Free Oh What a Paradise It Seems by John Cheever

from the nineteenth century and even earlier that were completely unpretentious but that, in their charm and inventiveness, seemed outstandingly patrician. Seven seventy-four was now a length in that highway of merchandising that reaches across the continent. It would be absurd to regret the obsolescence of the small dairy farm, but the ruined villages were for Sears a melancholy spectacle, as if a truly adventurous people had made a wrong turning and stumbled into a gypsy culture. Here were the most fleeting commitments and the most massive household gods. Beside a porn drive-in movie were two furniture stores whose items needed the strength of two or three men to be moved. He thought it a landscape, a people—and he counted himself among them—who had lost the sense of a harvest.
    While he drove he thought self-righteously of what he had done to improve the scene; what he had done forBeasley’s Pond. He had employed the environmentalist—Chisholm—and paid a laboratory at Cornell to specify the toxicity in the water. The reports were not completed, but there was to be a hearing in the town of Janice in the coming week. Chisholm spoke of the people who were destroying the pond as a huge and powerful criminal organization, who were bribing small municipalities and polluting water supplies to profit from the high cost of fill sites. Sears was not completely persuaded. Chisholm was one of those men whose worthwhileness, it seemed to Sears, was more of a genetic trait than a persuasion. One found them all over the world. The size of Chisholm’s teeth, the thickness of his glasses, his stoop and the spring with which he walked all marked him, Sears thought, as a single-minded reformer. His marriage, Sears guessed, would have been unsuccessful and his children would have difficulty finding themselves. Sears was not far from wrong. Seven seventy-four seemed an extension of the destruction of Beasley’s Pond.
    It was late when they reached the inn. Sears was disappointed but not surprised to find his inn flanked by two fried-food shops. The inn had changed ownership many, many times since he had been there. They drank a lot at the bar but whenever they mentioned fishing the barman changed the subject. The kitchen was closed and they ate sandwiches for supper. In their room they watched a show on television and went together to bed. Sears woke up. He had no idea of the hour but it was that hour when one is given the illusion of insight. He went to the window. The fried-food places were closed but the window was open and the smell of fried food filled the room.
    It was the smell of fried food that seemed to fill his consciousness. He thought, but only for a moment, of fried food as a new aberration like the strip with its cut-rate outlets and drive-in peep shows. He hastily amended this random thought with the knowledge that fried food had been one of the first things to be smelled on the planet. After the discovery of love, the importance of hunting and the constancy of the solar system came the smell of frying food. Even now, at the end of harvest in the most inaccessible of the Carpathians the shepherds come down from the mountains with their herds in the autumn to hear gypsy fiddlers and a snareless drum and smell sausages rotating over charcoal. It was barbarous—it disclaimed authority—and its magic was malnutrition, acne and grossness. It was indigestible and highly odorous and would be, if you were unlucky, the last thing you smelled on your way to the executioner’s block. And it was portable. You had to be able to eat it as you sat in a saddle or rode on a Ferris wheel or walked the midways and alleys of some country fair. You had to be able to eat it with your fingers, picking it from a cornucopia of leaves or bark or human skin while you paddled your war canoe or marched into battle. They were eating fried food when they made the first human sacrifice. Eggplant was being fried in the Colosseum when they broke the