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A Diamond That's Forever
It's been 16 years since Field of Dreams made grown men weep into their baseball mitts. So what is that magic out there in the moonlight that keeps bringing people back to Iowa? By BROOKE HAUSER December 2005/ January 2006 issue After the death of her first husband, Becky DuBuisson started having a recurring dream. In it, she was eating a hot dog and drinking root beer in the bleachers overlooking a baseball diamond in the cornfields. The time was midnight on New Year's Eve. The place was the Field of Dreams—the plot of land featured in the 1989 movie that has since become a tourist attraction, thanks to the two owners who have kept much of the original film set intact. Haunted by the vision, DuBuisson, who was living in Colorado at the time, knew what she had to do, though she didn't yet know why. With her aunt as her companion, she drove to Dyersville, Iowa, where she stopped to call Don Lansing—the single farmer who ran right field—to ask if she could visit. Never mind the odd hour or the snow piling up on the bases. Destiny had summoned her to Iowa, and when she arrived, DuBuisson found her future. "I've been waiting for you," Lansing greeted her, a perfect stranger. The next year, on February 10, 1996, they married. ***
Like Ray Liotta's Shoeless Joe, who took a hiatus from heaven to play baseball in someone's backyard, Field of Dreams has been blessed with an afterlife so surreal you have to see it to believe it. Sixteen years following the movie's release, its audience continues to multiply at locustlike rates. In 2004, Universal sold almost one million copies of a two-disc anniversary edition DVD of the baseball classic. And every year, from April through November, approximately 65,000 people from around the world travel to Dyersville—a town previously best known for its National Farm Toy Museum—to play pickup games on the same field where Kevin Costner saw the ghosts of the shamed Chicago Black Sox. "There are a handful of sacred places in the world: the Wailing Wall, the Blarney Stone. This is, in my opinion, one of those places," Becky Lansing (formerly DuBuisson) says, sitting in the shade of the white clapboard house that sheltered the Kinsella family (Costner, Amy Madigan, and a young Gaby Hoffman) in the film. It's late in July on a day so hot it could pop corn, but tourists are still arriving in droves, fulfilling what James Earl Jones famously predicted at the end of the movie: "People will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom."  FIELD STUDIES: Father and baseball-impaired daughter. Off Route 136, we turn right at the pig farm, and here we are. We've never been the sort to go on a cruise or any kind of packaged vacation, but suddenly we find ourselves surrounded by gung-ho tour groups (mostly Japanese, although there is the occasional busload of spry senior citizens) wearing T-shirts that read "Is this heaven? No . . . it's Iowa " and "If you build it . . . they will come." Adding to our suspicion of the place is the fact that in recent years the press has had a field day, so to speak, with the rift between the two landowners. While the Lansings want to maintain a modest operation, their former neighbor, a widow named Rita Ameskamp, threw a wrench in the wheel when she began leasing her part of the field to an investment group with plans to expand the site into a quasi-theme park. Neither party charges an admission fee; instead, they both accept donations and run competing gift shops. And just so the property lines don't blur, there are two separate driveways leading to the attraction: The Lansings' entrance is marked "Field of Dreams Movie Site," not to be confused with "Left and Center Field of Dreams." (Asked about her feud with the Lansings, Ameskamp, a soft-spoken and attractive older woman, frowns and says, "Well, that I'll never understand 'cause I've been a twin. I've learned to share. I don't even like the word 'feud.' ") The good news is, most visitors don't seem to care about the dispute, and after a while, neither do I. The catalyst for my mood change is Libby Schieffer, a grandmother of 19 who has driven up from Keokuk, Iowa, for a family wedding party. Wearing a pink blouse, her hands folded coolly in her lap, she looks out of place sitting in the bleachers with a bunch of bikers in Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts. But she has a special reason for being at the Field of Dreams. Tucked in her purse is a photograph of her late father, taken circa 1910. "My dad was so proud of being a pitcher on a ball team," she says, admiring the young man in the pinstriped uniform as if he were one of her grandkids. "When I was born, he was hoping that I'd be a boy 'cause he wanted to teach me how to pitch. I only have one sister, and when she was born, he cried. But when I was eleven or twelve, Daddy made sure that he took me to see Babe Ruth. And I thought, 'I've got to bring my dad here.' " With that, she smooths her pants and waves to her relatives as she crosses the outfield. She hesitates for a moment at the edge of the grass, a rocky shore leading into an endless sea of corn, before sticking her hand between two sky-high rows-and when nothing happens, Libby Schieffer and her father walk right in. ***
Over the years, my father has developed a deft way of telling a baseball anecdote to the two people in the world who couldn't care less—my mother and me. He starts with a slow windup: "You remember Ty Cobb. We saw his plaque at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. . . ." Then he delivers the pitch: "He was nicknamed the Georgia Peach, but there was nothing sweet about him. Ty Cobb was the nastiest player who ever lived. He used to sharpen the spikes on his cleats so that when he stole bases, he'd tear holes in the other guy's flesh." Finally, sensing our waning interest, he makes the plea: "Okay, just stay with me here," he'll say, as if he were an ER doctor, and we two flatlining patients. "It's almost over." Poor Dad. Since the beginning, the odds have been against him. He should have realized he was in trouble when on one of his first dates with my mother, a blond and blue-eyed Jew from New Jersey, she boasted about her connection to Hank Aaron. "He's my cousin," she said. "Your cousin?" Dad asked, perplexed. "Well, second cousin." "Are you sure? I mean, you do know he's black." Eventually, they figured out that she had meant Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers slugger who famously refused to play on Yom Kippur during the 1934 pennant race. (As a sidenote, my mother always has been bad with names. In 1994, she was the one who told me that the lead singer of Nirvana, Kurt Russell, had died.) When it comes to understanding baseball, I am my mother's daughter—which isn't to say that I haven't tried. For a while, my dad was bent on getting me to learn to love America's favorite pastime. (I don't know how else to explain the fact that I wrote my fifth-grade book reports on Sandy Koufax, Lou Gehrig, and Babe Ruth.) But some things just can't be taught: It must have been a letdown when I was booted off the girls' softball team, partly due to a habit I had of twirling every time I struck out. Fortunately, we had Field of Dreams. I was ten when my father took me to see it at the theater—and I was entranced. What wasn't to love? Not only is it a fairy tale, but the smartest person in the whole movie is a little girl. (Ray's daughter has the bright idea to turn the field into a tourist attraction. Hmm. . . .) My dad shed a few tears over Burt Lancaster's portrayal of Moonlight Graham as an old doctor who travels back in time to get his chance at bat. Later that night, he showed me the real Archibald Wright "Moonlight" Graham's entry in the Baseball Encyclopedia—as a New York Giant, he only got to play one game in 1905—before telling me a bedtime story that ended with the refrain, "Say it ain't so, Joe."  GO THE DISTANCE: The site of the 1989 movie starring Kevin Costner attracts approximately 65,000 visitors per year. The unexpected prize in this package turned out to be the father-son story, as sweet (though not as stale) as a piece of chewing gum inside a pack of Topps. "I know there were baseball historians when it first came out saying, 'What's going on?' " says Liotta, who batted right-handed and threw left-handed in the film, even though the actual Shoeless Joe Jackson did just the opposite. "But my response was, 'He didn't come back from the dead, either.' The movie was more about, 'Are you in touch with your loved ones?' 'Are you following your dreams?' 'Are you playing catch after a hard day's work?' " I can answer yes to all of the above by the second day of our trip. It's been years since my father and I played catch in the firefly-laden field behind my elementary school; wearing my old glove, now a size too small, I am reminded of how much I used to enjoy it. (I may throw like a girl, but I catch like one of those comatose patients in Awakenings with Robin Williams. It's that automatic.) For the most part, we throw in silence. But every once in a while, Dad interrupts the flow to reminisce about losing the Dodgers to Los Angeles or to show me the difference between a curveball and a knuckleball. "You know what this is called?" he asks, catching the ball so that it's poised on the fingertips of his battered brown glove. "An ice cream cone." He laughs. "See, I thought you'd like that." ***
If baseball is a religion, then the Field of Dreams is the Holy Land. Over the years, it has been credited with inspiring reconciliations between estranged fathers and sons and reuniting families with the spirits of deceased relatives. It also has fostered lasting friendships, such as the one between the Lansings and Bob Pacanowski, a sporting goods sales manager from Chicago who has made 19 pilgrimages here, including one right after his father's death. "It hit me the hardest when the lights went on. You go back to that line in the movie: 'Dad, you want to have a catch?' " Pacanowski says. "My father played in the minor leagues. When he passed away, Don and Becky actually went out into the field, scooped up some dirt, and sent it to me. It arrived in a FedEx package before the service." Ironically, the site's biggest skeptic is its creator. "I have to admit there's a part of me that wishes it was a cornfield again, only because the book and the movie were about the imagination," says Robinson. "Everybody's got their own interpretation, and that's the way it should be. But I think whatever catharsis people are getting from being there, they could get in their own backyard." At least for me, it is the journey that makes the difference. All I had to do was ask, and my dad dropped a busy law schedule for a lark, shedding his suit for the "Who's a Bum?" Dodgers T-shirt that I bought for him last year at a Brooklyn fair. On the three-hour drive from Chicago to Dyersville, we didn't listen to the radio once: We were too busy talking about baseball. Granted, I zoned out a little during his explanation of the White Sox's nickname—the gist of it is that after throwing the 1919 World Series, they left a "black mark" on the team (the curse has since been lifted)—but in the process of trying to understand the game he loves so much, I have learned a lot about my father.  DYERSVILLE OR BUST: Memories of a great trip. Eventually Becky will go down to the basement to set up a row of sleeping bags and an inflatable mattress for the guys who have started to drift off. But first, standing in her QVC-stocked kitchen, she takes a moment to reflect on her good fortune. It's been 11 years since she followed a dream out to Dyersville. Next month, the Lansings will celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. "I made Donny read The Purpose Driven Life," she says, referring to Rick Warren's popular self-help bible. "What goes around comes around. What you give to the universe, you get back. I was taught this since birth. And I see it daily at the Field of Dreams." © 2006 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc. Reprinted with permission. Photos courtesy of author. |