Supermodels of New Jersey
The Ruins

BY K. ELLS MENARD

The more the young architect sees developments he’s designed rise up out of what have always been crops or late-growth woods, the more he thinks that all as-of-yet undeveloped land indicates the impending excavation of its ruins. The more he sees construction trucks with tank-like conveyor treads hauling earth into mounds to create foundations and cellars for inevitable homes, the more the young architect realizes that development is the up-churning of ruins. The If you lived here you’d be home by now and Build-to-suit: 150,000 available acres for ultra-modern corporate complex signs actually announce excavations. The ruins of the state are already beneath the ground, buried alive, scratching at the undersides of crops and scrappy woods. 

Mother lodes of real estate, diamonds in rough wilderness, every fallow lot of land awaits the discovery and exhumation of its society. Waiting for excavators to liberate them from beneath the scrub are palaces in which children have always wheeled in rainbow-canopied strollers, where flirtatious robins have always bounced on the still-bare limbs of front-yard maples, where weekend concertos of lawn maintenance have always been thoroughly enjoyed. 

In an older and now well-established development where the young architect grew up, and where he now gets into his reliable vehicle, he sees what’s thirty years down the line for the ruins he’s newly discovered. Spray-painted neon markings across the mud, a few hot-pink flags, cordoned-off areas where the houses he’s designed will rise. But how could he call a neighborhood in which hard-working, well-meaning American parents raise crops of hard-working, well-meaning American children, who will grow to literally love their neighbors, and eventually return to the neighborhood throughout their lives and sit quietly within and understand as an honest frame for living, how can the young architect call such places ruins? A neighborhood that’s only begun to grow out of the land. The young architect thinks of the construction crews as excavators who ensure that these traditional shelters are accurately reconstructed to uphold authenticity . . . how can the young architect call the places these teams build ruins? 

Instead of discovering shards of china patterns and thousands of well-preserved aluminum drinking vessels to be auctioned at Christy’s, the excavators find nothing. As they dig foundations and raise eventual homesteads from beneath crops and woods, far from the ceremonial and cultural centers, they find nothing at all. No artifacts since this society rises out of nothing (nothing defined as woods and fields). The young architect determines that these ruins are excavated and restored out of nothing. 

When he thinks this way, he drives to the City, where he can’t think of anything but the City itself and all the supermodels on the streets who are probably from the provinces no different than him. 
 

On Liberating Flies 
The Dead Boy