Recognize it? It's from Field of Dreams, which would probably be my favorite baseball movie of all time if not for Bull Durham. This shot comes about two-thirds of the way through the movie, when Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) is driving back home after going to Boston to track down reclusive writer Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones). By this point Ray has long-since listened to the mysterious Voice ("If you build it, he will come!") and plowed under enough of his corn acreage to build a baseball diamond for Shoeless Joe Jackson to return and play ball again. Next the Voice sends ray after author Mann, for reasons that aren't really clear, and now, at night, Ray is driving home. Here he's getting close, and he points Mann's gaze to the distance, where the lights are on at his new ballpark.

This shot powerfully reminds me of things I noticed about Iowa and the Midwest when I was traveling through that region during my college years, either with my parents going back and forth from Buffalo to there and back again, or on long bus rides with college music groups, or with friends while road-tripping. Many of those treks involved eschewing the Interstate highways and using US and state routes. In the Midwest, unless you're in one of the major river valleys, roads are often long and straight, and many of the towns you pass are literally towns you pass. Not towns you pass through, but towns you pass.

I remember noticing this on our first long drive out there, toward the end of my senior year of high school, when we were driving to Iowa to visit a college (the one I ended up attending, Wartburg Collect in Waverly, so that worked out well). What I noticed was that while the roads we took did pass straight through larger towns, many smaller towns existed entirely off the large roads. I'd look out my window and see and entire town out there, off to the left or the right, while the road we were on--US20, perhaps--skirted it a mile or two to the north or the south. I don't remember when I figured out why that's the case, but anyway, it's because those small towns are all old farm towns, and farm towns didn't rise on main roads but along the railroads.

This is where the Field of Dreams shot comes in: when you drive by those small towns at night, especially on a Friday or a Saturday night, you often see the stadium lights in the distance, dominating the entire town. Local high schools, hosting a football game if it's fall or a baseball game if it's spring. That single shot captures a look and feel of a place that is wildly specific, keyed to a very specific observation I made on one of many drives around that part of the country.

There was one spot, and I don't remember where or what road this even was, (it could have been any of four or five states, even) when there was a town up ahead...but then the main road we were on made a gentle S-curve up and over the train tracks that led to that town. It wasn't that high of an overpass, but in some parts of the Midwest you don't need that much height to get a wider view, and I could see a lot farther for just those few seconds. And this particular town had built what was obviously a new high school and athletic field right there, in the shadows of that overpass, instead of right in the town, which was still half a mile thataway.

As we crested that overpass, I could see the entirety of this new-ish stadium, where a contest was taking place (football, baseball, something!), under the Friday or Saturday Night Lights. The stands weren't full--there's something oddly optimistic about the amount of seating many Iowa school stadiums have--but there were a lot of people there, on each side. Both teams were on the field, and there were the coaching staffs and all that stuff, too. I remember thinking about all the various school-aged dramas that take place in the environs of the school sports field: maybe the school jock was down there trying to impress his cheerleader girlfriend, maybe the marching band was there and not feeling too enthusiastic about the whole thing, and so on. I wonder how far some of those kids there have come and how far away their lives have taken them since, or how many are still there. Every small town has its small number of citizens whose entire world is that very town, and for them the high school stadium is probably the height of, well, everything.

And then we sped on, and the stadium where for one night an entire town's hopes and dreams were focused fell behind us and into memory, to be triggered later on by a single shot in a baseball fantasy movie.

Like I said, I don't know why I've thought of that the last few days. Maybe it's the end of this year's baseball season, just concluded last night with the Astros winning the World Series. Maybe it's the arrival of November with its darker nights that fall ever earlier and earlier. And there is a story idea that I've been nursing for a while now that's probably going to have to come out of my head soon...a story whose kernel involves a teenage boy on a road trip with his father, and somehow they end up in a small town watching a baseball game under the Friday-night lights.

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Jeff Goldblum at 70: An appreciation

Autumnal music: "The Isle of the Dead" by Sergei Rachmaninoff

Producer Jules Bass: A tribute

Coming soon: A new stadium for the Bills

How I make chili

Welcoming Orion the Hunter back to my sky!

In Closing....

I leave you with this, a single page from a delightful book called Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village, by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper. This is from the section outlining the kinds of residents you find in precisely the kinds of Quaint English Villages where grisly murders seem to be all the rage:

And that's all for this issue. The next one will be the week before Thanksgiving, or so I hope. Be well, y'all!

-K