Somewhere between St. Louis and Kansas City, I hopped on the phone with my buddy Matt. He and I were long overdue for a chat. I met him ten years ago at an animal rights festival in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We hit it off and have stayed in touch over social media, although we haven’t hung out in person since. It just so happens that we are each publishing a book this year. He had been watching the rollout of mine on Facebook, and his interest was piqued by my little book tour. His publishers have discouraged him from doing one, citing the financial and physical cost, and the fact that most book events are poorly attended these days. He wanted to know if I thought it was worth it.
Even before I could answer, he informed me that it was. “You’re not on a book tour,” he said. “It’s a vision quest.” Before the tour, I would have felt silly describing it that way, but Matt was right. This Midwest swing in particular was akin to a rite of passage for me, in which I connected with people from my past and had profound experiences with new friends. In Chicago, I saw my cousin and met her family for the first time. I returned to Iowa, where I moved in 2007 to begin my career in earnest, and where I met my wife. I drove through the plains and prairies to talk about baseball and, over the course of two glorious days off in Kansas City, to watch it in one of the best ballparks in America (more on that in a future column).
It was like a journey into the Cooperstown myth. Those who uphold baseball as central to American mythology like to imagine that it sprung from the land itself. The Natural and Field of Dreams introduced me to this mythology, but it goes back much further. Baseball was never invented per se—it was a series of rolling innovations—but even in the 1900s and 1910s, baseball served to remind us of our agrarian past, of the wide-open spaces we lived in before America’s urbanization. It also recalls our individual pasts, when we played in the backyard every day in the summer, and a suburban lawn felt as expansive as the Great Plains. We were little, and baseball was enormous.
The book tour has recalled my own past. In my last missive, I wrote about the screening of Field of Dreams I hosted at the Jacob Burns Film Center, where I spoke about playing wiffle ball each summer’s day with my sister Darcy and our next door neighbor Karen. At the end of the night, I discovered Karen’s parents were in the audience, and Karen herself was planning to be there, until childcare got in the way (her kid, I’m told, is a Mets fan). I don’t know if it’s a vision quest, or some kind of cosmic coincidence, but every stop I make on this tour somehow brings me closer to the child inside me who thought baseball was huge and loved it in that pure way that’s only possible before life has broken our hearts.
On this trip, I held events in Chicago, St. Louis, and Des Moines, and connected with lovers of books, baseball, baseball movies at every spot. In Chicago, the owners of Three Avenues Bookshop gave me a book they selected just for me as a thank-you. “Authors are the lifeblood of our industry,” they said earnestly. At another stop, I made friends with a middle-aged couple at a vegan restaurant who invited me to join them for dinner. They weren’t baseball fans, but of course, they had seen A League of Their Own and The Natural, so we had plenty to discuss. I got to see The Bad News Bears and Moneyball on the big screen, the former at an incredible mom-and-pop theater in St. Louis called Arkadin Cinema & Bar, and the latter at Tivoli Classics, a gorgeous, ancient one-screen cinema outside of Chicago. When I arrived at Tivoli, I turned the corner and saw this staring me in the face.
Some of the events were well attended. Others were not. But it didn’t matter. At the big ones, I communed with the crowd. At the smaller ones, I had intimate conversations. People showed up in their favorite baseball jerseys and hats. They told me they had heard me on Effectively Wild or read about my book in Craig Calcaterra’s newsletter. It turns out there is a community of smart, progressive-minded baseball fans out there that I wasn’t entirely sure existed when I wrote this book. In a sense, I created Baseball: The Movie to find my tribe.
Now that I think about it, my home has always been on the road. I’ve lived in numerous places: Boston, Portland, Dubuque, New York, Hoboken, Maryland, and a little beach town in North Carolina. But my favorite place is the space between. I love driving. I love being in the car in that liminal state between motion and stillness, between past and future. It’s where I reconnect with music I used to love, catch up with old friends on the phone, and gaze in total amazement out the window at places I’ve never seen before. On this trip, I saw big skies and lots of armadillos. I pulled over on the side of the highway to look at an endless field of windmills, enormous and foreboding, and thought about how they’d make a great setting for the climax of a movie. I pulled over for gas outside of Columbia, MO, and walked a few minutes down the road to find myself at a quiet crossroads with corn fields on every side. I stood in the middle of the empty road and felt a rare stillness, just steps from a place truckers go to load up on Mountain Dew.
I’ve always been like this. When I was 22, I took a road trip with my friend Nick. We spent six weeks driving around the country, rarely stopping for more than one night. I don’t remember visiting any landmarks. The point was the driving. A few years ago, I went to Norway, spending only a day each in Oslo and Bergen. The rest of the time, I just drove around the fjords. I remember one day when I crossed a ferry, then drove switchback for forty minutes up a beautiful grassy hill, before arriving at the top where the road was surrounded by six feet of snow, and then driving through a forest of spruces on the way down. It was like traversing several continents in a day, and was easily the highlight of the trip. Just in the car.
I have more trips coming up. I’ll be on the west coast next week for book events, although most of my traveling will be done by plane. I will have a nice drive from Portland to Seattle, a trip I’ve never done before. I’m even thinking beyond that. At the end of the summer, my lease is up, and I’ve decided to go vagabond for a while. I plan to live in Rochester, NY for a month, and then Portland, ME for six weeks. After that, who knows? I’ll likely continue chasing the liminal space.
Maybe I learned it from my favorite sport, whose players barely have a home for six months out of every year and instead live their lives in a series of buses, planes, and hotel rooms. Ron Shelton, who wrote Bull Durham, compared professional baseballers to the gunslingers of the Old West, who come to town with a job to do, eschew any emotional attachments, and leave as soon as possible, because their real home is out in the wilderness. I guess that’s me: ballplayer, gunslinger, and newly-published author on a book tour that I refuse to let end.
Well done, Noah! You started out just wanting to sell books, but now you are adding new meanings to your life. Connecting with your past, contemplating your future, but most of all, relishing the present! What a road trip!