This episode was originally released on July 19, 2024.

Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Once, as a child, I broke off from my parents and became lost at the Tennessee County Fair. I looked for my family everywhere: in the sky where the Ferris Wheel turned like a giant clock, in the shaded overhang of crashing bumper cars, in the line of people at the ring toss where giant plush animals hung from a booth’s ceiling.

Everywhere I walked I kept bumping into a forest of adults and children eating cotton candy. I remember wishing I could just whistle and have everyone freeze, have the carnival noise go quiet, and hear my parents calling for me.

I often brag about possessing an inner Magellan, an ability to navigate to a destination without aid; truth is, I have a history of getting lost. At the MacDowell artist retreat, on the first night, I could not find my way through the woods to the main hall for dinner. For the better part of an hour, I ran through the yards of neighboring homes.

Then, there was that Halloween when my son and I kept circling back to the same location in a haunted corn maze in Vermont. It was near to closing time. We were terrified by the thought of being imprisoned through the night in a dense labyrinth of stalks and hay bales. Recorded screams and cries increased our fear. Eventually, a lithe, tall teenager in black clothes appeared and guided us back.

When lost, truth is, someone always rescued me from my disorientation. Today’s poem reminds me that we are a single body, reliant on each other to find our way.

Pando Aspen Clone
by Jacqueline Balderrama

 Never  a  notice  of  exiting,  just  another  entering sign  in the  rearview 
mirror.  Where it begins and ends:  a conference of roots.  Visitor guides 
admit  how difficult  to  sense the entirety  when  the  organism  merges 
with    smaller   aspen   the   way    a    pattern   meets   itself  on  strips  of  
wallpaper.  Everywhere I stand:  its center.  Tree in the foreground.  Tree 
in  the  background.   In  periphery — on  my  right  and  left  side  dusting 
into  juniper.  The horse in Magritte’s forest may have  such percipience, 
being   in  three  harmonious  pieces  bent  in  the  direction  of  travel.  It 
moves  forward and  sideways  the way the trees  braid  through it.  Tree 
clustered  around others. Slow tree in the years of drought. Tree on the 
mind  of  every  tiring bird.  Close  to  the eye,  beetles  colored the same 
white  and black  as the bark  dodge  my view.  The trunk  ascends, and I 
forget  to look up.  I put  my ear  against  one tree  to hear  the promised 
popping  of  thirst  but  meet  vibrations  of the  nearby  road,  the static 
radio,  vast  and  trembling.  I believe  the paradox  of touching  one tree 
and   reaching  a  thousand—all   their  seedlings  circling  the  voices  of 
those who speak and those who say nothing. I hear them in my father’s 
recitation   of   St.  Patrick’s  Breastplate   on  those   long-ago  drives  to 
school.  He’s saying,  and may  we  follow  the way—of trees  beautiful in 
the fall, for clones synchronize their yellows. They are in the practice of 
changing even  as regeneration slows, as  deer fences  warn impending 
mortality.

"Pando Aspen Clone" by Jacqueline Balderrama. Used by permission of the poet.