Michael Chabon - Along the Frontage Road

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The New Yorker, November 19, 2001

Along the Frontage Road

by Michael Chabon

I don't remember where we used to go to get our pumpkins when I was a kid. I grew up in a Maryland

suburb that, in those days, had just begun to lay siege to the surrounding Piedmont farmland, and I

suppose we must have driven out to somebody's orchard or farm—one of the places we went to in the

summer for corn and strawberries, and in the fall for apples and cider. I do remember the way that my

father would go after our pumpkins, once we got them home, with the biggest knife from the kitchen

drawer. He was a fastidious man who hated to dirty his hands, in particular with food, but he was also a

doctor, and there was something grimly expert about the way he scalped the orange crania, excised the

stringy pulp, and scraped clean the pale interior flesh with the edge of a big metal spoon. I remember his

compressed lips, the distasteful huffing of his breath through his nostrils as he worked.

Last month, I took my own son down to a vacant lot between the interstate and the Berkeley mudflats.

Ordinarily no one would ever go to such a place. There is nothing but gravel, weeds, and the kind of

small, insidious garbage that presents a choking hazard to waterfowl. It is a piece of land so devoid of life

and interest that from January to October, I'm certain, no one sees it at all; it ceases to exist. Toward the

end of the year, however, with a regularity that approximates, in its way, the eternal rolling wheel of the

seasons, men appear with trailers, straw bales, fence wire, and a desultory assortment of

orange-and-black, or red-and-green, bunting. First they put up polystyrene human skeletons and

battery-operated witches, and then, a few weeks later, string colored lights and evergreen swags. Or so I

assume. I have no idea, actually, how this kind of business operates. There may be a crew of Halloween

men, who specialize in pumpkins, and then one of Christmas men, who bring in the truckloads of spruce

and fir. The Halloween men may be largely Iranian, and the Christmas men Taiwanese. And I don't know

if someone actually owns this stretch of frontage, or if it lies, despised and all but invisible, open to all

comers, a freehold for the predations of enterprising men. But I don't want to talk about the contrast

between the idyllic golden falls of my Maryland youth and the freeway hum, plastic skeletons, and

Persian music that spell autumn in the disjointed urban almanac of my four-year-old son. I don't want to

talk about pumpkins at all, really, or about Halloween, or, God knows, about the ache that I get every

time I imagine my little son wandering, in my stead, through the deepening shadows of a genuine pumpkin

patch, in a corduroy coat, on a chilly October afternoon back in, say, 1973. I don't mean to imply that

we have somehow rendered the world unworthy of our children's trust and attention. I don't believe that,

though sometimes I do feel that very implication lodged like a chip of black ice in my heart.

Anyway, Nicky loves the place. Maybe there is something magical to him in the sight of the windswept

gray waste transfigured by an anomalous outburst of orange. In past years, the rubber witch hands and

grinning skulls had intimidated him, but not enough to prevent him from trying to prolong our visits past

the limits of my patience and of my tolerance for the aforementioned ache in my chest. This year,

however, was different, in a number of ways. This year he took the spooky decorations in stride, for one

thing.

"Dad. Look. Look, Dad. There's a snake in that skull's eyehole," he said.

We were just getting out of the car. The gravel parking strip was nearly empty; it was four o'clock on a

Monday afternoon, with three weeks still to go until Halloween. So I guess we were a little early. But we

had both wanted to get out of the house, where ordinary sounds—a fork against a plate, the creak of a

stair tread—felt like portents, and you could not escape the smell of the flowers, heaped everywhere, as

if some venerable mobster had died. In fact the deceased was a girl of seventeen weeks, a theoretical

daughter startled in the darkness and warmth of her mother's body, or so I imagine it, by a jet of cool air

and a fatal glint of light. It was my wife who had suggested that Nicky and I might as well go and pick out

the pumpkin for that year.

There was only one other car in the lot, a late-model Firebird, beer-cooler red. Its driver's-side door

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