Field Of Dreams

‘People will come, for it is money they have and peace they lack.’ 

To reach my hometown you have to drive through an endless sea of corn. It's an especially tall crop this year—so tall it swallows most of the horizon and has local weathermen attributing rising humidity levels to a phenomenon known as 'corn sweat.' Miles and miles of maize-colored tassels blur past, with the occasional farmhouse or line of windmills breaking the hypnotic parade of green stalks and broad leaves. From this drive-induced trance state, one could imagine that very few people live here—or if they do, it's within the corn itself, just like Shoeless Joe in 'Field of Dreams.' I seriously considered this possibility while looking over my shoulder at the colossal crowd gathering for the annual Backroad Music Festival. Where did they came from? 

This marks either my ninth or tenth year at the festival. I still find wonder in the transformation that unfolds—from grassy hillside to packed-out, sweat-soaked back country revelry. We arrived a day early to help out, or at least hang around, with old friends who've become grizzled volunteers hauling equipment in cut-off tees, directing the next task with a tall boy in hand. It's an all-volunteer affair: some 200-plus people including uncles, grandparents, and “the cousins from Arizona.”

The headliner was Alabama—bona fide country legends and also a stretch for the organizers, financially. So when the first act got cancelled due to thunderous downpour, the organizers looked ready to retch, digestively. Everyone was forced to wait it out in cars or under the pork chop sandwich tent. Those sandwiches, by the way, are a distinct regional offering: pounded, breaded pork chops the size of boat trailer tires, topped with a normal—now hilariously small—bun and zero condiments. They are our cultural expression of plain abundance.

Then the rain stopped. People returned to the park, and they kept coming—some from as far as Washington and Montana. One woman, Frances, came from Missouri for the third time and swore she'd learned her lesson about drinking too much. So many faces streamed by and many looked weary to me, or seriously ready to lay some burdens down. In that moment, feeling some slight relief, in the last pink blush of summer light, I could hear James Earl Jones telling me why people come out from cornfields and why music can be a lot like baseball: 'because it reminds us of all that once was good, and could be again.'