Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

My neighbor and friend Mary called to say, “No one does Autumn like Vermont.” She had just gotten back from a weekend trip of leaf-peeping with friends. I’d always thought that phrase a little too mischievous. Touring New England’s fall foliage is typically innocuous and magical.

Mary’s enthusiasm led me, on my next voyage to my adopted home state, to drive the backroads. I rented a car at Boston Logan and hit “Avoid highway” on my navigation app. My destination? The Brattleboro Literary Festival.

The colors through Massachusetts and New Hampshire were stunningly beautiful — rolling lanes and villages decked out in reds, oranges, yellows. Sunlight blazed through maples and oak. Falling leaves set my windshield aflame.

Vermont bans billboards and any visual noise that might pollute the horizon, so to cross into the state is to penetrate some divine force field of nature. It is to feel yourself enter a tourist postcard or live painting full of vibrant colors where a mountainside resembles a box of Fruit Loops.

But then, my friend Wyn texted a warning: “Leaf peeping in full session. Time your drive from Boston.” Turned out a thousand others also had the same idea of touring nature’s color exhibition. I hit unexpected traffic. The drive stretched out for an additional two hours. We forcibly meandered and drove slow past white clapboard churches, homes decorated with bright pumpkins, scarecrows, wreaths and garlands of yellow leaves. Part of the spectacle, I suddenly felt very self aware.

Today’s poem captures our complex relationship with nature, how we experience the sublime of the seasons, but also, the way it is often mediated through our modern and mechanized era.

On Being
by Ruben Quesada

Everything looks like a Monet
painting, the details softening 
onto the curve of road;
the reddened trees slicing 
through crumbling clouds
of smog. The moon gives itself
up to engorged highways
glowing through the windshield.
A bewildered driver waits 
at a stoplight— who has turned 
this image around? Now I’m a thin
column curiously looking past
the farthest queue of cars. 
The light changes, the driver
grows smaller moving past, 
I am a ribbon of flesh 
waving in the mirror.

“On Being” by Ruben Quesada from BRUTAL COMPANION © 2024 Ruben Quesada, published by Barrow Street Books. Used by permission of the poet.