Free The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

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