Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

M ore interesting landscape for the citizen scientist now passes my window. A Benjamin Moore paint “test farm,” with holiday browsers strolling the grassy aisles, pointing to this or that pastel or maroon tile as if they were for sale. More significant signage: SUCCESS IS ADDICTIVE (a bank); HEALTHY MATE DATING SERVICE; DOLLAR UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE FOR HIGHER EARNING. Then the cement-bunker Ocean County Library, where holiday offerings are advertised out front — a poetry reading on Wednesday, a CPR workshop on Thanksgiving Day, two Philadelphia Phillies players driving over Saturday for an inspirational seminar about infidelity, “the Achilles’ heel of big-league sports.”

“I just don’t understand it,” Mike says again, because I haven’t answered him the first time he said it. His pointed chin is still elevated, as if he’s seeing out the bottom of his expensive yellow glasses. He looks at me, inclining his head toward his shoulder. He’s wearing a silver imitation Rolex as thick as a car bumper and looks — behind the wheel — like a pint-sized mafioso on his way to a golf outing. He is a strange vision to be seen from other Suburbans.

“You don’t understand ‘Tight butts make me nuts’?” I say. “That’s pretty basic.”

“I don’t understand suicide survivors.” He keeps careful eyes on the Parkway entrance, a hundred yards ahead of us.

“It just wouldn’t work as well if it said ‘Welcome Suicide Failures,’” I say. The names Charles Boyer, Socrates, Meriwether Lewis and Virginia Woolf tour my mind. Exemplary suicide success stories.

“Natural death is very dignified,” he says. This is the kind of “spiritual” conversation he likes, in which he can further prove his superiority over me. “Avoiding death invites suffering and fear. We shouldn’t mock.”

“They’re not avoiding it and they’re not mocking it,” I say. “They like getting together in a multipurpose room and having some snacks. Haven’t you ever thought about suicide? I thought about it last week.”

“Would you attend a suicide survivors meeting?” Mike roams his tongue around the interior of his plump cheek.

“I might if I had time on my hands. I could make up a good story. That’s all they want. It’s like AA. It’s all a process.”

Mike’s bespectacled face assumes a brows-down ancient look. He doesn’t officially approve of self-determination, which he considers to be non-virtuous action and basically pointless. He believes, for instance, that Sally’s sudden leaving last June put me in a state of vulnerable anxiety, which resulted from the specific, non-virtuous activity of divisive speech, which was why I got cancer and have titanium BBs percolating inside my prostate, a body part I’m not sure he even believes in. He believes I should meditate myself free of the stressful idea of love-based attachments — which wouldn’t be that hard.

A state police blue flasher’s now in sight where the on-ramp angles up to enter the Parkway. Cars are backed up all the way down to 37. An ambulance is somewhere behind us, whoop-whooping, but we can’t pull over due to the road construction. A police copter hovers above the southbound lanes toward Atlantic City. Traffic’s halted there in both lanes. Some of the ramp cars are trying to turn around and are getting stuck. People are honking. Smoke rises from somewhere beyond.

“Did you seriously think about suicide?” Mike says.

“You never know if you’re serious. You just find out. I’ve survived to be in Toms River this morning.”

A wide, swaying orange-and-white Ocean County EMS meat wagon, bristling with silver strobes, shushes past us on the shoulder, rollicking and roaring. Lights are on inside the swaying box, figures moving about behind the windows, making ready for something.

“Don’t go up there,” I say, meaning the Parkway. “Take the surface road.”

“Shit!” Mike says, and cranes around at the traffic behind us so he’s not forced up onto the ramp. “A pain in the ass.” Buddhists have no swear words, though cursing in English pleases him because it’s meaningless and funny and not non-virtuous. He looks at me in the sly, secret way by which we’ve come to communicate. He has no real interest in suicide. A significant portion of the essential Mike may now have gone beyond the selfless Buddhist to be the solid New Jersey citizen-realtor. “In your lifetime, you’ll spend six and a half years in your car,” he says, merging us into the left lane that goes under the Parkway overpass. All the traffic’s going there now. “Half the U.S. population lives within fifty miles of the ocean.”

“Most of them are right here with us today, I’d say.”

“It’s good for business,” he says. And that is nothing but the truth.

S urface roads are never a pain in the ass, no matter where we roam. And I’m always interested in what’s new, what’s abandoned, what’s in the offing, what will never be.

Route 37 (after we make a wrong turn onto 530, then correct to 539 and head straight as a bullet up to Cream Ridge) offers rare sights to the conscientious observer. The previous two drought years have rendered the sand-scrubby New Jersey pine flats we’re passing a harsh blow, having already been deserted by the subdivision builders in search of better pickings. Vestigial one-strip strip commercials go by now and then, usually with only one store running. Travelers have dumped piles of 24-pack Bud empties in many of the turn-outs, as well as porcelain sinks, washer-dryers, microwaves, serious amounts of crumpled Kleenexes and a clutter of defunct car batteries. Several red-stenciled posters are nailed to roadside oaks, announcing long-forgotten paint-ball battles in the pines. (We’re near the perimeter of Fort Dix.) At the turn-off for Collier’s Mills Wildlife Management Area, a billboard proclaims a WILD WEST CITY — MASTODON EXHIBIT AND WATER SLIDE. A few cars, dust-caked green Plymouths and a rusted-out Chevy Nova with white shoe-polish 4-$ales on their windshields, sit on the dry shoulder at the woods’ edge. One lonely-guy sex shop lurks back in the trees with a blinking red-and-yellow roof sign, awaiting whoever’s out here to abandon his pet but finds himself in the mood for some nasty. The White Citizen’s Action Alliance has “adopted” the highway. The only car we pass is an Army Humvee driven by a soldier in a helmet and a camo suit.

And though all seems forsaken, back in the pines are occasional tracts of weathered pastel ranch-looking homes on curved streets with fireplugs, curbs and power poles in place. Most of these residences have windows and front doors ply-boarded and spray-painted KEEP OUT, their siding gone gray as a battleship, foundations sunk in grass that’s died. It’s not clear if these were once lived in or were abandoned brand-new. Although on one of the winding streets that opens onto the highway, Paramour Drive, I make out as we flash by, two boys — twelve-year-olds — side-by-side together on the empty asphalt. One sits on a dirt bike, one’s on foot. They’re talking while a mopish fluffy dog sits and watches them. The pink house they’re in front of has a fallen-in wheelchair ramp to the front door. All its windows are out. No cars are in evidence, no garbage cans, no recycle tubs, no amenities.

In sum, this part of Route 37’s the right place to go through a gross of rubbers, shoot.22s, drink two hundred beers, drive fast, toss out an old engine or a load of snow tires or a body. Or, of course, to become a suicide statistic — which I don’t mention to Mike, who’s sitting forward, paying zero attention to the landscape. It might as well be time travel to him, though he clicks on the radio once for the ten o’clock news. He’s, I know, worried that Gore might push through in the Florida Supreme Court, but there’s no rumor of that, so that he goes back to silently dry-running his meeting in Montmorency County, and fidgeting over trading in his minority innocence for the chance to wade into the heavy chips — something any natural-born American wouldn’t think twice about.