Simple Truths

Three summers ago, I took a job with the Fund for Public Interest Research knocking on doors for the Sierra Club. In short, my duties involved: memorizing a rigorously standardized spiel about how whosever dinner I had just interrupted in Massachusetts should write me a check because oil surveyors were upsetting caribou in northern Alaska; either having the door slammed in my face or enduring a 20-minute lecture on the evils of environment-based government regulation; and repeating this process 40 times every evening for two months.

Like any other job, canvassing had its pros and cons. One pro was that it was not like any other job. While friends shuffled papers under fluorescent lights at white-collar internships, I got to hike around a different neighborhood each day under the deep, late-afternoon sky. On the con side, repeating the same speech to the same blank, polite, vaguely frightened faces dozens of times every afternoon made me feel artificial.

It wasn't that I didn't want to "save the environment." It's just the pitch was so reductive, so unbalanced, so manipulative, like a television commercial. Nothing as complex as the relationship between man and the natural world can be boiled down to a string of several well-wrought sentences. The words, their simplicity, the way they flow easily off the tongue, into the ears, and settle around the brain. It is the seductive grace with which the speech acquitted itself, like a charming suitor who dazzles and then departs before betraying his baser habits, which would surely reveal themselves in marriage.

But when each kind-eyed woman smiled and reached for her checkbook, I stayed silent, and soon became one of the office's most lucrative fundraisers.

One day I was canvassing a neighborhood here in Concord, my hometown. Plotting routes and systematically blanketing each road and neighborhood had made me amazed at how little of the town I had actually ever seen. Sidestreets off familiar thoroughfares had opened up into entire networks of smaller roads and cul de sacs, which were treasure troves for donation-seeking footsoldiers like me. It was early in the evening -- I remember because the sun had turned orange and slid near the treetops, causing me to lower the brim of my cap closer to my eyes. I was on a street I had never been on before. I remember how clean the lawns were, how exposed to the sunlight. The neighborhood appeared to have been built relatively recently by a developer who clear-cut a chunk of the woods, and I winced at the knowledge that any checks I collected here would bear a small stain of irony.

The house was on my left. That I am certain of. A deck-style house, I think. Two levels for sure. With a white door and a driveway to the right of the door. I remember walking down to it on a gradual slope and noticing that the gradient leveled off near the driveway. A walkway to the door. A stoop? Maybe. I cannot be sure. The one part of this memory that I know is true is that there was were narrow windows stretching the whole height of the door on either side of it, though I cannot remember whether they were flat against the front of the house or perpendicular to it, with the door set in slightly. I know there were windows because it is through the one on the right that I saw the inscription on a rectangular, wooden slab; the elusive inscription I would find myself seeking feverishly three years later.

I don't remember what it said. Not a word.

Here is what I do remember: Being rapt. Tilting my head against the glass of the window to see it more clearly once it was obvious no one was at home. Reading it all the way through, and then again. I remember the owner of the house pulling into the driveway, me introducing myself, skipping my Sierra Club spiel and asking her about the the inscription. I remember her letting me in and telling me it was recovered from an old church in Baltimore right before it burned down, I think, sometime in the 19th Century. It was a litany of advice. Simple, intuitive truths. Not prosyletized but humbly submitted, as if by a dying man, sighing the words into the wood as the walls of the church burned around him. Accessible, brief, useful, unpretentious. Serene, reassuring, permanent.

After chatting with the woman for some time, I excused myself, telling her I still had her neighbors to visit. I can't remember if she donated money. I can't even remember if I wound up asking for any.

Several years passed.

By senior year of college, the focus was the future: the great blue beyond, and what my classmates and I would do when we got there. I would see friends marching across campus in dark suits and fresh haircuts, on their way to meet a representative from this firm or that investment bank. I would see roommates working feverishly on fellowship applications. It became clear that the four years we had been given to figure out what the world is and how to integrate into it were nearly expired. I couldn't help but feel I had largely failed at this task. Rather, the more I had learned, the more I had realized I did not know -- or worse, could not know. The world, it appeared, was more complicated than I had hoped. I put off applying for jobs as long as I could.

I never completely forgot about the sun-soaked deck house with the inscription from that old Baltimore church. There were several times in those years when I thought about finding it during some trip home, but I always forgot until I was back in my dorm room in Maine. "Oh well," I would say to myself. "Maybe next time." I knew exactly where it was: down Monument Street, left on Liberty, and then it was some road on the right -- one I had never known existed before that summer. When I came home for my final school vacation several days ago, I resolved to find it.

It was late afternoon, about the time I would have been canvassing that summer, and the sun was low and fat as I drove out Monument Street past the Old North Bridge and then left on Liberty right after the Concord River. After consulting a map at home, I decided I was looking for was called Cedar Way -- a small cul de sac just past where Liberty intersects with Barnes Hill Road. But when I turned on the the small street, there was no slope, no deck house on the left with windows flanking the door. Strange, I thought. Were there any other hidden neighborhoods, any other sidestreets along that ridge? I doubled back to Monument Street and, finding nothing, turned around again and followed Barnes Hill all the way to the intersection with Lowell and Barretts Mill. There were no sidestreets, just familiar old country houses I had driven past hundreds of times.

I decided I must have misremembered the area of town where the house was, and I scoured my memory for alternatives -- areas of town that were open to late-afternoon sunlight, might have been developed relatively recently, and that I recall having canvassed that summer after freshman year. I decided to try Strawberry Hill. But the woods were too thick and they cast shadows over the roofs of each house. The only clear-cut neighborhood I found was full of McMansions, too big and ostentatious to be my humble deck house with its humble inscription.

I was irritated. This was supposed to be a quick, easy trip to satisfy a minor itch. I had never minded enough to seek out the inscription before, save for several unsuccessful Google searches, but I had always counted on it being there where I left it -- something I could always find if I really wanted to. Now that I couldn't the itch had opened up into a raw sore, and I wheeled around and sped back toward Monument Street, this time driving past Liberty and into the rolling farmland with its sprawling colonial pastures. I turned right at Doris Kearns Goodwin's house, the one with the lighthouse at the north end, on to Silver Hill Road, driving down Cressbrook and back and then left on Turning Mill, without any luck. Finding myself suddenly in Carlisle, I turned around abruptly in a blind drive and nearly got rear-ended by another car, which honked at me.

The sun had reached the tops of the trees, and I knew I wouldn't have enough light to continue my search for much longer, so I went home. The next day I used a map. If the house with the inscription wasn't off Liberty and it wasn't off Strawberry Hill and it wasn't off Monument, then it must be on the other side of Route 2, in one of the subdivisions off Sudbury Road, Powder Mill Road, Old Marlboro Road, or Old Road to Nine Acre Corner.

It was gray out, and the sky spat cold droplets on to receded plow-heaps of dirty snow that lined the roads and driveways. I started down Sudbury, figuring I'd work east to west, and hung a left on Heath's bridge road, which was nearly washed out where it dipped into the Sudbury river floodplain. The houses skulked in the shade of willows the near the river and maples farther in. There were too many trees here, and the underbrush was thick and filamentous. These were the wrong houses, the wrong neighborhoods. They were too natural, too gnarled.

I worked my way over to Powder Mill, turning off on to Plainfield and working my way impatiently down short cul de sacs and around oxbows. I passed the breezy shacks on Shore Drive near White's Pond, which were too small, and the stately mansions of Captain Miles Road, which were too large. On Anson Avenue, the houses seemed almost just right. I slowed my car and crept down the street, as though the correct house might bound off like a spooked deer if I approached too quickly. I studied the doors, looking for the tall windows that I had peered through three years earlier. And there they were, on a gray house with blue shudders and the numbers 117 nailed into the siding.

Was this the house from my memory? Could it have been gray? I remembered it as yellow, but I could easily have confused that with my memory of the sun. I didn't actually remember a color, not one I could be sure of. I had remembered a deck-style house, and this wasn't. But it was about the same size and the same rectangular shape. It was exposed. It had a clean, clearly demarcated lawn. And those windows next to the door. I coasted to a halt on the opposite side of the road, feeling suddenly nervous, as though I were picking up a date. I left the car running when I got out. Nobody appeared to be home, and I grew acutely conscious of how sketchy I must have seemed in my black coat and dark sunglasses, skulking around an empty residence on a quiet suburban street like a burglar casing a house. In this town, people called the cops over much less.

I came to the door and glanced quickly through the right-side window at the facing wall. There was no slab, no inscription. No insights. Just bricks.

On Old Marlboro Road I pulled over again, but not to look in on another house. My car had recently been in the shop due to a faulty shifting linkage, and whatever they did to fix it had caused the stereo to reset. It wouldn't turn on again unless I entered the theft code, and distracted by my quest I had barely noticed that I had been driving the whole afternoon in silence. Now this absence weighed on me, and I rifled the manual in my glove box for the code and found it. The only disc I had in the car was a mix of Death Cab for Cutie and the Kings of Convenience, and I twisted the volume knob to high as I shifted back into drive.

More streets, more houses. My enthusiasm for the quest had dulled. I was now going through motions, expecting disappointment around ever bend and down every empty street and finding it. I began to wonder if my vision of this house, which I had clung to for three years, might have been a farce; a fragmental collage of of the hundreds of similar houses on similar streets I had visited that summer. If I couldn't remember if the house was yellow or blue, how could I be sure it was a deck house, and not a ranch or a split-level? How could I be sure it was even in Concord? As if on cue, Ben Gibbard's voice rang through on the stereo: "It stung like a violent wind / that our memories depend / on a faulty camera in our minds..."

It was time to go home. As I turned off Old Marlboro road and on to the highway, I thought about that day three years ago, when I, the door-to-door virtue salesman, stumbled on that sun-soaked house on the sloping road with the clear-cut lawn and the inscribed panel from that old Baltimore church. I imagined myself transcribing the artifact's words on to the back of my donation ledger with my pen. I imagined myself writing them down in a notebook when I got home. Memorizing them. Quoting them to friends.

Those simple, untangled truths.