Free The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford Page B

erected a human chain against the recycling people. But without notice, one night the Koreans dispatched a jumpsuited wrecking crew, trucked in dismantling equipment, trained two big klieg lights on the house, lighting up the neighborhood like an invasion from space. And by seven in the morning all four walls—within which I’d started a family, experienced joy, suffered great sadness, became lost to dreaminess, but through it all slept many nights as peaceful as a saint under the sheltering beeches and basswoods—were gone.
    Legal remedies were sought—to enjoin something, punish someone. The neighborhood has many lawyers. But the Koreans instantly cashed in the lot for two million to a thoroughbred breeder from Kentucky with big GOP connections. In a year, he’d put up a lot-line to lot-line three-quarter-size replica of his white plantation-style mansion in Lexington, complete with fluted acacia-leaf columns, mature live oaks from Florida, an electric fence, mean guard dogs, a rebel flag on the flagpole and two Negro jockey statues painted his stable colors, green and black. “Not Furlong” is what he called the place, though the neighbors have found other names for it. All problems were deemed my fault for selling out originally back in ’85. So mine is not a popular face around there now, though many of my old neighbors have also moved on.
             
    B runswick Pike glides me in through Rocky Ridge, back into Haddam Township, and becomes Seminary Street along the banks of the widened stream referred to by locals as Lake Bimble, for the German farmer who owned the river bank and, as a Tory in the Revolution, gave aid and comfort to Colonel Mawhood’s troops, and who for his trouble got bound to a sack of ballast rocks and tossed in the stream—Quaker Creek—by General Washington’s men, there to stay.
    Since I lived here for twenty years, I know what to expect farther in on Seminary two days before Thanksgiving. A melee. People stocking up and leaving for Vermont and Maine, the cozy Thanksgiving states; others arriving for family at-homes, students back from Boulder and Reed, divorcées visiting children, children visiting divorcées—the customary mid-day automotive hector brought about by a town become a kind of love-it/hate-it paragon of suburban amplitude gone beyond self-congratulation to the point of entropy. (Greenwich minus the beach, times three.)
    Plus, there’s the further complication of the town fathers’ decision to mount a Battle of Haddam re-enactment right in town. I read this in the Haddam
Packet,
which I still receive in Sea-Clift. Uniformed Redcoats and tattered Continentals in homespun, carrying period musketry, eating homemade hardtack and wearing tricorn hats, jerkins and knee pants, their hair in pigtails, will be setting up drill fields, redoubts and headquarters all around the Boro, staging assaults and retreats, bivouacs and drumhead courts-martial, digging latrines and erecting tenting at the sites where these occurrences actually occurred back in 1780—though the current sites may now be Frenchy’s Gulf, Benetton or Hulbert’s Classic Shoes. This was done once before, for the bicentennial, and it’s all happening again for the Millennium in an effort to rev up sidewalk appeal. Though some merchants—I heard this at the bank last week—are already sensing retail disaster, and have retained counsel and are computing lost revenue as damages. This includes the bank itself.
    The other distraction making movement into the Square near-impossible is that the Historical Society, in a fit of Thanksgiving spirit and under the rubric of “Sharing Our Village Past,” has converted the entire Square in front of the August Inn and the Post Office into a Pilgrim Village Interpretive Center. Two Am. Civ. professors from Trenton State with time on their hands have constructed a replica Pilgrim town with three windowless, dirt-floor Pilgrim houses, trucked-in period barnyard