by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Field of Dreams popped up awhile ago on Netflix, and after casting about for something to pass a Sunday evening in a fractious and disturbing political season, it seemed like a pleasant and familiar diversion. I have seen it before, and thought that it would be unchallenging and comforting, like a nice big plate of macaroni and cheese. Apparently, it’s been long enough since my last viewing that I had either forgotten some of the deeper meanings, or I just saw this time what I really wanted to see.

“Is this heaven,” asks (Dwier Brown’s) John Kinsella? “It’s Iowa,” his son Ray replies. John says, “I could have sworn it was heaven.” Whether or not this is a completely accurate quote, these are still words that would warm the heart of any native Iowan, like me. Iowans grow up with a bit of an inferiority complex because there is so little in our home state that really commands the attention of the world. At the same time, we tend to harbor a quiet, unshakable assurance that there is something in our core that is fundamentally decent and worthwhile; something that can’t be corrupted because it comes from the soil beneath our feet and the air that we breathe. When Iowans hear Ray Liotta’s Shoeless Joe Jackson ask (early in the movie) if, being in Iowa, he’s actually in heaven, we may seem pleasantly surprised, but deep down we’re only surprised that it has taken so long for the world to see it.

Yet there is more to this question that is posed twice in the movie to Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella as he stands next to a baseball diamond that he carved out of his cornfield. William Patrick Kinsella, who wrote Shoeless Joe, the novel from which Field of Dreams was adapted, was not a native Iowan. He was a Canadian who moved there for a time to attend the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa (my alma mater). While he was there, Iowa seems to have become for him the perfect setting for his mythical tale of redemption and closure. I don’t pretend to speak for Kinsella, but his apparent experience of going out, away from home, to find the magical place where a circle can finally be closed resonates with my own. I will always identify as an Iowan, but I have found my magical places, the places where I could close my circles, far from those gentle rolling hills between the Missouri and the Mississippi.

Even though the fictional Ray Kinsella farm was nearly a thousand miles from where young Ray had become estranged from his father John, that farm nevertheless became the place where a game of catch allowed them to come back together and close the circle of their relationship. The image of that ball arcing through the air, creating a bridge from father to son, was one of the most beautiful in the film. It came near the end of the climactic scene during which Ray looked around and realized he needn’t search elsewhere for heaven. He had found it there in an Iowa cornfield. It was not the corn that made it happen. It was his willingness to defy all convention and plow up the corn to make a space for play, for imagination, for dreams.

Like Ray, I didn’t find my heaven in the place where I spent my childhood—ironically, in Iowa. I found it elsewhere; first near the deep blue, cold water of Lake Superior, and more recently near the Salish Sea. I don’t expect to “have a catch” with my late father on some magical baseball diamond next to the Puget Sound. (Neither of us were ever much into baseball.) But I have found here a semblance of the destiny that my father once predicted would be mine.

I don’t yet know where I want my circle to be closed, if it matters what I want. Perhaps it will be in Iowa by some strange twist that I can’t yet foresee. Wherever it is, I hope that I will be so entranced by the place that I will also be prompted to ask, “Is this heaven?”