Speaker 1: Retirement suited me mostly. I thought that clearing out my
Speaker 1: office boxes of reports and a battered mug with world's
Speaker 1: most tireless parks Man scrawled across the side would leave
Speaker 1: some gaping emptiness. Instead, what followed was quieter mornings that
Speaker 1: unspooled at their own pace. My flat suffused with a
Speaker 1: cautious sort of possibility I hadn't had since my twenties. Still,
Speaker 1: old habits tend to carve themselves deep. So every day,
Speaker 1: just after dawn, I walked the circuit of the park
Speaker 1: I tended for nearly four decades, a loop through its
Speaker 1: patchwork of beds and statues, past the chest bench and
Speaker 1: the spindly Linden tree. It was my way of marking time,
Speaker 1: even with nothing left that truly required timetables. On the
Speaker 1: first morning, I noticed the air was crisp and faintly apricot,
Speaker 1: with the first sunlight pooling on wet grass. The footpath,
Speaker 1: composed of mixed gravel and smooth, hard packed earth, always
Speaker 1: began at the north gate. I'd leave my flat, slip
Speaker 1: the keys in my coat pocket, and step into the
Speaker 1: hush that only seems to exist in half waking cities.
Speaker 1: My watch was a no nonsense old cassio, working back
Speaker 1: from thirty years of field work, it had become a
Speaker 1: small anchor for me walks, tasks, even meals measured in
Speaker 1: its blunt, impersonal digits. That morning, my circuit began as
Speaker 1: it always had, a brisk, familiar rhythm over the slight undulations,
Speaker 1: the crunching greet of gravel under rubber soles. I nodded
Speaker 1: to tamars sweeping due off the chest bench, heard a
Speaker 1: dog barking somewhere behind the sycamores, felt the reflex pull
Speaker 1: of old memories guiding my feet past each sun warmed landmark.
Speaker 1: The statue of the heron, half forgotten by most marked
Speaker 1: the garden's midpoint. I passed the trio of pensioners fussing
Speaker 1: over a checkered board, and mentally ticked off time, glancing
Speaker 1: down at the cassio and my step counter where it
Speaker 1: dangled by my belt. By the time I'd reached the
Speaker 1: north gate again, letting myself out on to the sidewalk,
Speaker 1: I felt a faint but distinct itch and off kilter
Speaker 1: echo that something hadn't lined up. My breathing wasn't heavier,
Speaker 1: but when I checked my watch blinking in disbelief. It
Speaker 1: seemed impossible. The walk was fifteen minutes longer than the
Speaker 1: average I had traced for years. My pedometer showed nearly
Speaker 1: seven hundred extra steps. I stood baffled at the corner
Speaker 1: by the bakery, mentally working backwards. Did I dawdle? Maybe
Speaker 1: did Ta Mars catch me for a chat? And I
Speaker 1: had lost time? But no, I hadn't stopped. The geese
Speaker 1: were silent, the smells of cooling bread from across the
Speaker 1: street had greeted me as always. I turned over the
Speaker 1: facts like a puzzle box. But by the time I'd
Speaker 1: brought a bun from the bakery and started home, it
Speaker 1: felt almost trivial. Perhaps I'd simply been slow, distracted by
Speaker 1: some detail mist in my first retirement months age. Perhaps
Speaker 1: the memory of my mother's voice. Asterisk, you lose a
Speaker 1: step and don't even know it, asterisk echoed at the
Speaker 1: edge of thought, and I muttered to myself as I
Speaker 1: poured the morning's first cup of tea. But as I
Speaker 1: walked back across the living room, something felt altered. Asterisk.
Speaker 1: The morning had been just oft enough that, despite myself,
Speaker 1: I found my mind looping back to the path searching
Speaker 1: for what I'd missed after breakfast, the feeling hadn't faded.
Speaker 1: I checked my log book Old habit, a left over
Speaker 1: from work where I sometimes jotted down steps and times.
Speaker 1: Even now there it was six thousand, seven hundred steps,
Speaker 1: up from six thousand, a full fifteen minutes gone unaccounted for.
Speaker 1: It seemed a ridiculous thing to dwell on, and I
Speaker 1: was almost embarrassed to think of bringing it up with
Speaker 1: any one. I let it be, but noticed a faint restlessness,
Speaker 1: as if some small important gear in the daily machine
Speaker 1: had slipped. I suppose, if I'm honest, that was where
Speaker 1: the boundary began to smudge, and the world hinted at
Speaker 1: having more peculiarities lurking in its routine than I'd ever
Speaker 1: cared to admit. As a child, I'd loved maps, grid paper, compasses,
Speaker 1: tracing roots through fields near my grandparents village. My strongest
Speaker 1: sense of self always came from knowing where I was
Speaker 1: and how to get from one place to another. The park,
Speaker 1: when I first joined the city's maintenance crew as a
Speaker 1: fresh twenty something, had been a perfect mosaic of roots
Speaker 1: and ratios, Counting the pace from the East gate to
Speaker 1: the sun dial, measuring distances for new benches, overseeing the
Speaker 1: lengthening of flower beds. As budgets shifted with years, my
Speaker 1: responsibilities waxed and waned, but my relationship to the space
Speaker 1: beneath my feet remained fixed. Even as the park grew,
Speaker 1: unchanged statues replaced trees, trimmed seasons, rolling over the same
Speaker 1: stone archways, I maintained a kind of catalog in my head.
Speaker 1: Even after retiring. It was hard to attach entirely, which
Speaker 1: is why I trusted my memory when it came to
Speaker 1: the feel of the circuit and its expected demands. The
Speaker 1: park itself is nestled in what used to be the
Speaker 1: wealthier side of the city. Though now its edges are
Speaker 1: hemmed by grim, utilitarian blocks. Still, the central garden is beloved,
Speaker 1: a little island of layered quiet, fallen petals, whispers of
Speaker 1: kids shrieking from the playground, and an odd blend of
Speaker 1: permanence and the unpredictable. The ornate iron work of the
Speaker 1: north gate, set between two squat stone lions, opens onto
Speaker 1: a long promenade. If you angle west, you pass under
Speaker 1: alleys of sycamores, always sticky under foot in spring. To
Speaker 1: the south the gravel curves by the Herons statue rumored
Speaker 1: to be based on some real city mascot from years
Speaker 1: gone by. Dead Center, the path divides at the Rose Garden.
Speaker 1: New hybrids over prune some seasons, ebulliant the next, but
Speaker 1: always the half way mark. In my walk, there's a
Speaker 1: living cars who populate those hours. To Mars, who tends
Speaker 1: the beds with almost monastic silence, grunting greetings morning after morning.
Speaker 1: The chess bench regulars, three retired school teachers, Missus Cock,
Speaker 1: McKinney and old mister Doig, whose debates about the proper
Speaker 1: defense in Queen's Gambit have become part of the landscape themselves.
Speaker 1: Then there are the runners, always ignoring the world behind headphones,
Speaker 1: and the litter of dog walkers with yipping terriers and distracted,
Speaker 1: apologetic smiles. In a lighter season, Doctor Ming slim Eglide
Speaker 1: sometimes haunts the periphery, sketching in a note book with small,
Speaker 1: fierce jabs. She sometimes rumored to be writing a local
Speaker 1: flora catalog. But I'd never thought to ask into this world,
Speaker 1: this cross section of routines, ceremonies, and tiny dramas. I'd
Speaker 1: embedded myself since the city's first round of modernization, back
Speaker 1: before the park replaced a cracked old bandstand with a
Speaker 1: rose garden. I know the calcind roots beneath the oldest oaks.
Speaker 1: I know where the ground heaves and swallows puddles. My
Speaker 1: own memories and the little green bound volumes of official
Speaker 1: survey dates and maps are as interwoven as the branches overhead,
Speaker 1: and give me the quiet satisfaction of believing in things
Speaker 1: that more or less stay put. That tangibly was what
Speaker 1: the first long walk threatened. Not just a statistical hiccup
Speaker 1: or the ordinary misplacing of keys, but a soft, crawling doubt.
Speaker 1: What if something as sturdy seeming as a footpath could
Speaker 1: shift from under you unnoticed? So I resolved to pay
Speaker 1: closer attention. On the following morning, I let myself stretch
Speaker 1: in the doorway, feeling the stiffness in my knees, and
Speaker 1: began my walk with a deliberate, almost performative precision through
Speaker 1: the north gate, Passing under the flaking white paint of
Speaker 1: the arch, counting steps beneath my breath. I moved at
Speaker 1: my old, brisk, workmanlike pace to Mars. Was there again,
Speaker 1: head down, I waved but said nothing, focusing instead on
Speaker 1: the rhythmic crunch, the metronome of footfalls, the faint pull
Speaker 1: of gravity at each gentle bend. The sun was dew bright,
Speaker 1: turning the air almost gold in pockets. The park was itself,
Speaker 1: or seemed to be a quarter through the walk, I
Speaker 1: passed the statue, a bronze heron with its neck improbably curved,
Speaker 1: beak pointed downward as if searching for an invisible frog.
Speaker 1: Normally it marked in my mind precisely minutate on a
Speaker 1: normal day. I took note of my watch. I was
Speaker 1: running only moments behind, seconds not minutes, and pressed on,
Speaker 1: feeling that any irregularity could be weeded out by sheer will.
Speaker 1: But as the world around me unfolded, ushers of light
Speaker 1: through trees, occasional dog walkers, a jogger sweating past with
Speaker 1: a flat, determined look, I felt the unnerving sense of
Speaker 1: being slightly off script. By the time I should have
Speaker 1: approached the rose garden, where petals lay scattered like a
Speaker 1: painter's debris, I found myself in a stretch of path
Speaker 1: that felt subtly wrong, elongated with the garden itself delayed
Speaker 1: behind a trick of turns. My legs ached, not in
Speaker 1: any new way, but with the aggravation of being asked
Speaker 1: to do more than promised. When I completed the loop,
Speaker 1: my watch blinked back at me, twenty minutes slower than
Speaker 1: my average old pace. My pedometer clung to its integrity,
Speaker 1: but recorded even more steps than the previous morning. I
Speaker 1: stopped by the familiar iron bench, rubbing the back of
Speaker 1: my neck, feeling a flicker of irritation. Maybe the senses
Speaker 1: were malfunctioning, though both my body and watch believed what
Speaker 1: they told me, and I struggled to believe otherwise. A
Speaker 1: jogger grinned as he lapped me. Traffic on the adjacent
Speaker 1: artery pulsed with its usual indifference. The city was unchanged.
Speaker 1: Back in my apartment, I unearthed the city's official park
Speaker 1: map from my files p D F Overlay's archived surveyor's notes,
Speaker 1: old measuring wheels. Each check confirmed the loop's total length,
Speaker 1: the rational curve of each segment, the distance from one
Speaker 1: bench to another. The map was clean, the numbers consistent
Speaker 1: with every record I'd ever logged, but something between the
Speaker 1: hard ground of one place and another was no longer matching.
Speaker 1: I looked out my window to the spires and tree
Speaker 1: tops and found nothing amiss. Yet the footpath I'd known
Speaker 1: as a line of certainties now squirmed quietly beneath every
Speaker 1: attempt to summarize it. I told myself it was something small, fixable,
Speaker 1: maybe a transient physiological quirk, bad sleep and approaching cold.
Speaker 1: But beneath that, a quieter possibility nagged. What if nothing
Speaker 1: in the world had changed except the map inside my head?
Speaker 1: And what if, just maybe the roots of all this
Speaker 1: lay somewhere in the ground itself. My impulse was to
Speaker 1: return to basics. If time and steps were unreliable, perhaps good,
Speaker 1: honest measurement would restore order. On the third morning, I went,
Speaker 1: armed with an old tape measure, the kind I'd used
Speaker 1: to settle disputes between city planners and contractors over the
Speaker 1: true length from gate to garden. The morning was slightly overcast,
Speaker 1: the sky mottled with vapor, and the air was sharp
Speaker 1: with the smell of mud and fallen leaves. I started
Speaker 1: at the north gate, anchoring my tape at the cast
Speaker 1: iron threshold and dragging it stride by stride to the
Speaker 1: first stone bench two hundred fifty meters as the map insisted.
Speaker 1: I staked off landmarks, tree, trash, bin, bench, matching each
Speaker 1: to my mental and archival conformation. Not a millimeter discrepancy,
Speaker 1: a surge of hope, then the path, at least in
Speaker 1: part was true. I pressed ahead, methodical stepping, counting, cross
Speaker 1: referencing GPS on my smartphone. The satellite image placed me
Speaker 1: more or less where it should, Following the curve parallel
Speaker 1: to the western garden wall. I traversed the full loop,
Speaker 1: pedometer ticking steps, tallid GPS, trying fitfully to overlay a
Speaker 1: blue line over the park's diagram. The result a jumble steps,
Speaker 1: again more than the map would demand. GPS meanwhile mapped
Speaker 1: a line that seemed to squiggle and swerve where the
Speaker 1: path was dead straight. I spent the next week logging
Speaker 1: data each sunrise, armed with tools, frustration growing. No matter
Speaker 1: the approach, tape measure, GPS, voice notes, each walk grew
Speaker 1: longer by a minute, a dozen steps more, little increments
Speaker 1: that refused unification. I tried mid loop starts, using different gates.
Speaker 1: Once upon doctor Ming's gentle suggestion, I began at the
Speaker 1: Rose Garden itself, a place had never considered the start
Speaker 1: the same distortion trailed me. Timings and step counts drifted,
Speaker 1: stretching from memories fixed boundaries. Trying to exorcise doubt, I
Speaker 1: poured over old postcards and archival photographs in my study.
Speaker 1: The winding course of the path curved at the precise
Speaker 1: bend where the Linden grew, bubbled back after the warm
Speaker 1: memorial fountain was the same as ever, Yet walking in it,
Speaker 1: living in it, something quietly broke free from the old pattern.
Speaker 1: I checked the weather, was humidity or temperature a culprit?
Speaker 1: I charted mood, distraction, hydration, thinking perhaps my own body
Speaker 1: was betraying me, But each variable failed to account for
Speaker 1: the persistent, quantifiable strangeness. At this point, the park's character
Speaker 1: shifted for me from comforting permanence to a realm where
Speaker 1: every landmark was unmoored by the simple fact of measurement.
Speaker 1: Tools and senses can't both be wrong at once, I thought,
Speaker 1: But neither map, step, nor satellite would yield a clear culprit,
Speaker 1: and I found myself wondering, is it possible for the
Speaker 1: world to stay absolutely still and yet somehow refused to
Speaker 1: be fully measured? Growing restless with my private theorizing, I
Speaker 1: turned to Mars, catching him as he trimmed a border
Speaker 1: of impatience near the chest bench. I asked bluntly to Mars,
Speaker 1: any one ever add a new bit to the footpath,
Speaker 1: make it longer, nudge it around? He straightened, half shrugged.
Speaker 1: It's always twisted like this. Maybe feels different after rain,
Speaker 1: but the stones they stay put. Last time they repaved
Speaker 1: fifteen twenty years. Maybe I pressed him. New paving root
Speaker 1: changes a shake of the head, only fix the holes,
Speaker 1: never change the length. The chest bench regulars by that point,
Speaker 1: circling one another, like hawks debating some obscure opening. Go Ford.
Speaker 1: When I pose the question, need new shoes? Bob missus, Cock,
Speaker 1: declared her white curl's bobbing? Or stop counting? The mind
Speaker 1: plays tricks. You're thinking too hard, mc kinney added, wagging
Speaker 1: a finger at his thermos. Walk for pleasure, not for pace.
Speaker 1: Park Ees always been the same old mess. Mister Doyg,
Speaker 1: the most senior, offered, you're just catching up to all
Speaker 1: of us. Wait until you forget which bench is your favorite.
Speaker 1: Chastened and a little annoyed, I stopped by doctor ming
Speaker 1: that Saturday, where she hunched over a notepad, sketching a
Speaker 1: mass of unfamiliar weeds by the southern fence. Her reply
Speaker 1: was different, though still inconclusive. Perception shifts with routine. Maybe
Speaker 1: you've imprinted your expectations into the walk. Or perhaps she grinned,
Speaker 1: looking up through a curtain of wind tugged hair. Try
Speaker 1: beginning somewhere else, see what happens. That at least was actionable.
Speaker 1: On Sunday, I parked myself in the rose garden at
Speaker 1: the loops half way tide mark and began. The sunlight
Speaker 1: was ruddy, the flowers neither more nor less luminous than
Speaker 1: at any other hour. But when I finished a full rectangle,
Speaker 1: the numbers refused to unite. Time steps. Even my internal
Speaker 1: map of order each disagreed. I called my sister in exasperation,
Speaker 1: reciting the list of impossible results. Her laugh was calm, mind,
Speaker 1: but firm. Only you would retire and spend your free
Speaker 1: time measuring the world into bits. Maybe it's just a phase.
Speaker 1: Go enjoy it for Heaven's sake. Enjoyment, I thought, was
Speaker 1: hard to muster when the ground denied me certainty. But
Speaker 1: still I wondered whether the failing was mine alone. After dinner,
Speaker 1: I dragged out a faded shoe box of old park maps,
Speaker 1: post cards, aerial prints, half dusted diagrams bearing my own annotations.
Speaker 1: In every instance, the path was the same loops, curves,
Speaker 1: the stylized rectangle around the central rose bed, no extensions,
Speaker 1: no aberrations. The visible world outside my window, traffic moving,
Speaker 1: the distant clang of a school bell, remained unmoved by
Speaker 1: my dilemma. It was not only my body, or age
Speaker 1: or memory, my sense of the park's constancy. Once the
Speaker 1: static axle around which my days turned now wobbled with
Speaker 1: every attempt at confirmation, I delayed raising it with any
Speaker 1: one else. Years spent as the reliable one made it
Speaker 1: difficult to accept the possibility of a public mistake, or worse,
Speaker 1: of seeming unmoored without justification. But after nearly a fortnight
Speaker 1: spent measuring, logging, and quietly growing more frustrated, I found
Speaker 1: myself near the fountain one morning, with Doctor Ming's sketching
Speaker 1: irises in her battered notebook. The sound of water plunking
Speaker 1: from a bronze fish's mouth offered a gentle cover for embarrassment.
Speaker 1: I cleared my throat and sat beside her on the
Speaker 1: crumbling granite rim. I have a collection of numbers that
Speaker 1: refuse to agree with each other, I said, keeping my
Speaker 1: voice low. Ming looked up, intrigued, narrowing her eyes. I've
Speaker 1: noticed you circling, always counting steps. What's the hypothesis? I
Speaker 1: pulled out copies of my latest logs, two neat pages
Speaker 1: of loops, minute by minute times, step counts, beside landmark entries.
Speaker 1: I imagined herlaughing off my fixation, but her brow furrowed in
Speaker 1: genuine concentration. This is more than habit, she said, trailing
Speaker 1: a finger down the figures. Let's try an experiment. Document
Speaker 1: the entire journey out loud with a voice recorder, noting
Speaker 1: times and what's around. Maybe if we match our commentary,
Speaker 1: we'll catch where things miss aligne Her willingness kindled something,
Speaker 1: at last, an opportunity to test whether the problem was
Speaker 1: my own. We set out together the next morning, each
Speaker 1: armed with a phone for audio. We're passing the sycamores
Speaker 1: on the left, I muttered, at minute seven, should be
Speaker 1: the memorial fountain. In three minutes, Ming countered with small observations,
Speaker 1: color of rose leaves, a sketch of the heron. As
Speaker 1: we walked, the world seemed to keep pace with us,
Speaker 1: Yet divergence emerged. Approaching what should have been the rose garden,
Speaker 1: doctor Ming's commentary had her already passed it while I
Speaker 1: was still approaching. We ended at the gate comparing times
Speaker 1: and notes. Our logs didn't quite match, even though we'd
Speaker 1: walked side by side, Timings, perceived distances between points, even
Speaker 1: the actual order of features were inconsistent. She frowned, fascination
Speaker 1: coloring her tone. Let's try to enlarge our perspective. If
Speaker 1: it's not just you, how do others remember the root?
Speaker 1: We spent the next few days polling the morning crowd.
Speaker 1: Most gave little thought, denials, laughs, the root s as
Speaker 1: short as ever. A jogger insisted, towels slung over, sweat
Speaker 1: soaked shoulder, maybe you just need coffee. But amidst dozens
Speaker 1: of denials, Helen, a quiet woman who slow loping stride
Speaker 1: always seemed slightly out of tempo with the rest, offered
Speaker 1: something close to admission. Oh, I always forget where the
Speaker 1: roses are, she told us one misclad morning. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: turn the bend and expect them and they're not there
Speaker 1: for ages. Then suddenly they're right in front of me.
Speaker 1: But then I'm getting old, she added with a chuckle.
Speaker 1: We let the words linger, realizing in their own gentle way,
Speaker 1: how they widened the puzzle. My suspicion grew. Perhaps the
Speaker 1: park's stability was an artifact of our collective insistence, a
Speaker 1: thin overlay of custom atop a deeper unpredictability many chose
Speaker 1: to ignore. For the first time, I considered that distance
Speaker 1: itself might be unreliable, a measure that failed at the
Speaker 1: very point where shared expectation collided with the lived details
Speaker 1: of experience. Perhaps, in certain times or under certain conditions,
Speaker 1: the ground itself refused to act as passive backdrop. From there,
Speaker 1: it was a short leap to organizing a true experiment.
Speaker 1: I called doctor Ming in the evening, the idea forming
Speaker 1: somewhere between determination and unadulterated curiosity. Let's walk it as
Speaker 1: a group, each with our own watch, our own pedometer.
Speaker 1: We'll note every landmark, see if even a single measurement
Speaker 1: lines up. A week later, we stood assembled, rag tag
Speaker 1: but willing to Mars, looking awkward, holding a running watch
Speaker 1: borrowed from the chess regulars Helen, squinting into the daylight,
Speaker 1: Doctor Ming her phone already recording two athletic joggers who'd
Speaker 1: agreed to humor us, and, to my mild surprise, mister A. Mendola,
Speaker 1: a local historian known for his insatiable appetite for small
Speaker 1: town stories. We split up, each instructed to walk alone
Speaker 1: at ordinary pace to record at every major feature, bench, statue, garden,
Speaker 1: arch I myself began at the north gate, starting my timer.
Speaker 1: The instant my foot crossed the line, a hush fell
Speaker 1: city noise receded, the trees casting lattice work shadows as
Speaker 1: we filed into the circuit. For the next thirty minutes,
Speaker 1: the park teemed with the quiet march of a scientific experiment,
Speaker 1: each participant dissolving into their own rhythm as birds flitted
Speaker 1: above and clouds massed over the water feature. When we
Speaker 1: gathered again by the chest bench, the commotion began. Each
Speaker 1: report contradicted the next in some meaningful way. Helen, with
Speaker 1: mild confusion, insisted she'd walked a little less than usual,
Speaker 1: but definitely passed the memorial fountain before the playground. To Mars,
Speaker 1: notes scrawled on the back of a seed packet, insisted
Speaker 1: he'd gone the other order fountain, then playground, then heron
Speaker 1: the joggers readings were further splintered. They argued for different
Speaker 1: total lengths based on identical devices. Step counts failed to align,
Speaker 1: timings bore no reasonable relation to one another. Doctor Ming
Speaker 1: raised an eyebrow as she scanned each log book. No
Speaker 1: two of you agree on the landmark order, she announced,
Speaker 1: trying and failing to keep the excitement out of her voice.
Speaker 1: The physical sequence, the shape of the walk seems to change,
Speaker 1: not just for different people, but for each repetition. Mister
Speaker 1: Mendola was put out, shaking his head, muttering about the
Speaker 1: absurdity of modern science. Yet as the group discussed even
Speaker 1: he fell into speculation. Was the park actively changing or
Speaker 1: we we all victims of subtle perceptual tricks. Might it
Speaker 1: relate to geography, some oddity of the land itself, or
Speaker 1: his words, something stranger entirely embedded in the way we
Speaker 1: retell the world to ourselves. We lingered beneath the Linden tree,
Speaker 1: every one animated now voices overlapping with possibilities and doubts.
Speaker 1: I found myself filled with awe, a soft pressure under
Speaker 1: my sternam This was never just about a lapse of memory,
Speaker 1: age or fatigue. The park itself, this patch of the
Speaker 1: world I'd clung to for its fixedness seemed now to
Speaker 1: exist outside the reach of ordinary order. It was a
Speaker 1: place that, for reasons unfathomable, would not be measured or mapped.
Speaker 1: The same way twice I gazed out across the grass,
Speaker 1: the winding path threading off into new sunlight, and felt
Speaker 1: the gentle, freeeson of so something opening a mystery bigger
Speaker 1: than any one life's attention, but not perhaps bigger than
Speaker 1: the curiosity that binds a small group to wonder together.
Speaker 1: The group's experiment left us with more bewilderment than triumph,
Speaker 1: but we were united by a new appetite, not just
Speaker 1: for answers, but to keep pressing at the surprisingly elastic
Speaker 1: skin of the familiar. In the days that followed, our
Speaker 1: makeshift society of the footpath met with unspoken regularity, catching
Speaker 1: each other by the chest bench or at the fountain's
Speaker 1: sunwashed rim lingering after a walk that felt too short
Speaker 1: or perhaps impossibly stretched out. Neither to Mars, ever pragmatic,
Speaker 1: nor Helen, with her drifting modest uncertainty, seemed especially unsettled
Speaker 1: by the contradictions we'd observed, but their presence became essential.
Speaker 1: The steadying rods among us questioners. Mister A. Mondola, having
Speaker 1: lent his doubts and his historical cash, proved as drawn
Speaker 1: as the rest to the daily unraveling. Doctor Ming meanwhile,
Speaker 1: showed her scientific teeth, plotting the next test between bursts
Speaker 1: of half nervous laughter. It was doctor Ming who proposed
Speaker 1: we split into pairs next, taking opposite directions and gates,
Speaker 1: using phones to record video as we traced the looping circuit.
Speaker 1: If anything's varying, it should show up, she said, not
Speaker 1: just in our minds, but in the raw footage. Edit
Speaker 1: nothing trust The eye that morning was heavy with the
Speaker 1: fragrance of rain left over from the midnight storm. I
Speaker 1: was paired with Helen, both of us starting at the
Speaker 1: easternmost gate, while the others began at points north, south,
Speaker 1: and west, pointedly avoiding proximity. We agreed to speak out loud,
Speaker 1: narrating with as much precision as possible, every bench, every turn,
Speaker 1: every new landmark appearing. The results only rippled the surface further.
Speaker 1: When we gathered afterward at the stone table near the
Speaker 1: marsh border, the phones came out and we began to compare.
Speaker 1: What emerged was not chaos but an off odd persistent divergence.
Speaker 1: The videos Mine and Helen's to Marss and mister Mendolas
Speaker 1: Ming's and the two joggers captured the same features, the
Speaker 1: same details, but the order shifted invisibly between recordings. In mine,
Speaker 1: the rose garden appeared barely past the start. In Helen's
Speaker 1: it arrived only three quarters through. To Mars's video opened
Speaker 1: with the Linden Tree, then the chess bench, then the
Speaker 1: memorial arch, a sequence that by the official park layout
Speaker 1: would have required a different path altogether. Some features, like
Speaker 1: the little brass plaque commemorating the park's centenary, surfaced in
Speaker 1: various places, sometimes on a stone wall, sometimes stuck beside
Speaker 1: the pond. Only the chess bench, perhaps due to the
Speaker 1: gravitational pull of its regulars, clung to consistent spot in
Speaker 1: most narratives, though even it was sometimes approached from a
Speaker 1: direction that the map did not support. No one, not
Speaker 1: even the most dogged denys, could dismiss the evidence. We
Speaker 1: must have coordinated these accidentally, or done something wrong with
Speaker 1: the timing, one of the joggers protested, shaking her head.
Speaker 1: There's no way this isn't just some error with our phones,
Speaker 1: or but we'd checked the time stamps, GPS overlays, the
Speaker 1: start and end points, the cities. In the background, the
Speaker 1: rattle of home bound buses all placed us within identical
Speaker 1: slices of clock time, if not of space. Afterward, Helen
Speaker 1: produced almost sheepishly, a folded sheet of paper. She drawn
Speaker 1: what she called her mind's eyemap, intending, she said, to
Speaker 1: help a friend navigate the park after surgery. Her sketch
Speaker 1: showed the chest bench much further along the rose garden,
Speaker 1: tucked behind a knot of bushes. She couldn't properly name
Speaker 1: the fountain, set opposite the playground rather than beside it.
Speaker 1: It was at once familiar and entirely estranged from the
Speaker 1: city's official diagram. The others poured over it, pointing out oddities.
Speaker 1: Bench here, this one's closer to the Linden tree, But
Speaker 1: on the real path it should be on the other side,
Speaker 1: I said, she shrugged, smiling a little. That's where I
Speaker 1: feel it anyway. The historian mister A. Mendola, seemed revived
Speaker 1: by this. He'd brought a folder stuffed with old park
Speaker 1: guides and Sepia photographs pilfered from the city archives. Sorting
Speaker 1: through these on the picnic table. He pointed to a
Speaker 1: series of grainy images from the nineteen twenties, then the
Speaker 1: war years, then the mid nineteen seventies. The placement and
Speaker 1: angle of certain landmarks, the missing elm tree, the stone
Speaker 1: drinking fountain, the arrangement of the Linden Avenue shifted, not
Speaker 1: just in the way photos do, but fundamentally. The elm,
Speaker 1: for instance, appeared in only half the photographs, new and
Speaker 1: mature in the span of a decade, then absent altogether,
Speaker 1: with later guides failing even to acknowledge it. How old
Speaker 1: are these supposed to be? Anyway, Ming asked, flipping over
Speaker 1: the car board backed prince to find handwritten dates in
Speaker 1: a looping formal script. None of it added up. I'd
Speaker 1: always chalked this up to lax record keeping, a Mondola mused,
Speaker 1: But now I'm not so sure. There were stories, you know,
Speaker 1: from the oldest residents, that the park couldn't be mapped properly,
Speaker 1: so they stopped trying. They called it the shifty heart
Speaker 1: of the city. I always thought it was just sentimentality, folklore,
Speaker 1: he smirked, But there was less certainty in it than before.
Speaker 1: To Mars, who rarely engaged in speculation half whispered. There's
Speaker 1: a bench by a linden tree. We painted it blue
Speaker 1: once years back, but now no blue, just old gray
Speaker 1: paints showing through. Maybe it's nothing, maybe something always fades.
Speaker 1: It struck us then, different as we were in approach memory,
Speaker 1: even bodily rhythm, that we'd waded into difference itself, something
Speaker 1: both more mundane and more exquisite than error. There was
Speaker 1: no longer any way to say the path had a
Speaker 1: single objective shape. It wasn't misplacement, not as traditionally understood,
Speaker 1: and certainly not mere decrepitude or routines forgetfulness. The park
Speaker 1: revealed itself as a palimpsest, not simply of layered soil
Speaker 1: and shifting trees, but in the deeper, more stubborn sense,
Speaker 1: a ground on which time and experience were being overwritten daily,
Speaker 1: ever so slightly divergent from what came before. I began
Speaker 1: to sense dimly that our task wasn't about finding a
Speaker 1: fixed map, but understanding something broader, something that included the
Speaker 1: full mess of personal and historical drift. Each attempt, at
Speaker 1: certainty yielded a greater appreciation of the territory's resistance. This
Speaker 1: patch of earth amid housing blocks and city regularities, displayed
Speaker 1: a quiet autonomy from our insistent need for order. It
Speaker 1: was at once collective, our differences mapped out together and
Speaker 1: deeply personal, coloring each footstep with a unique shade of uncerty.
Speaker 1: But if we were to understand even a little, we'd
Speaker 1: need more perspective science, history, folklore, geology, intension. What made
Speaker 1: a place like this remain just beyond measure? The next
Speaker 1: few weeks were given over to kind of group enthusiasm,
Speaker 1: infectious and sometimes absurd, but always gently exhilarating. Doctor Ming,
Speaker 1: true to her calling, brought out technology, a flurry of
Speaker 1: mapping and fitness apps. Experimenting with GPS overlays from half
Speaker 1: a dozen contributors, she sometimes huffed into her phone on
Speaker 1: her walk northeast from the fountain. Bench should be here, bench?
Speaker 1: Not here? Is this even possible? Satellite imagery, when compared
Speaker 1: across free mapping platforms, showed a stable, sensibly curved path
Speaker 1: winding through rough ovals. The park from above was rational, sturdy,
Speaker 1: the lines of infrastructure mercilessly regular. Yet every walk logged
Speaker 1: via GPS on a phone or smart watch showed patterns
Speaker 1: of subtle divers the GPS trails smudged and curved, slightly,
Speaker 1: sometimes elongated in the direction of a remembered bend, sometimes compressed.
Speaker 1: It was as if the very act of walking inscribed
Speaker 1: a unique, ephemeral version of the space, never to be repeated,
Speaker 1: never converging fully with any other walk or device. I'm
Speaker 1: running out of plausible explanations, Ming confided one afternoon, frowning
Speaker 1: at a laptop screen beneath the Linden Tree. Satellites agree
Speaker 1: with themselves, but not with us. Our tracks drift almost
Speaker 1: like well interference, but not in the usual sense. It's
Speaker 1: more like an echo or persistent error that has a
Speaker 1: pattern but no cause. I can see. If it's not
Speaker 1: our steps and not the ground, what are we measuring?
Speaker 1: What actually makes up a distance? In a place built
Speaker 1: for memory? A Mendola, always eager to chase an archival
Speaker 1: rabbit hole, took it as a challenge. He announced the
Speaker 1: next morning that he would spend a week buried in
Speaker 1: the town's oldest records, hunting up every oddment about lost
Speaker 1: paths and shifting sights. He promised, waiving his notebook at
Speaker 1: the group to find some precedent for this, either a
Speaker 1: cover up, a mistake, or perhaps just perhaps a tradition.
Speaker 1: While we awaited his findings, Helen and I sat in
Speaker 1: the sunshine outside the park's old tea house. She remarked
Speaker 1: quietly how the place was now haunting her dreams, paths
Speaker 1: losing themselves, roses blooming in winter, the cities rumble, always
Speaker 1: at the margin, but never close enough to pin things down.
Speaker 1: For her and for me, the drift was no longer
Speaker 1: just a puzzle, but a hue that colored thought itself.
Speaker 1: I start to wonder if I've always been a little
Speaker 1: lost whenever I thought I was home, she said, not grieving,
Speaker 1: but with a kind of pleased wonder in her voice.
Speaker 1: When a Mondola finally returned on a Thursday, his face
Speaker 1: was split by a smile that was half triumph, half concession. Well,
Speaker 1: he began, you'll find this interesting. I stumbled onto a
Speaker 1: collection of oral histories, the kind once kept by the
Speaker 1: city as a nod to diversity before the term was fashionable.
Speaker 1: Several of the oldest entries talk about this very park,
Speaker 1: or rather the land it sits on. Apparently in the
Speaker 1: local indigenous language it was called something that translates roughly
Speaker 1: as winding place. He flipped through a notebook, reading from
Speaker 1: a yellowed photocopy. Winding place, the ground that folds and stretches,
Speaker 1: the place where the distance between things is sometimes short
Speaker 1: and sometimes long. No one knows why. Travelers pause, and
Speaker 1: sometimes time stands still. Sometimes it runs ahead. When you
Speaker 1: walk it, you should sing, so the way will not grow.
Speaker 1: He let this sink in the group, silent, listening to
Speaker 1: the nearby shout of children on the playground. It could
Speaker 1: just be a poetic description of floodplain unpredictability, or a
Speaker 1: fanciful bit of legend, But he went on, there's more.
Speaker 1: During the Victorian era, when the park was finally surveyed
Speaker 1: and tamed, the renowned landscape architect in charge, One George Whitcomb,
Speaker 1: chose to model its paths after ancient European labyrinths. Not
Speaker 1: Maze's mind, but those old designs meant to be walked,
Speaker 1: meditated upon. According to his letters, he wanted to unsettle
Speaker 1: the suffocating certainties of the modern city, to make people
Speaker 1: quote attend a new to where they stood and where
Speaker 1: they might be led. Our park's footpath, in other words,
Speaker 1: was intentionally given a design that resists efficient traversal. It's
Speaker 1: not only a practical route. It's a constructed ambiguity meant
Speaker 1: to trip the habits of the mind. Doctor Ming's smile
Speaker 1: was thin, speculative, So folklore, cultural intention engineered confusion. And
Speaker 1: what about the geomorphology? It fell to me as the
Speaker 1: one who'd sent a scattergun email to a local university's
Speaker 1: geology department to relay the reply, half digested and couched
Speaker 1: in the polite tentativeness of academic caution. The professor said
Speaker 1: the old river bed beneath the park might be causing
Speaker 1: subtle local variations in the Earth's magnetic field, unlikely to
Speaker 1: scramble memory, but not impossible to affect sense of direction.
Speaker 1: Perhaps she d included a gentle disclaimer. Most anomalies in
Speaker 1: park navigation, though, are social or psychological. Place memory is
Speaker 1: slippery at the best of times. The list grew memory, culture,
Speaker 1: historical design, ambiguous Earth itself. Yet none of these alone
Speaker 1: or in combination, seemed enough to wholly account for our experiences.
Speaker 1: The hard measurable divergence, the substantiated differences between our walks,
Speaker 1: even side by side, not just in feeling, but in
Speaker 1: documented sequence, the climactic moment if a journey like ours
Speaker 1: truly allowed one arose when we tried the most ambitious
Speaker 1: experiment yet. Inspired by Ming's technological confidence and A Mendola's
Speaker 1: historical lens, we walked in the largest group we'd ever assembled,
Speaker 1: a dozen drawn from every regular the park could offer,
Speaker 1: each supplied with a watch, a pedometer, and a simple instruction.
Speaker 1: At every major landmark, take a photograph, stamp the time,
Speaker 1: note your location, and keep walking. It was Helen Lingering,
Speaker 1: behind the group, as usual, who was first to speak
Speaker 1: the realization aloud when we reconvened with a dazzling mess
Speaker 1: of prints and logs. My photo of the heron Look here, Bob,
Speaker 1: it's got the rose garden in the background, she said,
Speaker 1: showing me her phone. You took yours at the same spot,
Speaker 1: but all I see in yours is a line of trees,
Speaker 1: not the garden. That's impossible, isn't it? Yet? It was so,
Speaker 1: and not only for the Heron the collected records, a
Speaker 1: cacophony of data impossible to reconcile, did not merely contradict
Speaker 1: by time or number, but by perspective. What was background
Speaker 1: for one was foreground for another, and the sequence in
Speaker 1: which features appeared altered from walker to walker, We tried
Speaker 1: lining the photographs up on a big picnic table, attempting
Speaker 1: to reconstruct a single shared reality. The more we sorted,
Speaker 1: the more we failed. Moments, overlapped perspectives doubled back, Impossible
Speaker 1: adjacencies appeared. Each person's journey through the park was not
Speaker 1: just a retelling, but a physical map, fleeting, unreproducible, impossible
Speaker 1: to lay atop any other. This was more than perceptual bias,
Speaker 1: more than failing bodies or confused minds. Every method, video, photos, GPS, print,
Speaker 1: spoken observation told its own internally consistent yet irreconcilably different story.
Speaker 1: Yet the world outside the park, buses, shops, the cities,
Speaker 1: ticking clocks remained synchronously aligned, as if the anomaly was
Speaker 1: bounded by the garden fence. We might, i thought, drive
Speaker 1: ourselves wild with further attempts, charting courses, recasting the path,
Speaker 1: seeking that elusive objective Hatten. But the harder we pressed,
Speaker 1: the more we arrived back at the same realization. The
Speaker 1: park insisted on plurality, on the interruption of a single
Speaker 1: authoritative narrative. By the time the experiment's excitement faded into sunset,
Speaker 1: we had as a group reached the closest thing to
Speaker 1: collective understanding we were likely to get. Ming. Writing in
Speaker 1: the margins of her note book put it best. We've
Speaker 1: uncovered layers folk, custom design, intent, physical geography, memories, slipperness,
Speaker 1: but none erased the others. Rather they all press against
Speaker 1: one another. This park is a kind of cross roads,
Speaker 1: and not where the lines of history, nature and thought
Speaker 1: tie into something living. It isn't a question of which
Speaker 1: explanation is the right one. All of the matter all
Speaker 1: only part way explain a mendola agreed for once subdued.
Speaker 1: Maybe most maps are too cruelly simple for the world.
Speaker 1: Maybe the world is always hiding itself this well, and
Speaker 1: we only notice sometimes. It was my own sense, too,
Speaker 1: that we had happened upon a pocket of place where
Speaker 1: certainty could not thrive, where each attempt to fix meaning
Speaker 1: revealed a necessary instability. The park was a contradiction built
Speaker 1: of fact, record, intention, and the irresistible slippage of personal journey,
Speaker 1: And it was all the more remarkable for it. I
Speaker 1: spent one more evening pouring over my old note books,
Speaker 1: logs of footsteps and minutes, old survey diagrams, a city
Speaker 1: map yellowed and brittle at the corners. In my retirement,
Speaker 1: I had expected to keep tracing old patterns, comforting myself
Speaker 1: with what could be measured. But now staring at the
Speaker 1: diagrams that once seemed so stable, the neat lines felt
Speaker 1: oddly pale beside the blooming multiplicity contained just outside my window.
Speaker 1: When next I walked at dawn, I left my tools
Speaker 1: at home for the first time since the anomaly had
Speaker 1: nudged me awake. I set out neither to record nor
Speaker 1: to prove. The path meandered a little longer in one place,
Speaker 1: a little shorter in another. The rose gardens shifted, The
Speaker 1: Linden Avenue felt unfamiliar, bright with unusual bird song. I
Speaker 1: gave myself up to the ambiguity, feeling at once modest, excited,
Speaker 1: and deeply at peace. It came to me, as my
Speaker 1: circuit closed by the iron gate, that my sense of
Speaker 1: comfort had circled too. I once depended on certainties, the
Speaker 1: fixedness of roots and ratios, the lined map, the agreement
Speaker 1: of every tool. Now my curiosity contained the space for contradiction.
Speaker 1: Rather than chafe at the limits of knowledge, I delighted
Speaker 1: in the park's refusal to let itself be mastered. I'd
Speaker 1: begun by seeking to solve. I ended content to witness
Speaker 1: with a small, abiding thrill, the world's quiet revolt. On
Speaker 1: my last morning, as summer threatened autumn, I paused just
Speaker 1: inside the north gate. A group of children burst past
Speaker 1: in a riot of footfalls, racing one another down the
Speaker 1: path that, whether long, short, or somewhere slyly in between,
Speaker 1: seemed to them one more ordinary ground to test by play.
Speaker 1: Their laughter carried startled the pigeons, and echoed back from
Speaker 1: the city's high flats. I watched them go, neither rushed
Speaker 1: nor dawdling now, but aware in a way that felt
Speaker 1: almost transparent, of the shimmering uncertainty under every step they took.
Speaker 1: I wondered, as I often had in recent weeks, whether
Speaker 1: to day's circuit would be longer or shorter than the last,
Speaker 1: but found myself unconcerned. Instead, I was left with one
Speaker 1: clear sense that the ground beneath us, unmapped as it
Speaker 1: may be, holds far more possibility and gentle wonder than
Speaker 1: we ever expect. And it struck me to ask, not
Speaker 1: of the park, but of the world outside, how many
Speaker 1: of our supposed certainties changed their size and shape from
Speaker 1: beneath our notice their fixity only a kind mask for
Speaker 1: something wilder, softer, and quietly transformative. We chase lines always,
Speaker 1: but perhaps it's the curve were meant to follow, the
Speaker 1: blooming ambiguity, that makes the journey worth taking at all,
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.