TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Like most people I know, I tend to travel the same paths over and over. The same walk to the coffee shop, or to my children’s school, or to the post office. The same familiar route around the block with my old dog, because she’s comforted by familiar sights and scents and will stop, confused, if I try to lead her another way.

Even by car, many of us drive the same way to work or to school every day, influenced by traffic patterns and timing. We have our preferred routes to run errands, or to visit friends and family. When you live in a place long enough, or visit a place enough times, you learn the most efficient, or most scenic, ways to travel. I often feel like I’m on autopilot, as if my car has driven itself to a familiar destination.

Maybe humans have muscle and sense memory not unlike my dog on her walk around the block. We instinctively know the way, and we are most comfortable traveling the paths we’ve traveled before. It becomes a part of who we are, of how we know ourselves.

But sometimes we want or need to travel “off the beaten path,” as they say. Sometimes, as we see in today’s poem, we have to find — or create — a new way.

This is a poem by Carol Moldaw.

What We Wanted
by Carol Moldaw

was a trail that would lead sufficiently far away
                 to make it a good walk by the time we got back.

We wanted its footprint to be light enough
                 to escape notice but deep enough to follow.

Its route not known, its end site
                 and turning-back point not yet glimpsed,

but its mouth had to be where the easement
                 on the property above met undeveloped city land.

To scurry straight up the piñon-studded shale
                 was to slide scrambling backwards in one long gasp,

arms needle-scratched and palms shale-scraped.
                 It took most of summer’s Sunday morning dog walks

to construct a less direct and better course,
                  tracking the barbed wire fence line both north (left)

and right (south), seeking openings
                 in the ponderosa pines to climb up at a slight incline. 

It took much re-traipsing of the same ground
                 to suss it out, snipping strips of neon orange or pink

from the reels at our waists, tying, untying, retying 
                 (at first I typed “retyping”) ribbons every few trees.

When we reached the gulch that further on
                 crosses under our shared road, we veered back from it

and up, inadvertently creating our first switchback.
                 Later, we came to tack away well before the drop-off.

By that time, we knew where we were headed:
                 a vista point we’d stumbled upon coming up a saddle

from the north. It was already marked by cairns.
                 In the sun, the city below was a blur, while the mountain

peaks across the valley glinted like arrowheads. 
                 Blazing our trail back up, we often found ourselves guided

by the hoofprints of crisscrossing deer paths,
                 each delicate stamp on the dirt a seal, a heraldic fleur-de-lis.

"What We Wanted" by Carol Moldaw. Used by permission of the poet.