Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Ummm,” Mike grunts. “I can see that, yes.” My attempt doesn’t work, and we are for a time sunk in reverential silence.

A mile into Montmorency County, 206 drops into a pleasant jungly sweet-gum and red-clay creek bottom no one’s quite figured how to bulldoze yet, and the old road briefly takes on a memorial, country-highway feel. Though we quickly rise again into the village of Belle Fleur, old-style Jersey, with a tall white Presbyterian steeple beside a sovereign little fenced cemetery, and just beyond that, a seventies-vintage strip development, with two pizza shops, a laundrette, a closed Squire Tux and an H&R Block — and across on the facing side of the road two deserted, dusty-screened redbrick Depression houses (homes to humans once) from when 206 was a scenic rural pike as innocent and pristine as any back road in Kentucky. Another double-size wooden sign with big red lettering spells an end to the houses: OWNER WILL SELL, REMOVE OR TRADE. It’s a perfect site for a Jiffy Lube.

Mike takes a left past the church and commences west. And right away the atmosphere changes, and for the better. Somewhere out ahead of us lies the Delaware, and all can feel the relief. Though Mike’s now consulting his watch and a scribbled-on pink Post-it while the road (Mullica Road) leaves the strip development for the peaceable town ’n country housing pattern New Jersey is famous for: deep two-acre lots with curbless frontage, on which are sited large but not ominous builder-design Capes, prairie contemporaries and Dutch-door ranches, with now and then an original eighteenth-century stone farmhouse spruced up with copper gutters and an attached greenhouse to look new. Yews, bantam cedars and mountain laurels that were scrubby in the seventies are still young-appearing. The earth is flat out here, poorly drained and clayey. Plus, it’s dry as Khartoum. Still, a few maples and red oaks have matured, and paint jobs look fresh. Kids’ plastic gym sets and chain-link dog runs clutter many back lawns. Subarus and Horizons stand in new asphalt side drives (the garages jammed with out-of-date junk). Everything’s exactly as they pictured it when it was all a dream.

Passing on the left now, opposite the houses, lies a perfect, well-tended cut cornfield extending prettily down to Mullica Creek, remnant of uses that predate memory but a plus to home buyers prizing atmosphere. Though you can be sure its pristine prettiness is giving current owners across the road restless nights for fear some enterpriser (such as the one driving my car) will one day happen along, stop for a look-see, make a cell-phone call and in six months throw up a hundred minimansions that’ll kick shit out of everybody’s tax bills, fill the roads, jam the schools with new students who score eight million on their math and verbal, who steal the old residents’ kids’ places at Brown, and whose families won’t speak to anybody because for religious reasons they don’t have to. Town ’n country takes a hike.

Every morning, these original settlers who bought in at 85K — on what was Mullica Farm Road — frown down at their mutual-fund numbers, retotal their taxes against retirement investitures and wonder if now might be the time to roll over their 401s, move to the Lehigh Valley and try consulting before beating it to Phoenix at age sixty-two. Median house prices out here are at 450K, the fastest market in the land — last year. Only, that’s not holding. One or two neighbors already have BY OWNER signs up, which is worrisome. Though to me it’s all as natural as pond succession, and no one should regret it. I like the view of landscape in use.

Small, dark-skinned yard personnel with backpack blower units that make them look like spacemen are busy in many yards here, whooshing oceans of late-autumn leaves and heaping them in piles beside great black plastic bags, before hauling them away in their beater trucks. The cold sky has gone cerulean and untroubled (weather being what passes for drama in the suburbs). I don’t miss Haddam, but I miss this — the triggering sense of emanation that a drive in what was once the country ratchets up in me. And today especially, since I’m not risking or pitching anything, am off duty and only along for moral support.

“Is Michigan in Lansing or Ann Arbor?” Mike says, blinking expectantly, hands again in the prescribed steering positions. We are nearing our rendezvous and he’s on the alert.

He knows I bleed Michigan blue but doesn’t really know what that means. “Why?”

“I guess there’re some pretty interesting things going on at Michigan State right now.” He is speaking officially. Practicing at being authentic.

“Did they discover a featherless turkey in time for Thanksgiving?” I say. “That’s what they’re good at over there.”

A man stands alone on the wide grassy lawn of a bright yellow bay-windowed Dutch contemporary where Halloween pumpkins still line the front walk. He’s barefoot, wearing a white tae kwon do suit and is performing stylized Oriental exercises — one leg rising like a mantis while his arms work in an overhand swimming motion. Possibly it’s a form of pre-Thanksgiving stress maintenance he’s read about in an airline magazine. But something about my Suburban, its rumbling, radiant alien-ness, has made him stop, put palm to brow to shade the sun and follow us as we go past.

“In my new-product seminar last week”—Mike nods as if he’s quoting Heraclitus (I, of course, pay for this)—“I saw some interesting figures about the lag between the top of the housing market and the first downturn in askings.” His narrow eyes are fixed stonily ahead. I used to eat that kind of computer spurtage for breakfast, and made a bundle doing it. But since I arrived at the Shore, I’m happy to list ’em ’n twist ’em. When man stops wanting ocean-front, it’ll be because they’ve paved the ocean. “I guess they’ve got a pretty good real estate institute over there,” Mike blathers on about Moo-U. “Using some pretty sophisticated costing models. We might plug into their newsletter.” Mike can occasionally drone like a grad student, relying on the ritual-reflexive “I guess” to get his most significant points set in concrete. (“I guess Maine’s pretty far from San Diego.” “I guess a hurricane really whips the wind up.” “I guess it gets dark around here once the sun sets.”)

“Did you read any reports from Kalamazoo College?”

Mike frowns over at me. He doesn’t know what Kalamazoo means, or why it would be side-splittingly hilarious. His round, bespectacled, over-serious face forms a suspicious tight-lipped question mark. Sense of humor can become excess baggage for immigrants, and in any case, Mike’s not always great company for extended periods.

Ahead on the left rises an ancient white concrete silo standing in the cornfield, backed by third-growth hardwood through which mid-day light is flashing. A weathered roadside vegetable stand, years abandoned, sits at the road shoulder, and alongside it a pale blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville. When Ann and I arrived to Haddam blows ago, it was our standard Saturday outing to drive these very county roads, taking in the then-untouched countryside up to Hunterdon County and the river towns, stopping at a country store where they cooked a ham and eggs breakfast in the back, buying a set of andirons or a wicker chair, then pulling over for squash and turnips and slab-sided tomatoes in a place just like this, taking it all home in brown paper sacks. It was long before this became a wealth belt.

I’m thinking this old roadside stall may actually have been one of our regulars. MacDonald’s Farm or some such place. Though it wasn’t run by a real farmer, but a computer whiz from Bell Labs, who’d taken an early buyout to spend his happy days yakking with customers about the weather and the difference between rutabagas and turnips.