Reprinted from the Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 2001
I've always loved to roam the fields of Delaware Valley College in Doylestown. The campus is only five minutes from my house and ever since we moved from the farm, it has been my retreat, my solace, even my sanity.
When I want to escape suburbia (which is often) I ramble through the meadows and cornfields and listen to the song of the crickets or the rustling of corn stalks which seem to whisper of stories just waiting to be written. Through the voices of nature I find my own voice, as a writer. Even during our year in Italy, I dreamed of the ripening fields of Del Val, back home. Take Venice, take Rome, take Florence—take everything under the Tuscan sun! Just give me a pasture of cows and a field of corn, and my heart is full to overflowing.
I'm a worrier. I can't help it; it's in my genes. I come from a long line of warrior-worriers. My mother was a worrier, and her mother before her. It's a noble tradition. Maybe that's why I worried that having a hundred acres of meadows, woods, and fields to walk in was too good to be true.
I plot my stories by saying, “What if?”… which is also how I worry. What if Del Val decides to build dorms in the middle of their cornfields? What if the new bypass slices through the center of the campus, destroying my pastoral paradise (not to mention my peace of mind)? What if the college decides to become a Center for the Study of Urban Culture instead of an agricultural college?
One day last spring I was returning from a walk at Del Val when a farm worker stopped me. “I'm afraid you can't walk here anymore,” he said. “Del Val is closed to the public. We're concerned about people infecting the animals with Foot and Mouth disease,” he explained. “Even our employees have to take special shoe baths.”
I'd worried about a computer virus destroying my hard drive, but I'd never imagined that a weird animal virus would ruin my country walks.
Months passed during which I often gazed longingly at the graceful sweep of the cornfields in the late summer light—from the wrong side of the railroad tracks. Finally I decided to write the Dean of Agriculture and request a special permit to walk there. I explained (without going into the delicate issue of my sanity) how much it meant to me and my work. I write children's books and I have slides of Del Val in my school program. I tell kids how important it is to my writing to have a quiet place to reflect and remember. In my letter, I promised I would take footbaths or mouth baths or anything else they wanted—if only I could walk in my fields.
The day I mailed my letter an article appeared in the local newspaper. DEL VAL, CORN, MEL TO MAKE A MOVIE. Del Val had just signed a contract with Disney to make a movie with Mel Gibson—in the cornfields!
It had all happened very suddenly after a location scout for Disney had discovered the perfect setting for “Signs”, a movie about a farmer who discovers mysterious patterns etched in his cornfields.
Of all the cornfields in all the towns in all the world, why did they have to pick mine?
Now no one, absolutely no one, is allowed in those fields—except actors, directors, makeup and hair stylists, lightning engineers, set builders, camera operators, script consultants, prop men, and a special security force to keep out hysterical teenage girls.
I haven't heard back from the Dean of Agriculture. But I'm not going to let it get me down. I'm applying to be an extra in the film. If that falls through, I'll go to the theater when the movie comes out and imagine I'm again wandering those golden fields, utterly and blissfully alone—with Mel Gibson.