Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

W inds buffet us. Our flying culvert makes a sudden shimmying eee-nyaw-eee noise, and a tiny red seat belt emblem illuminates above me. The big brassy stewardess, whose name tag says Birgit, stands up like a friendly stalag matron and begins talking into a telephone receiver turned upside down, working her dark mannish eyebrows at the comedy of knowing none of us can understand anything she says. Though we’re all veterans of this life. We know where we’re descending to. No one’s surprised or applauding. “Here goes nuttin’,” someone says behind me and guffaws. Sally Caldwell, sweet wife of my middle season, squeezes my hand, smiles a falsely gay smile, rolls her eyes dreamily and leans to give me a “be brave” kiss on my oddly cold cheek.

Below us I see the whited landscape stamped out in squares despite the early snow and failing light. It is nearly four. We pass, lowering, lowering over farms and farmettes and farm-equipment corrals, single stores with gas pumps along the ribbon of Route 14, where Clarissa and I walked and talked and sweated last August. Settlement’s thickening and widening to include vacant baseball diamonds, a Guard armory with starred tanks and trucks out back (in case the fuckers make it this far inland, and they might), the Applebee’s, the red blinking tower of an old AM transmitter morphed now into all new radiography — cell phone, cable, radar, NORAD, government surveillance. I don’t yet see the great Mayo citadel with its own antennas and helipads, ICBM launchers and surface-to-air missiles to shoot down marauding microbes, but it’s there. It’s what we’ve come for. I press my cheek to the cold window, try to see the airport out ahead, establish the world on a more human scale. But I see only another jet, tiny and at an incalculable distance, its own red beacons winking, vectored for some different landing.

It is, of course, only on the human scale, with the great world laid flat about you, that the Next Level of life offers its rewards and good considerations. And then only if you let it. A working sense of spirituality can certainly help. But a practical acceptance of what’s what, in real time and down-to-earth, is as good as spiritual if you can finagle it. I thought for a time that practical acceptance, the final, certifying “event” and extra beat for me had been my breathless “yes, yes,” to my son Ralph Bascombe’s death, and that I would never again have to wonder if how I feel now would be how I’d feel later on. I felt sure it would be. Here was necessity.

But get shot in the heart and live, and you’ll learn some things about necessity — and quick. Lying in my ultramodern hospital bed in Toms River, looped to this machine and that fluid, with winter’s woolen days coming on, I determined to be buried in powdered form somewhere at sea off Point Pleasant (it seemed simplest), and set about the solemn details that only a cold hospital room in New Jersey can make seem congenial: compiled my list of pallbearers, jotted down some basic obituary thoughts, concluded how I wanted my assignables assigned, to whom and with what provisos; who to take the business (Mike. Who else?). Happily, there wasn’t so much. For a day or two afterward, I lay there and it all made me glad, and I thought I’d feel glad that way forever. Only by day three, I’d started to feel differently about everything — saw that what I’d decided was a mistake, probably a vanity — I’m not sure why. But right then and there, in that motorized bed with a hospital priest shanghaied from his everyday death duties and not at all sure if what he was doing was right, I fired all my pallbearers, forgot about a sea-burial, tore my organ-donor card in half and executed a document provided in the “welcome kit” by the hospital ethicist, consigning all my mortal leavings to science — the option I and Ann had failed for lack of courage to choose for our first son years ago. The medical kids, I felt, would treat me with all the dignity and compassion I’m due and no doubt with a measure of irreverence and amusement, which seemed right and a better way to turn a small event — my death and life — into a slightly less small one, while keeping things simple and still making a contribution. Not a contribution you can see from a satellite, like Mount St. Helens or the Great Wall, but one that puts its money where its mouth is.

On the day I got home from the hospital, the weather turned ice-cream nice, and the low noon sun made the Atlantic purple and flat, then suddenly glow as the tide withdrew. And once again I was lured out, my pants legs rolled and in an old green sweatshirt, barefoot, to where the soaked and glistening sand seized my soft feet bottoms and the frothing water raced to close around my ankles like a grasp. And I thought to myself, standing there: Here is necessity. Here is the extra beat — to live, to live, to live it out.

We are going down fast now. Sally clutches my fingers hard, smiles an encouragement. The big engines hum. Our craft dips, shudders hard, and I feel myself afloat as the white earth rises to meet us — square buildings, moving cars, bundled figures of the other humans coming into clear focus as we descend. Some are watching, gaping up. Some are waving. Some turn their backs to us. Some do not notice us as we touch the ground. A bump, a roar, a heavy thrust forward into life again, and we resume our human scale upon the land.

An unusual and embarrassing number of people made significant contributions to the writing of this book, none as illuminating, as consequential and as sweetly given as those made by Kristina Ford. My dear friends Gary Fisketjon, Amanda Urban, Gill Coleridge and Gabrielle Brooks have again given me the benefit of their judgment and encouragement, which have been indispensable. I wish also to thank Liz Van Hoose, Jennifer Smith, Amy Loyd, Field Maloney and Richard Brody for their kindness in extending the range of my notice. I’m grateful to Alexandra Pringle and Nigel Newton, to Olivier Cohen, to Elisabeth Ruge and Arnulf Conradi, to Claus Clausen, Jorge Herralde and to Inge and Carlo Feltrinelli for their trust in me. I’m also indebted to Katherine Hourigan, to Lydia Buechler, Carol Edwards and Margaret Halton for their generosity. I wish to thank Helen Schwartz for her essential writing on New Jersey houses, Deborah Treisman for her editorial counsel, Rachel Bolton for her trust, Tom Campbell for his saving advice and Debra Allen for her friendship for this work and for me. It is also true that I would not have written this book had I not met Mike Featherstone, and would not have felt I could write it had I not met Dennis Iannaccone and Paul Principe, the kings of the New Jersey Shore. Finally, I wish to express my lifetime’s gratitude and affection to Christopher and to Koukla MacLehose, for expanding the horizon I see, and for their enduring friendship. RF