitchcockian menace. We emerge from the maze about 10 minutes later, keenly aware from the sour looks that we have failed to enter into the spirit of the thing. Corn flakes.
By now it is almost six o'clock and we have been promised a spectacular, an extravaganza. There is a corporate outing to this pastoral idyll, indeed the corporate types have begun grazing in a little hospitality tent a few yards away. For their benefit at six, or whenever they are done grazing, the Field Of Dreams players will walk out of the corn and play a little ball as the sun sets. It won't be much of a show because once you have walked out of the corn well there's not lot else to do except try out your James Earl Jones impressions and say gravely: "build it and they will come."
Besides, the players are restricted to ghosting about in left field. The rest of the field is being carefully cut, rolled and manicured right now by a man on a little John Deere mower. Every now and then he tugs the brim of his sky blue baseball cap down over his eyes and looks balefully at the little carnival on the other side of the field.
We stand watching him lovingly rake the basepaths and meticulously trim the grass. He checks the little wooden bleachers where Kevin Costner himself carved the words "Ray loves Annie" one day between takes (Ray and Annie being the Costner character and his wife in the movie), and he moves behind home plate checking for discarded butts and other rubbish.
Finally Becky Lansing approaches and strikes up some chat. Becky could talk for Iowa. She's been to Ireland and has a soft spot for us and invites us to sit on her porch and sit on her swing like Ray and Annie.
This is her home. In the evenings Don and Becky Lansing sit right out here on the swing on the porch of their sweet wooden farmhouse and gaze across the swales of corn at the failing sun and give thanks. Becky frets about the tall slender trees which have been growing here for the 96 years that the Lansing family have lived here. Two or three of them are dying each summer now and there is a little sadness that goes with each fallen beauty.
Don was born in this house and played among these trees and played his first baseball in the yard just here. He remembers running home through the cornfield by the house, the territory of the corn ran right over where the baseball diamond is now. It was an idyllic existence and he feels honoured late in life to be sharing it with so many folks.
"Well I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm just glad to have the company."
Don and Becky are idealists about the field. In 1996 they went to court to fight the Ameskamps' attempt to rezone their portion of the land from agricultural to commercial. The people who now run leftfield and centrefield have plans of which the maze and the corporate gigs are just the start. Batting cages and other baseball diamonds and celebrity games and baseball schools would all be part of the package.
Don Lansing shrugs. He's getting on now and he's so polite and old worldly that he asks permission to shake your hand, apologising because he's just been handling garbage. His eyes are an odd swimming pool blue and when he looks across the field at the corporate chaps tossing the balls about he shakes his head.
"Me and Becky are happy to just share this place. All my life I grew up here, so quiet and all and so beautiful and then this happened and suddenly people wanted to come here. We're happy to have them. I'm so glad to look out here and see people around enjoying what I've enjoyed. We weren't meant to make money out of all this. This is just a blessing. That stuff that goes on over there," and he jerks his head westward, "that's not what this place is about, it's not what my family was ever about."
Their little store helps them pay for the maintenance of the place but they've never wanted to charge admission and never will. Most of the day they just spend talking with folk and welcoming them. You grow up in Iowa and suddenly you are shaking hands with the world.
"It's an honour and a pleasure I tell ya," says Don.
"You know," says Becky, "we have no children and this place is like a child to us. In summer we can't go far. We like to be here. All we ask is that everyone respects our child."
And she laughs happily. Don and Becky know that in the business of the Field Of Dreams they hold the aces. And if anyone ever asks (as they often do) about the climax of the movie when those 1,500 or so cars came rolling down the path towards the field, well, it was Don driving the first one.
Don and Becky's side of the field will always have the diamond, the barns, the farmhouses and the beauty and in the evenings when the work is done and the cash tills are still ringing across the way they will always sit on the porch and watch the sunsets, because nobody owns them.
And more importantly, perhaps, the place would lose its magic if there weren't two old romantics like Don and Becky sitting on their porch presiding over it all. They guard the last piece of sporting America that isn't grasping and greedy and "show me the money" vulgar.
Slightly embarrassed at our unwitting treachery we shake hands goodbye and traipse back to our car, parked prominently outside the mini mart in leftfield. We turn and head home towards Chicago. Out the back window, Don and Becky are waving. They wave till we can see them no more.
Series concludes
