Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Yeah. Kids. Estelle’s sister. My mom. The clan.”

It’s nice to know Clare has a mom who comes for holidays. “That’s great.”

“You?” Clare shifts into gear, his truck bumping forward.

“Yep. The whole clan. We try to connect.” I smile.

“Okay.” Clare nods. He hasn’t heard me right. He idles away up toward 35 and the long road back to Parsippany.

Since there’s no direct-est route to Parkway Exit 102N, where Wade’s already fuming at Fuddruckers, I take the scenic drive up 35, across the Metedeconk and the Manasquan to Point Pleasant, switch to NJ 34 through more interlocking towns, townships, townlettes — one rich, one not, one getting there, one hardly making its millage. I love this post-showing interlude in the car, especially after my syncope on the dune. It’s the moment d’or which the Shore facilitates perfectly, offering exposure to the commercial-ethnic-residential zeitgeist of a complex republic, yet shelter from most of the ways the republic gives me the willies. “Culture comfort,” I call this brand of specialized well-being. And along with its sister solace, “cultural literacy”—knowing by inner gyroscope where the next McDonald’s or Borders, or the next old-fashioned Italian shoe repair or tuxedo rental or lobster dock is going to show up on the horizon — these together I consider a cornerstone of the small life lived acceptably. I count it a good day when I can keep all things that give me the willies out of my thinking, and in their places substitute vistas I can appreciate, even unwittingly. Which is why I take the scenic route now, and why when I get restless I fly out to Moline or Flint or Fort Wayne for just a few hours’ visit — since there I can experience the new and the complex, coupled with the entirely benign and knowable.

Cancer, naturally, exerts extra stresses on life (if you don’t instantly die). We all cringe with cancer scares : the mole that doesn’t look right; the lump below our glutes where we can’t monitor it, the positive chest X ray (why does positive always mean fatal?) resulting in CAT scans, blood profiles, records reviews from twenty years back, all of which scare the shit out of us, make us silent but wretched as we await the results, entertaining thoughts of apricot treatments in Guadalajara and inquiries about euthanasia for nonresidents in Holland (I did all these). And then it’s nothing — a harmless fatty accumulation, a histoplasmosis scar from childhood — innocent abnormalities (there are such things). And you’re off the hook — though you’re not unfazed. You’ve been on a journey and it’s not been a happy one. Even without a genuine humming tumor deep in your prostate, just this much is enough to kill you. The coroner’s certificate could specify for any of us: “Death came to Mr. X or Ms. Y due to acute heebie-jeebies.”

But then when the sorry news does come, you’re perfectly calm. You’ve used up all your panic back when it didn’t count. So what good is calm? “Well, I’m thinking we’d better do a little biopsy and see what we’re dealing with….” “Well, Mr. Bascombe, have a seat here. I’ve got some things I need to talk to you about….” Be calm now? Calm’s just another face of wretched.

And then what follows that is the whole dull clouding over of all good feeling, all that normally elevates days, moods, reveries, pretty vistas, all the minor uplifts known to be comforting…. Crash-bang! Meaningless! Not real reality anymore, since something bad had always been there, right? The days before my bad news, when I had cancer but didn’t know I had it and felt pretty damn good — all of those days are not worth sneezing at. Good was a lie, inasmuch as my whole grasp on life required that nothing terrible happen to me, ever— which is nuts. It did.

So the on-going challenge becomes: How, post-op, to maintain a supportable existence that resembles actual life, instead of walking the windy, trash-strewn streets in a smudged sandwich board that shouts IMPAIRED! FEEL SORRY FOR ME! BUT DON’T BOTHER TAKING ME SERIOUSLY AS A WHOLE PERSON, BECAUSE (UNLIKE YOU) I WON’T BE AROUND FOREVER!

I wish I could tell you I had a formula for changing the character of big into small. Mike has suggested meditation and a trip to Tibet. (It may come to that.) Clarissa’s been a help — though I’m ready for her life to re-commence. Selling houses is clearly useful for making me feel invisible (even better than “connected”). And Sally’s absence has not been a total tragedy, since misery doesn’t really want company, only cessation. Suffice it to say that I mostly do fine. I overlook more than I used to, and many things have just quit bothering me on their own. Which leads me to think that my “state” must not be such a thoroughly bad or altered one.

And I’ll also admit that in the highly discretionary lives most of us lead, there is sweet satisfaction to this being it, and to not having it be always out there to dread: the whacker coronary; both feet amputated after paraskiing down K2 on your birthday; total macular degeneration, so you need a dog to help you find the can. This longing for satisfaction, I believe, is in the hearts of those strange Korea vets who admit to wartime atrocities they never committed and never would’ve; and may be the same for poor friendless Marguerite, back in Haddam, wondering what she has to confess. There is a desire to face some music, even if it’s a tune played only in your head — a desire for the real, the permanent, for a break in the clouds that tells you, This is how you are and will always be. Great nature has another thing to do to you and me, so take the lively air, the poet said. And I do. I take the lively air whenever I can, as now. Though it’s that other thing great nature promises that I rely on, the thing that quickens the step and the breath and so must not be thought of as the enemy.

I hatch a thought as I cross the Manasquan bridge and near the 34 cut-off: to stop at the Manasquan Bar for a beer and a piss in its nautical, red-lit cozy confines. Years ago, with a cohort of fellow divorcés, I would drive over from Haddam once a month, just to get out of town, seeking night-time companionship and large infusions of gin and scotch that always sent us back into the dark to Hightstown, Mercerville and home with a better grasp on our griefs and sorrows. A quick re-savoring of those old days — the rosy perpetual indoor bar light and beery bouquets — would, I’m sure, extend the good feeling I’ve concocted. But a piss is what I really need and a beer is not, since a beer would just require another piss sooner than I now consider normal (hourly). Plus, any venture into the swampy vapors of time lost — no matter how good I’d feel — could prove precarious, and make me late for Wade.

Instead then, I take 34 straight inland, north through suburban Wall Township, which is not truly municipal or even towny, but dense and un-centered, a linear boilerplate of old strip development, skeins of traffic lights and jug-handles with signage indicating Russians, Farsi speakers, Ethiopians and Koreans live nearby and do business. A cellular tower camouflaged to look like a Douglas fir looms up at an uncertain distance above roofs and fourth-growth woodlots. The Manasquan River winds past somewhere off to the left. But little is discernible or of interest. It is actually hard to tell what the natural landscape looks like here.