(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 T HE L AY OF THE L AN D 25

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.

he morning’s plan is that once we make contact with Mike’s land T developer—

at the proposed cornfield site—I’m to take an expert

read on the character. Then he and Mike will hie off for a shirtsleeve, elbows-on-the-table, brass-tacks business lunch and afternoon plat-map confab, where Mike’ll hear the pitch, look him in the eye and attempt his own cosmic assessment. He and I’ll then hook up at 6:45

at the August Inn in Haddam and drive back to Sea-Clift, during which time I’ll offer my “gut,” take the gloves off, connect some dots, do the math and everything’ll come clear. Mike believes I have a

“knack for people,” a matter in dispute among the actual people who’ve loved me. Our scheme, of course, is the sort of simple one that makes perfect sense to everybody, and then goes bust no matter how good everyone’s intentions were. For that reason, I’m going in with earnest good feeling but little or no expectation of success.

’ve said nothing so far about my own Thanksgiving plans, now just two days aw

I

ay and counting, and that involve my two children. My reticence in this matter may owe to the fact that I’ve organized events to be purposefully unspectacular—consistent with my unspectacular physical state—and to accommodate as much as possible everyone’s personal agendas, biological clocks, comfort zones and need for wiggle room, while offering a pleasantly neutral setting (my house in Sea-26 Richard Ford

Clift) for nonconfrontational familial good cheer. My thought is that by my plan’s being unambitious, the holiday won’t deteriorate into apprehension, dismay and rage, rocketing people out the doors and back to the Turnpike long before sundown. Thanksgiving ought to be the versatile, easy-to-like holiday, suitable to the secular and religious, adaptable to weddings, christenings, funerals, first-date anniversaries, early-season ski trips and new romantic interludes. It often just doesn’t work out that way.

As everyone knows, the Thanksgiving “concept” was originally strong-armed onto poor war-worn President Lincoln by an early-prototype forceful-woman editor of a nineteenth-century equivalent of the Ladies’ Home Journal, with a view to upping subscriptions.