Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“You talk like a Buddhist.” He actually giggles, then narrows his little lightless eyes and hugs his blazered shoulders in the cold.

Anyone, of course, can talk like a Buddhist. You just turn every cornpone Will Rogers cliché on its ear and pretend it’s Spinoza. It wouldn’t be hard to be a Buddhist. What’s hard is to be a realist. “Buddhism-schmuddhism,” I say.

Mike enjoys coarse American talk for the same reason he enjoys random cursing — because it’s meaningless. You can’t insult the Buddha, only yourself for trying. “So, we can talk later?” He looks down at his big fake Rolex, as if time was what mattered now.

“We’ll talk later, yep.” My window’s going up. He’s retreating. Possibly the wind’s chasing him, because he begins half-skipping, half-running/shuffling, everything but a cartwheel toward the waiting blue Cadillac. For a man of his size, race, age, religion and manner of fussy dress, he is a funny spectacle — though spirited, which can take you a far distance.

As I pull away, I take a departing look at the cornfield stretching down to Mullica Creek, its gentle fall and charming hardwood copse, soon to be overwhelmed by grumbling, chuffing, knife-bladed Komatsus and Kubotas, cluttered with corrugated culverts, rebar and pre-cut king posts, ready-mixers lined up to 206, every inch flattened and staked with little red flags prophesying megahouses waiting on the drawing boards. The neighbor across the road, watching his dreams go up in smoke, has his point: Someone should draw the line somewhere.

I say silent adieu to the ground my son trod and will no more. The old lay of the land. E-eye, E-eye, OOOOOOO.

Driving the scenic route back to Haddam — Preventorium Road to the rock quarry (where certified mafiosos once dumped their evidence), past the SPCA and the curvy maple-lined lane along the mossy old Delaware Canal, past the estate where retired priests snooze away days in tranquilized serenity and hopeful non-reflection — I’m for an instant struck: What would real scientists, decades on, say about us here on our own patch of suburban real estate?

I knew a boy back at Michigan, Tom Laboutalliere, who dedicated his whole life to “reading” little birds-feet scratch marks on ossified clods of ancient tan-colored mud and possibly turds. From such evidence, he conjured what the ancient Garbonzians were doing back in 1000 B.C. in their little square of earth. By studying cubic tons of dirt — his field data — what he got his hands on and sifted through screens were the Garbonzians’ precious laundry receipts. The little birds-feet tracks were actually their writings, which made it unassailable, using infrared spectroscopy and carbon dating, that a mighty lot of army uniforms had needed repair and entrail despotting and caustic herbal soaks between about 1006 and 1005. So that he concluded (everyone was amazed) that a considerable amount of nonstop pulverizing, disemboweling and tearing limb from limb had gone on during that period, and — his great, tenurable discovery — that’s why we now think of those long-ago, far-distant folk as “warlike.”

None of us should suppose that this type of years-on digging won’t winkle out our own naked truths. Because it will. Which merits some consideration.

Most evidence, of course, will just be the stuff Mike and I cruised past on Route 37 this morning, strewn along the road shoulder, in the pine duff and dusty turn-outs. This civilization, future thinkers will conclude, liked beer. They favored wood-paper products as receptacles for semen and other bodily excretions. They suffered hemorrhoids, occasional incontinence and erectile dysfunctions not known to subsequent generations. They thought much about their bowel movements. Sex was an activity they isolated as much as possible from daily life. They disliked extraneous metal things. They were faltering in their resolve about permanence vis-à-vis possibility and change, as evidenced by their shelters being in good condition but frequently abandoned, with others seemingly meant to last only five years or less. I’m not certain what the signs about paint-ball wars will teach them, or, for that matter, Toms River itself, should it last another year. Fort Dix they’ll understand perfectly.

But future delvers will also think — and Mike’s and Tom Benivalle’s plans lie in my brain like a piece of heavy driftwood — how much we all lived with, banked and thrived on, got made happy or sad by what was already there ! And how little we ourselves invented ! And by how little we had to invent, since you could get anything you wanted — from old records to young boys — just by giving a number and an expiration date to an electronic voice, then sitting back and waiting for the friendly brown truck. Our inventions, it’ll be clear, were only to say yes or no, like flipping off a light switch or flipping it on. Future scholars might also conclude that if we ever did think of trying something different — living in the Allagash and eating only tubers; becoming a mystic, taking a vow of poverty and begging on the roadside in Taliganga; if we considered having six wives, never cutting our hair or bathing and holing up in an armed compound in Utah; in other words, if we ever gave a thought to worming our way outside the box to see what was out there — we must’ve realized that we risked desolation and the world looking at us with menace, knew we couldn’t stand that for long, and so declined.

Possibly I tend toward this glum future perspective because, like millions of other journeying souls, I’ve lately received the call — from my Haddam urologist, possibly phoning from the golf course or his Beemer, casually commenting that my PSA “values” were “still higher than we like to see…so we’d better get you in for a closer looky-look.” That can change your view, let me tell you. Or maybe it’s because I’ve graduated to the spiritual concision of the Permanent Period, the time of life when very little you say comes in quotes, when few contrarian voices mutter doubts in your head, when the past seems more generic than specific, when life’s a destination more than a journey and when who you feel yourself to be is pretty much how people will remember you once you’ve croaked — in other words, when personal integration (what Dr. Erikson talked about but secretly didn’t believe in) is finally achieved.

Or possibly I take the view I do just because I’ve been a real estate agent for fifteen years, and can see that real estate’s a profession both spawned by and grown cozy with our present and very odd state of human development. In other words, I’m implicated: You have a wish? Wait. I’ll make it come true (or at least show you my inventory). If you’re a Bengali ophthalmologist with your degree from Upstate and have no desire to return to Calcutta to “give back,” and prefer instead to expand life, open doors, let the sun in — well, all you have to do is travel down Mullica Road, let your wishes be known to a big strapping guinea home builder and his smiling, nodding, truth-dispensing, dusky-skinned sidekick, and you and civilization will be on the same page in no time. They’ll even name your street after your daughter — which those same scientists can later puzzle over.

Up to now I’ve thought this basic formula was a good thing. But lately I’m less sure I’m right — at least as right as I used to be. I can take the matter up with Mike in the car later, when home’s in sight.

M ike’s handoff to Benivalle has taken less time than expected, and it’s only noon when I merge onto westbound Brunswick Pike, the corner where once stood a big ShopRite when I lived nearby but which now contains a great silver and glass Lexus palace with wall-to-wall vehicles and a helipad X for buyers on the go, and across from it a giant Natur-Food pavilion where formerly stood a Magyar Bank. If I shake a leg and don’t attract a speeding ticket, I can make the funeral home before they begin shooing mourners out to ready Ernie McAuliffe’s casket for its last ride.