Smithsonian Magazine has eight brief essays in its May issue under the general heading “Destination America.” As they put it, “eight beckoning variations on the great American vacation. Their secret ingredient? The unexpected.”
One of the articles, Fielder’s Choice: Dyersville, IA, tells how in “rural Iowa, baseball fans and film buffs alike flock to a divided field of dreams.”
For 15 years now, Dyersville, Iowa, a small farm town (pop. 4,000) 25 miles west of Dubuque, has been a place where a certain breed of American romantic converges. Some 60,000 visitors find their way here each year, traveling country roads and dirt lanes to a site where fantasy and reality intersect. On a five-acre stretch of cornfield just northeast of town, director Phil Alden Robinson filmed Field of Dreams. The 1989 movie starred Kevin Costner as a baseball-obsessed farmer who heeds a disembodied command (“If you build it, he will come”) and sets out to construct a ball field in the middle of nowhere. Today, the diamond built for the film has become a fixed location in the geography of the imagination. Tourists arrive equipped with bats and balls to play catch, sit in bleachers (another relic of the set) or organize teams of strangers in pickup games.
If you saw Field of Dreams, the article may be of particular interest, in part because the field is split between two properties and “the owners hold opposing views of what a visitor’s experience should be.”