Fields of Dreams
I couldn’t resist posting photography as today’s art installment—while I would have loved to sketch it all, I wouldn’t have been able to choose which scene or even keep up; I’ve been staring out the train window for hours straight, mesmerized.
I’ve called New England home for my entire life; I was born and raised in Connecticut, moved north to New Hampshire for college and never left. The landscapes of my life are filled with majestic maple, pine, and birch trees that change their color to reveal their absolutely glorious autmnal splendor. I’m used to seeing rolling hills and moderate mountains, the coastline of the Atlantic, and deep blue lakes. While pastoral farms make up a fair amount of the New England countryside with their silos and red barns, I’m not used to seeing land as far as my eye can see. And today, I couldn’t stop staring.
My husband is a midwesterner, so expanses of fields and farmlands don’t necessarily hold much appeal. I couldn’t understand how he wasn’t as enthralled by the scenes unfolding just outside our window. “There’s really nothing new to see,” he said at one point, after I asked him how he could not be sharing my fascination. I guess as a Midwesterner, flat farmland tends to be more common than novel.
But not for me.
While yesterday’s train route ran through familiar cities and towns of the Northeast, today was a different story. I woke up in Ohio, before passing into my first “new” state: Indiana. Then our train lumbered toward Illinois, and I watched as Lake Michigan came into focus in the horizon and then the Chicago skyline.
But the real magic of today came in the afternoon, after boarding the California Zephyr. As I write this, we’ve made our way from Chicago through the vast farmlands of central and western Illinois and into my second new state of the day: Iowa.
I’ve been obsessed with Iowa since 1989, ever since Field of Dreams, which still ranks in my top five of all-time favorite movies (maybe even the top three!). After seeing the film, I was convinced I wanted to attend college in Iowa. I researched Iowa schools—there was no Internet back then, so my college “research” consisted of paging through the giant Peterson’s college guides we had at home and which I tended to read “for fun.” Yes, I was a geek, but in my defense, my mom was a high school guidance counselor. So while I never did get to Iowa for college, I got there today—albeit a bit delayed. I was hoping to watch the sun fully set over Iowa fields so I could snap a photo and caption it, “Is this heaven?” “No, it’s Iowa.”
We crossed the mighty Mississippi and into Iowa as the sun was on its last legs, but damn if it didn’t take my breath away.
