Back when tuberculosis was one of the great health threats in our country, sufferers were often shipped west in search of dry climates that might provide a cure. Doc Holliday and others make that journey. Today, in an unpublicized and impressively large exodus, hundreds of Americans are heading west to find something to cure the aching holes in their souls. They go to Dyersville, on Route 20 twenty-five miles west of Dubuque. There they find the baseball field, just as in the movie, with lights around it, an outfield made up of cornfields, and the old Kinsella farm house sitting there, too.
Tourists flock there, and find to their happy surprise that it is the antithesis of a theme park.
Tourists can wander on the field, batting, pitching, playing any position. There are no rules, no umpires, no managers, no scoreboards-only complete freedom to make up a game with whoever else happens along. The secret to the Dyersville field is what the people visiting bring to that place. They come looking for bigger meanings to their lives, but they come as well with refracted memories of their earlier lives. They come looking for the Promised Land, only to be reminded in finding it that it resembles what they remember of their childhood and their childhood homes.