Speaker 1: The first thing I ever noticed was half straight. It
Speaker 1: was straightness, you see, is something you can measure, was
Speaker 1: a rule of but rarely trust outdoors, and that's why
Speaker 1: it stood out. I was knee deep in a century
Speaker 1: and a half of maps spread across the long table
Speaker 1: at the Historical Society, maps with yellowing parchment edges and
Speaker 1: others sharp from a platter match crammed with loop and
Speaker 1: field boundaries in the heavy pencil lines of railway sidings
Speaker 1: that never arrived. Every single one from eighteen seventy four
Speaker 1: to last year's tourist pamphlet showed the same unlikely footpath,
Speaker 1: a line as incompromising as the North Star, running unbent
Speaker 1: from the old brick library, now shabbily grazed with a
Speaker 1: ramp and rubber door mat, to the wild grass edge
Speaker 1: of the community meadow. But it wasn't just the line.
Speaker 1: It was with a line went. Anyone who's grown up
Speaker 1: in Brenfield knows the old row ravine, a shaggy's gard
Speaker 1: in the earth at the back of town, so asteep
Speaker 1: that even the dog walkers prefer to skirt its farlip.
Speaker 1: If you value your ankles, you'd need it. The long
Speaker 1: way around yet there it was the cartographer's path. Didn't
Speaker 1: think to hesitate at the ravine. No switchback, no deeder,
Speaker 1: no apologetic wink of a dask crossing. It simply sailed across,
Speaker 1: as if every map maker agreed. There was nothing but
Speaker 1: green metter between Net and beee. The footpath rung perfectly
Speaker 1: mathematically direct. For perhaps two minutes. I simply stared cross
Speaker 1: referencing Victorian survey wartime utility map, the pocket fold at
Speaker 1: with lurid icons, even a greenfel Tip's Goal project from
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight. Child's handwriting squiggled at the margins all
Speaker 1: bear in the same unflinching path. I rubbed with them
Speaker 1: across the paper. On the turn of the Century sheet
Speaker 1: the short cut was sketched with measured certude. The latest
Speaker 1: Council map, glossy and horrendously digitized, carried it as a
Speaker 1: generic walking track, still as improbable as ever. I was
Speaker 1: frowning immerse when Elaine's force drifted from somewhere near the
Speaker 1: microfilm reader. Funny, nobody uses that one any more, she said,
Speaker 1: in a tone both absent and oddly affectionate. Doesn't go anywhere, now,
Speaker 1: does it? She didn't look up. Her hands full with
Speaker 1: a sheaf of old parish newsletters. I found words after
Speaker 1: a beat. But on every map, the lane and it's
Speaker 1: supposed to cross the ravine, it just goes straight. Has
Speaker 1: anyone ever, she gave a little chuckle, not unkind short cuts,
Speaker 1: dear were a town for them, but that one's got
Speaker 1: a mind of its own. She swept past to the
Speaker 1: tea bot, leaving the ear faintly scented with musty paper
Speaker 1: and dry bergamot. I'm not sure what reaction. I'd expected
Speaker 1: something more than fond dismissal, certainly, but her answer only
Speaker 1: made me more certain. This wasn't simple map makers ere
Speaker 1: Why would ever map maker, or for a century and
Speaker 1: a half, repeat such an obvious impossibility. Why hadn't anyone
Speaker 1: corrected it or replaced the arrogant straight line with a
Speaker 1: crushed horseshoe the way we actually walk. Maps fascinate me
Speaker 1: because of these little rebellions, their quiet disagreements with reality,
Speaker 1: the negotiations they host between us there and what's remembered
Speaker 1: or hoped for. But I couldn't settle the contradiction that morning,
Speaker 1: not with the shork of gleaming back at me a
Speaker 1: daring blacking and not with the casual way everyone seemed
Speaker 1: to accept its impossibility. I resolved to find out which
Speaker 1: have failed the land the record on my own memory
Speaker 1: of Redfield. I should say a little about myself and
Speaker 1: the texture of Brentfield, so you can see the knot
Speaker 1: i'd landed in. My name is Marian do'rsitch. Retired as
Speaker 1: I still joke too off, but only from the daily lessons,
Speaker 1: not from learning. For more than thirty years I taught geography, maps, girls,
Speaker 1: and the ways people tell stories about spaces. I left
Speaker 1: the grading and the ring binder walls behind a few
Speaker 1: years ago, But these days I can usually be found
Speaker 1: hair a little dusted with shark, if not quite white,
Speaker 1: volunteering at the Historical Society, filing documents, deciphering ancients, giggles
Speaker 1: while leading a school group through our glass cases. Brownfield
Speaker 1: sits on the kind of land that devis pigeonholing, part
Speaker 1: market town, part satellite of progress, all interrupted by odd rises,
Speaker 1: dips and streams that seem to have up foxed every
Speaker 1: planner's best intentions. The old cottage is stone moss browed,
Speaker 1: jostle up against nineteen seventies brick and aluminium, and the
Speaker 1: tangle of hedges and little lanes persists. The nowadays tho
Speaker 1: our more range rovers part perilously on their corners, and
Speaker 1: the WiFi sometimes outpaces the river. Half the houses and
Speaker 1: the new estates still look like they might sprout a
Speaker 1: barmb through the garden shed at any moment. Every Thursday,
Speaker 1: a Corsetta volunteers shows up at the Society to sort
Speaker 1: chair and chase. After the classification chaos, our predecessors left
Speaker 1: behind Lynna Lane ashraft Holl's court over tea and homemade biscuits,
Speaker 1: her accent sugared with the local vowels. She's the closest
Speaker 1: Brentfield has still living as a deer. If something happened
Speaker 1: within the last sixty years, she'll recite it, complete with
Speaker 1: who was dating hem. If you ask her about short cuts,
Speaker 1: she'll hand wave in the direction of whichever story amuses
Speaker 1: her mood. As mister Batell, the library senior survivor whose
Speaker 1: idea of shelving is highly personalized, I know which titles
Speaker 1: have be mended, toys, and there's a kind of system,
Speaker 1: He'll say. He's a connoisseur of local audities. Once introduced
Speaker 1: me to the archive of competition winning marrow photos from yesteryear,
Speaker 1: and nearly every week day at Catch imperch behind the
Speaker 1: lending desk, perusing medical mysteries or fussing over catalog cause
Speaker 1: nobody else uses any more. The town's walkers form another
Speaker 1: informal society. They cross generations, stroller pushing, new parents, old
Speaker 1: timers taking up their steps with Nordic poles, and John,
Speaker 1: the meadow groundskeeper, whose task turned greetings count for currency.
Speaker 1: Round these parts, there's a ritual to it. These walks
Speaker 1: and return routes, shaped as much by the line's stubborness
Speaker 1: as by people's habits. You learn, if you're local, to
Speaker 1: take the looping lanes and avoid short cuts across Tricher's
Speaker 1: dips unless you want a Whitford or a telling of
Speaker 1: from mister Ransom, the retirement h farmhand who patrols the allotments,
Speaker 1: organizing sorting, map filing. These are my happy labors, even
Speaker 1: after years teaching. I love the little mysteries. Maps contain
Speaker 1: vanished footpaths, notations about ancient stones oreb where the bull
Speaker 1: a layer cake of wishes and corrections. There is a
Speaker 1: contrast between official view lines on paper named in registers,
Speaker 1: and the peculiar stubven geography people actually use. I've walked
Speaker 1: every path in Brenfield a hundred times, at least so
Speaker 1: I believed until that morning in the society. I know where, ever,
Speaker 1: kissing aliens, where the brambles threaten in August, which modern
Speaker 1: fences of cropped ancient rights of way down to muddy afterthoughts,
Speaker 1: every journey to the meadow for affair, a cricket match
Speaker 1: or gooseberry picking in June required the same circuit, tracing
Speaker 1: the winding boundary to cut the ravine, no matter which
Speaker 1: shortcuts the maps faunted. If the ravine could have been crossed,
Speaker 1: believe me, someone would have done it. A short cut
Speaker 1: is a currency ab of gold to local school children,
Speaker 1: and nothing escapes their nerds for long. Yet here the
Speaker 1: maps insisted the short cut straight, as the seasons ignored inconvenience.
Speaker 1: I couldn't let it go, As every bonfieldeen knows, the
Speaker 1: land resist simplification. And yet the record refused to acknowledge it,
Speaker 1: whether maps, artifacts of ambition, or records of something lost
Speaker 1: to time. Had the short cut ever existed, or was
Speaker 1: it an idea transcribed into tradition, the ghostly proposal, creeping
Speaker 1: from one ear survey to the next, the question chafe
Speaker 1: even as I followed the routine. At every opportunity I
Speaker 1: dropped the shortcut into conversation, receiving shrugs, gentle laughs the
Speaker 1: odd Well, some things just used to be, didn't they
Speaker 1: Memory here as anywhere runs mud, the further back you go,
Speaker 1: And yet nobody seemed particularly troubled by the contradiction. I walked,
Speaker 1: I sworded, I consulted. Brenfield, with all its windy, leafy corners,
Speaker 1: continued turning oblivious to the puzzle on my desk. But
Speaker 1: I couldn't shake it. The feeling not of a mystery
Speaker 1: to be solved, but of a mismatched demanding respect. This
Speaker 1: short cut, in its persistent impossible link, began to feel
Speaker 1: less like a feature lost or gained and more like
Speaker 1: a question encoded at the heart of town, itself, unchanging
Speaker 1: but never quite settled. I don't like and solve things
Speaker 1: even when they bother nobody but me so. On Saturday,
Speaker 1: armed with a rolled upper production of the nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: nine server in a thermis of tea, I made up
Speaker 1: my mind to seek out the path in person. If
Speaker 1: experience contradicted every map I'd know, and with luck I'd
Speaker 1: find some renant and abandoned footbridge, perhaps, or crumbled stones,
Speaker 1: or at least the mody evidence of someone's shocking ambition. Maybe,
Speaker 1: I reasoned, a path so prominent in the alcoves left
Speaker 1: some echo for a determined walker to follow. Elaine, catching
Speaker 1: me at the door with my map case, sent a
Speaker 1: sly look over her glasses, off to chase the old
Speaker 1: truck cut Her tone mixed amusement with something rire careful.
Speaker 1: It's not as quick as it promises, I grinned, But
Speaker 1: inside I rehearsed my rat by the lines that others
Speaker 1: had inscribed so confidently. Starting from the library steps, I
Speaker 1: traced the edge of the car park, skirted the boxed
Speaker 1: and shrubs, and began looking for any sign of break
Speaker 1: in the hedgerow, a persistent gap that would commit the
Speaker 1: map's promise to the earth. Surprisingly, a faint trail did surface,
Speaker 1: not a broad avenue, nor even a fully clear footpath,
Speaker 1: but enough a narrow press of grass less lively a
Speaker 1: suggestion of former passage, unmistakably aligned with the maps, impossible
Speaker 1: larrow in some places. Garden fences jetted almost to block
Speaker 1: the way, and yet strangely they yielded either lowered with
Speaker 1: a poultry single bar or simply absent, as though never installed.
Speaker 1: I stepped lightly over a little bit of wire, half buried,
Speaker 1: feeling the pucker of trespass, until the shortcut seemed to
Speaker 1: reassert itself on the next stretch of communal green. It
Speaker 1: felt not hidden, but quietly permitted. Most riviting of all,
Speaker 1: as the land began to tilt toward the old row
Speaker 1: ravine ware. Logically the ground should drop alarmingly and force
Speaker 1: a deter the path refused. It did not swerve for
Speaker 1: seek a gently descending track like the llegitimate way. Instead,
Speaker 1: it remained stubbornly level, dogging the direct course, refusing the
Speaker 1: topography entirely. The ground sloped, but my feet seemed to
Speaker 1: negotiate it with the natural ease, as if the shortcut
Speaker 1: had for long enough, or in a gentle tongue into
Speaker 1: the earth that made the passage less daunting than memory allowed. Then,
Speaker 1: at which should have been the point of crisis, the
Speaker 1: ravined edge, I paused, the land copped under me in
Speaker 1: a suspicious, flattened dip, not much more than a white
Speaker 1: grassy shelf h saplings clustered to the west, but for
Speaker 1: a dozen paces the way seemed open, simple, and somehow
Speaker 1: entirely out of step with the surrounding bramble and undergrowth
Speaker 1: that choked the rest of the ravine I crossed. There
Speaker 1: was no drop, just a stretch of an even but
Speaker 1: perfectly walkable ground to drow out in the rest, with
Speaker 1: a distinctive pebble crunch underfoot. Looking back, the line I'd
Speaker 1: taken felt and broken, if regretful about its own daring.
Speaker 1: A headdrow that should have blocked the exit from a
Speaker 1: neighbor's garden had thin to a single arch of dove rose,
Speaker 1: which I ducked beneath. Beyond as on every map, a
Speaker 1: pass billed out onto the community meadow. Five minutes had passed,
Speaker 1: I might watch, though the distance was one I would
Speaker 1: have sworn required three times as much effort from any
Speaker 1: other route. A new fence crossed the field, but the
Speaker 1: path cut through an old style, just waiting as if
Speaker 1: for someone who'd always known the way. On my return,
Speaker 1: before entering the Society archives, I admitted my little experiment
Speaker 1: to Olane. She received the news with a light shruk.
Speaker 1: It an odd one and just a short cut if
Speaker 1: you need it, I suppose, or if it need you.
Speaker 1: Some people have the neck. She shook her head nod unsympathetically.
Speaker 1: Don't fuss if the path's behaving. Best not to ask
Speaker 1: too many questions. But I was already eaten alive by questions.
Speaker 1: How could so many fences and obstacles old and you
Speaker 1: leave just enough margin frustrate persists in crossing? Had trespasser's
Speaker 1: simply been sir habitual that landowners gave up contesting? Oh?
Speaker 1: Was there something else in play? A quiet treaty of
Speaker 1: expectation or an ertius light for anyone to bother correcting Elaine, ever,
Speaker 1: a defender of the town's eccentricities, offered no more. So
Speaker 1: I went home that evening with the directness of the
Speaker 1: short cut echo in my every step, the ravine so treacherous,
Speaker 1: and childhood now seen by bass by apathet ignored difficulty altogether.
Speaker 1: I resolved to press further. Something in Brnfield's collective record
Speaker 1: or collective habits, was reshaping the very ground. I spent
Speaker 1: much of the next week approaching the enigma as a
Speaker 1: scientist would, repeating the walk measuring recording. My first attempt
Speaker 1: had left me suspicious. Perhaps I'd missed something of the
Speaker 1: path sequence was luck So I returned mourning and dusk
Speaker 1: with notebook and NOL surveyor's campass, both to satisfy my
Speaker 1: retire tegious soul and to challenge the path's repeatability. On
Speaker 1: dry mornings, the shortt greeted me with Chris clarity. The
Speaker 1: press turf stood out, bordered by clumps of thistle and
Speaker 1: the splay remains of spring nettles. Each time it seemed easier,
Speaker 1: more deliberate to my passage along it, increasing the unfraught.
Speaker 1: Yet with every ata to quantify the peculiarity, to pin
Speaker 1: the anomaly on careless cartography or informal trespass, contradictions multiplied.
Speaker 1: Once to test my suspicions, I consulted my phone's GPS
Speaker 1: tracking app, expecting the route to zigzag or at worst
Speaker 1: to confirm the geography I had always known. Instead, the
Speaker 1: blue dots stuttered, at one point, drifting clean across the ravine,
Speaker 1: as though the slope and trees had melted politely from
Speaker 1: its path. Twice, the app frozen When refresh restored me
Speaker 1: at the far side with a clean straight track. The
Speaker 1: next evening, in half rain and with a steadier hand,
Speaker 1: my route became a tangle, a W shaped quiggle, impossible
Speaker 1: to reconcile with what my feet had done. I paid
Speaker 1: special attention at the awkward crossings. One aghbor's yard, seemingly
Speaker 1: fence thoroughly the last decade, now revealed a convenient cap
Speaker 1: in the tangled Hawthorne. Another who had expected to challenge
Speaker 1: my prisons, was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a battered foot,
Speaker 1: both private side mark the fence, swinging in the wind
Speaker 1: as though denying and conceding right of passage all at once.
Speaker 1: The strangeness intensified. On one occasion, a hedge received fuller,
Speaker 1: almost impenetrable. I resigned myself to circling round, only to
Speaker 1: finds along the line of the path and arched tunnel
Speaker 1: of bramble that felt as if it had been gingerly
Speaker 1: parted for the purpose. Each journey was subtly fresh. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the path scouted close enough to compost deep to notice
Speaker 1: the acrid bite of decomposing grass. Another time, and old
Speaker 1: robber Butanan coumduously from a low branch, as if marking
Speaker 1: the Waferer waferer. When I mentioned my finding Sir mister
Speaker 1: Bettell at the library, he was surprised by little, but
Speaker 1: a tenterness was his principal hobby. He dug into his
Speaker 1: own Trover family stories. My grandfather used to talk about
Speaker 1: the old quokway to school, you know, said it never
Speaker 1: made sense. He fished a slip of paper from his desk,
Speaker 1: covered in tidy leaped handwriting, it's the straight line always
Speaker 1: ran straight right through mis Eslot's garden before there even
Speaker 1: was a garden. He said, you could save ten minutes
Speaker 1: if he caught it on the right day. Never explained
Speaker 1: what the right day was. He shrugged, ice sparkling, as
Speaker 1: if the path itself kept changing its rules. John, the
Speaker 1: meadow's grounds keeper, provided a crow's perspective, recalling the short
Speaker 1: cut as a fact of Boyard. It was almost like
Speaker 1: you could walk straight through the hedge. Never thought about
Speaker 1: it much, he admitted, with the measured reluctance of a
Speaker 1: small town man, grudging in it. Extraordinary anecdote. Some kids
Speaker 1: said it was the best way for cricket hard to
Speaker 1: get grass stanes if you didn't have tavault hedges. A
Speaker 1: couple of us just did it, not noticing if we
Speaker 1: were crossing anyone's plot. He shook his head. You try now,
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's there, sometimes not. Maybe we will let her
Speaker 1: easier to pass through. Younger folks, six formers hanging about
Speaker 1: outside the bakery or the new residence, in the flat's
Speaker 1: new level of the path. It never goes any where, useful,
Speaker 1: a girl told me her phrase, caught between defence and indifference,
Speaker 1: short cut to nowhere, we all go the long Way.
Speaker 1: One Saturday, while trolling through a carton of towns show
Speaker 1: photos from the nineteen twenties, I stumbled across a seepy
Speaker 1: tone print the frozeny mid scan a group of seven
Speaker 1: school children in a jump of slack with age, standing
Speaker 1: at the edge of the meadow on a trailer ligned
Speaker 1: almost perfectly with the short kit's line the background, though
Speaker 1: through me it was planted thick with young trees, stakes
Speaker 1: still visible in rows right along where the path should
Speaker 1: have just barreled through. Yet the ground beneath the children's
Speaker 1: feet betrayed the shadow of a bare track, less a
Speaker 1: path perhaps than a confidence shared by their postures. They
Speaker 1: seemed primed for a run, for a race to school.
Speaker 1: Or home, and troubled by barriers of foe. To prove
Speaker 1: must have been present, The path in asserted itself after
Speaker 1: a rain, when the air shimmered with the possibility of
Speaker 1: rainbow and the grass still hung heavy, The path appeared
Speaker 1: shortest and most distinct in a golden ay. Before dusk,
Speaker 1: it showed as a lighter ubon across the field, though
Speaker 1: in full daylight it could seem to vanish utterly. It
Speaker 1: was as though the shortcut belonged to the industitial moments,
Speaker 1: the threshold conditions almost visible, almost lost. No record, official
Speaker 1: or otherwise ever mentioned a bridge or culvert where the
Speaker 1: path bloodely crossed a ravine. The Council's Minutes, though spoken
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four, of an adequate right of way across
Speaker 1: the droppy drivers, suggesting intent rather than fact. Yet every map,
Speaker 1: old or new, kept the short cut alive a cartographic
Speaker 1: after image, refusing to bow to the bureaucracy of the
Speaker 1: land Registry and certainly to the indifferent official who lolst
Speaker 1: severed the field. In nineteen eighty two, I began to
Speaker 1: suspect that, as with all things local, the story had
Speaker 1: lengthened and softened over generations. The historical society for the
Speaker 1: part or their amusement. Gently probably a mapping convention, offered
Speaker 1: doctor Finch, a visiting historian. You see it in market
Speaker 1: Town's past, proposed drawn and then never built the next map.
Speaker 1: Make a coppice faithfully errors, and all our work is
Speaker 1: an endless pallemsis of other people's hopeful intentions. He gave
Speaker 1: a smile that bagd appreciation for the error as much
Speaker 1: as for the fact. Yet what to make then, of
Speaker 1: real physical evidence Walker's reporting a crunch of gravel or
Speaker 1: a truck pressed hard through grassware. Rationally it ought not
Speaker 1: to be I press my colleagues for stories hypothesis argument. Elaine,
Speaker 1: stirring her tea with an unnecessary ferocity, simply murmured, people
Speaker 1: see what they need, don't they? Marian. That was when
Speaker 1: the new questions began to burrow. Coincidence didn't satisfy, nor
Speaker 1: did error. The shortcut was not merely ink. Something or
Speaker 1: someone kept it walkable, however inconsistent. I felt increasingly I
Speaker 1: was witnessing not one enigma, but a stacking of mismatched
Speaker 1: layer's documentary, tradition, practical habit, and some sort of force
Speaker 1: hiding between them. After a month of following anomalies and
Speaker 1: gently pestering every old timer in the vicinity, the shortcut's
Speaker 1: tenacity began to edge into the philosophical. Does the path
Speaker 1: actually exist, I'd wonder, But now that seems it almost quaint.
Speaker 1: Its reality was near a stable, nor wholly full, sometimes
Speaker 1: as obdurate as offense for sometimes as uncertain as remembered lyrics.
Speaker 1: A book on my shelf offered a clue one I'd
Speaker 1: ignored in my cartographic fury, the concept of the desire path.
Speaker 1: Desire paths I had often told board year nines, or
Speaker 1: on official trails, warmed by repeated passage, the lines people
Speaker 1: actually walk irreverently correcting the official sidework plan. They can
Speaker 1: cut corners, curve around obstacles, or establish the most direct
Speaker 1: line between two places, regardless of what planners intend. The
Speaker 1: shortcup began to look more and more like the tense
Speaker 1: collective desire, the path everyone wished for, where at least
Speaker 1: had worked into imagination, often enough to give it physical ambiguity.
Speaker 1: But even that fell short because the short persistence was
Speaker 1: too irregular, its prisons too documented. Across the maps. Desire
Speaker 1: paths usually adapt to respond to practicality. This one cut straight,
Speaker 1: ignoring human frailty and the terrain itself. I began collecting
Speaker 1: oral stories, sitting down with any one willing at the Society,
Speaker 1: or Valunche at Tilly's cafe. The stories I drew out
Speaker 1: did the line not really? Not accept in tone? It
Speaker 1: was my path, said Missess Bridger, fingers folded over the
Speaker 1: dented silver handle of her cane, walking school with the fok.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I'd look up near the playground and realized I'd
Speaker 1: left the house only moments ago, as if my feet
Speaker 1: had done the work without consulting my head. Another nivel
Speaker 1: clerk recalled chasing his paper round. Only used it when
Speaker 1: I was late. Sometimes felt the legwork drop away. Then
Speaker 1: you're at the meadow gate. Sometimes you find you've missed
Speaker 1: your delivery entirely. His laugh was creased at the edges,
Speaker 1: harboring both nostalgia and out from the patchwork, a new
Speaker 1: pattern grew. The short cut meant different things to different people.
Speaker 1: Some pictured at concrete and swift, a saving of minutes.
Speaker 1: Others half dreamt, a fading offenses and careful rules, a
Speaker 1: memory of effortlesses that didn't quite translate to physical proof. Still,
Speaker 1: the evidence kept refusing to settle. My collection of maps, prints, photographs,
Speaker 1: and testimonies began to take on the quality of a
Speaker 1: puzzle constructed from pieces made with different intentions. The more
Speaker 1: I gathered, the less clearly to shot could fit any
Speaker 1: single understanding. Some days it felt as though the path
Speaker 1: was more artifact than reality, a walking daydream captured by accident.
Speaker 1: And yet in all confusion, there were always enough physical,
Speaker 1: measurable traces for skepticism to keep shifting. I tested fences
Speaker 1: with all photographs, pressed neighbors for records of garden works.
Speaker 1: I compared registration deeds, only to find that the right
Speaker 1: of way was usually surrendered without noting the path itself. Once,
Speaker 1: on wet morning, I found the shortcut gleaming with beads
Speaker 1: of water, a ribbon so distinct that it seemed ridiculous
Speaker 1: to doubt. On a different afternoon, in clear weather, the
Speaker 1: path blowed into the earth, as if trying to raise
Speaker 1: its own evidence. Even the GPS dates smirked in ambiguity.
Speaker 1: Sometimes my journey read as a clean straight lines, sometimes nervous,
Speaker 1: wavering scribble. I tried to fill my walk, but the
Speaker 1: footage on playback seemed unimpressive. The oddness diminished in the
Speaker 1: lenses flat recording. The shortcut resisted capture. It was real
Speaker 1: enough to walk, unreliable enough to dismiss, and persistent enough
Speaker 1: to return a memory more than in fact. Something had
Speaker 1: changed in my perception, and I knew it. The problem
Speaker 1: was no longer whether the shortcut was present by absent,
Speaker 1: but whire was so much contradiction, so many competing claims.
Speaker 1: It remained a constant in both record and local imagination.
Speaker 1: Its existence felt less binary than blended, with layers of tradition, intension,
Speaker 1: and happ instance. Maps, I realized, are as much about
Speaker 1: what people wish for as what they know. Perhaps in
Speaker 1: some deep way, the shortcut was a record of longing
Speaker 1: before it was a mark of fact. Some manifestations in Brentfield,
Speaker 1: I remembered, have always been generated from communal expectation of
Speaker 1: bon violet every year, and precisely, the wrong field and
Speaker 1: maple dunce along a path logic says doesn't connect, But
Speaker 1: the short triol, phantom or somewhere between seemed to straddle
Speaker 1: the divide between belief and geography in a way that
Speaker 1: omitted no single author. I promised myself. I would chase
Speaker 1: the origin. I would find who first dared to draw
Speaker 1: the line and pressed it into the historical record, case
Speaker 1: closed or not. With each new fact, each contradiction, the
Speaker 1: shortcut expanded, not in clarde, but in fascinating uncertainty. My
Speaker 1: search brought me inevitably to the archaves of the County Council,
Speaker 1: where the oldest correspondence molded in green cardboard boxes. It
Speaker 1: was here, beneath the dust, among folders of penciled survey
Speaker 1: notes and faintly menacing letters about ditch encouragements, I discovered
Speaker 1: the story's next layer. Matthew Cook's name was the bread
Speaker 1: from a cartographer for the Ordnance Survey, whose letter dated
Speaker 1: December eighteen seventy four lay crinkled, paired with a set
Speaker 1: of neat fossy field notes. His hand was tidy, each
Speaker 1: capital stiff of professional pride. In his survey notes, Beside
Speaker 1: contour notations, I found a remark the proposed public right
Speaker 1: of way from the reading Room to the Common the
Speaker 1: Council on tends it straight across the ravine. No passage yet,
Speaker 1: but route request bridge not feasible. He'd mapped the shortcut
Speaker 1: as a dotted line first a proposal, not an achievement,
Speaker 1: but on the final versions copied by official lithographers back
Speaker 1: in London, a footpath solid out of the proposals dash
Speaker 1: replaced with certainty's line, an engineer's margin annotation too great
Speaker 1: a drop for a bridge prohibitively costly sat in the correspondence,
Speaker 1: but nowhere on the town's published maps. Instead, the shortcut
Speaker 1: appeared year after year, unashamed. Over time, the intention was
Speaker 1: mistaken for completion. Publishers in London, pressed to meet the
Speaker 1: dead lines, were reprinted with neither footful nor field check,
Speaker 1: and each new edition we confirmed the shortcut's existence. The error,
Speaker 1: if so it was, had become tradition, and by the
Speaker 1: late nineteen forties council minute still noted the right of way,
Speaker 1: though no bridge had ever been funded. Yet the deepried help.
Speaker 1: The less satisfaction I found in this bureaucratic genesis. Ordinary
Speaker 1: map airs do not survive scrutiny. In real life locals
Speaker 1: course correct them by walking routes that make sense. And
Speaker 1: yet here along the shortcut were living, shifting traces, paths
Speaker 1: formed by repeated footsteps, gravel scoured bare, and stories alive
Speaker 1: and voices was nostalgic and dismissive. Older council archous showed
Speaker 1: the town committee arguing heatedly about the Footlus's future at
Speaker 1: the ravine's edge, one which suggested I from raising fate
Speaker 1: to build a bridge where no bridge blonds, plans drawn,
Speaker 1: funds delayed, need forgotten. Yet the line remained black and
Speaker 1: clear on every map. Confronting a lamee with my findings,
Speaker 1: I expected, foolishly a note of closure. Instead, she twinkled,
Speaker 1: maybe all this for us made it real, Marion, who's
Speaker 1: to say? Sometimes we walked a road drawn for us.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the road molds itself to our walking. I looked
Speaker 1: back over the array of folded maps, the half remember tales,
Speaker 1: a persistent pathway in the grass. The shortcut, which I
Speaker 1: at once believed to be an arrow or a stubborn relic,
Speaker 1: now appeared as something stranger, a song line embedded in
Speaker 1: shared expectation, half instituted by bureaucracy, half issued into being
Speaker 1: by ordinary people's longing for directors and ease. Perhaps the maps,
Speaker 1: in echoing one another, had not merely recorded but constructed
Speaker 1: the path. Perhaps, in a feedback looper of documentation and routine,
Speaker 1: they had given the shortcut sufficient momentum to occasionally overcome
Speaker 1: reality itself. The more I pondered, the more I felt
Speaker 1: to shift in myself in need to reframe the whole
Speaker 1: idea of the shortcut, not just as a feature to
Speaker 1: be confirmed or denied, but as an evolving record of
Speaker 1: compromise between past intention, practical necessity, and human memory's exploratory appetite.
Speaker 1: Paths I realized could be walked into existence, even if
Speaker 1: only loosely enough for contradiction to persist. The question I
Speaker 1: carried now was not does the shortcut exist? But how
Speaker 1: do we shape and become shaped by the maps, memories,
Speaker 1: and quiet desires we share? Lane and I lingered shoulder
Speaker 1: to shoulder at the end of the map table. The
Speaker 1: old plants splayed open like stage sets, inviting improbable journeys.
Speaker 1: We've been at this for hours. Are tapping a finger
Speaker 1: on the faded margin where to shortcut leaps the ravine,
Speaker 1: me rifling through survey's letters and maps imported through centuries,
Speaker 1: blind faith. For a long, wordless moment, we just listened
Speaker 1: to the distant hamoomraat along the cricket green present, fleeting
Speaker 1: indifferent to the fact that the town's secret lay hiding
Speaker 1: in the lines beneath our cups. Eventually a question formed
Speaker 1: in my mind, different than all the rest, who really
Speaker 1: believed a path into being? Was a cook whose line
Speaker 1: on his original plan set the possibility in motion? Or
Speaker 1: was it the generations who laid one boot after another
Speaker 1: into the grass insist in the world be a touch
Speaker 1: easier than its topography allowed. I tested this question on Elaine,
Speaker 1: half rhetorical half sincere, do you think there is any
Speaker 1: difference in the end between a map's proposal in the
Speaker 1: foot that follows it? If enough people want the suggestion,
Speaker 1: does it make the route reel? She shook her head,
Speaker 1: mouth burst in mirthless thoughtfulness. If it helps you reach
Speaker 1: your doorstep quicker or home with dry feet, I'd say
Speaker 1: it counts. That evening, as the sky leaned violet over
Speaker 1: the tile roofs, I sent out a string of messages,
Speaker 1: not just to colleagues of the society or the walker's group,
Speaker 1: but to ptah chat threads in the local Facebook page.
Speaker 1: I proposed with a kind of informal bravodo, retired teacher
Speaker 1: can still muster a practical experiment, a community shortcut walk
Speaker 1: open to anyone who fancied, seeing if the path might
Speaker 1: behave differently under joint scrutiny. Responses trickled in curiosity from
Speaker 1: older residents, cheerful skepticism from under guards on spring break,
Speaker 1: polite interests from the more formal local ramblers, and dry
Speaker 1: wit from mister Patel. Perhaps will emerge in the next
Speaker 1: turn over. Please accept my overdue fine in advance. We
Speaker 1: gathered on a tempit Saturday, the air holding its breath
Speaker 1: between mist and the promise of sun. A dozen turned
Speaker 1: up at the library's steps. Missess Bridger leaning on her cane,
Speaker 1: but determined John with his faded club windbreaker, A tangle
Speaker 1: of children, all elastics and trainers, Sophie from the post Office,
Speaker 1: whose knowledge of hetero's and people's out gardening habits exceeded
Speaker 1: even A lanes, and three students from up the road,
Speaker 1: each bearing a phone from mapping in. I suspected the
Speaker 1: proper degree of ironic detachment. I organized the group into pairs,
Speaker 1: arming them as best I could with spare print outs,
Speaker 1: marked waypoints and instructions denote everything unusual. Try not to
Speaker 1: overthink the route, I told them, but don't deliberately avoid obstacles.
Speaker 1: To trust the line as the map showed. We set
Speaker 1: off in stagger triumph, and iyed against my better nature
Speaker 1: that the parser take me with Missus Bruger and one
Speaker 1: of the children's mothers, Aida, trying to balance record, keep
Speaker 1: his detachment with the deep ticker shope that something illuminated
Speaker 1: might occur. First surprise was how quickly we lost sight
Speaker 1: of one another. The short cut's old trick, lying plainly
Speaker 1: across lawns, through garden boarder gaps, and over the moody
Speaker 1: shelf above a ravine, seemed to promote a strange disposal.
Speaker 1: Each pair moved at a different rhythm, as if the
Speaker 1: shortcut shaped itself for each set of feet. Missus Bruger,
Speaker 1: half way to wheezing with purpose, tutted as we skirted
Speaker 1: a stubborn bed of nettles. Was never so thick when
Speaker 1: I was young. I swhere the path kept the weeds thinner.
Speaker 1: It is. Daughter up ahead, called back, mum, Look there's
Speaker 1: a gap here, and we slipped through past the ghost
Speaker 1: of a fence. The grass underfoot flattened in a way
Speaker 1: that suggested, if not official lance, then at least a
Speaker 1: bit real aquescence. We paused at the ravine here the
Speaker 1: land dipped sharply, resistive and wild. The short cut, according
Speaker 1: to both the map and a shimmer in the grass,
Speaker 1: led boldly over. I made the crossing without drama, sensing
Speaker 1: an illusion of ease, my boots brushing over what should
Speaker 1: have been uneven drop it is. Phone tracked our route,
Speaker 1: the blue line, jittering, then snapping in a two perfect straightness.
Speaker 1: Once we asked on the far side, the meadow greeted
Speaker 1: us as it always had, but the time was off
Speaker 1: five minutes, not the fifteen the official footpath demands. Missus
Speaker 1: Bridger smiled, winded, but satisfied. Just as I remembered, she said, quietly,
Speaker 1: half to herself, you don't think about it, You just arry.
Speaker 1: As others trickled in, some from a slightly different angle,
Speaker 1: some grumbling about flustered geese or a gate that refused
Speaker 1: to latch, stories began to diverge. The students divided between
Speaker 1: the short cut and the longer, more secured. As arrival
Speaker 1: compared phones over their mown grass. Mine's a straight line,
Speaker 1: but dom Here's map shows us zagging all over. One remarked,
Speaker 1: Dom offended, showed his phone, no sign of a crossing
Speaker 1: at all, just to loop back toward the library's parking bay.
Speaker 1: It's like we weren't even on the same walk, he
Speaker 1: said John Ground's keeper and erstwhile bought a shortcut, expert
Speaker 1: reported a curious split out. The path was easy coming back,
Speaker 1: couldn't find it, had to walk all round the houses.
Speaker 1: What if you close your eyes and walk the line
Speaker 1: in memory, missus Bridger suggested. Riley, as AIDA's daughter, attempted this, giggling,
Speaker 1: only to vere into an unexpect A clump of clover
Speaker 1: Arguments broke out playfully about who had done it right.
Speaker 1: Some felt wholeheartedly the presence of the shortcut, others insisted
Speaker 1: they'd been led astray by the land's old geometry. Sophie
Speaker 1: notebook in hand ticked off three out of five g
Speaker 1: p astraces bear out the straight rowt but no one
Speaker 1: can confidently retrace it twice, not in reverse any wy.
Speaker 1: You make a terrible postman with this shortcut. One of
Speaker 1: the children, Jordan ash nine, a little philosopher, looked to
Speaker 1: the adults uncertain. But how does it exist if you
Speaker 1: can't use it every time? Isn't a short cut always
Speaker 1: supposed to make sense? Most things don't if you want
Speaker 1: them enough, John Modert, brushing stray seed pods from his sleeve.
Speaker 1: I let the group chatter, the collective impressions tangling, then
Speaker 1: settling into a gentle camaraderie. The laughter of schriff futility
Speaker 1: colored the morning. The short cut seemed was not to
Speaker 1: be domesticated by crowd's signs or smart for uncertainty. When
Speaker 1: we compared notes back at the library, over home at Cake,
Speaker 1: then missus now three quarters emptied, the effect was quietly electrify.
Speaker 1: Not only did each pest's story diverge, but the shot
Speaker 1: cut itself had warped. Under pressure. Object of data was
Speaker 1: flimsier than ever. The more everyone tried to record the
Speaker 1: journey as a fixed line, the more blowd and capricious
Speaker 1: it became. Yet for the few who leaned into familiarity
Speaker 1: and recollection, the way remained umistakably, comfortingly present. The short cut,
Speaker 1: then was revealed as participant as much as path delighted
Speaker 1: to persists, so long as it was not measured too hard.
Speaker 1: Amused by our efforts to trapid in reason, I began
Speaker 1: to suspect that knowledge, or rather belief, was a mechanic
Speaker 1: as potent as any footful in these matters. Some were frustrated,
Speaker 1: especially the younger, more determined to prove the short cut
Speaker 1: one way or another, who now threatened to mount a
Speaker 1: campaign to clean up the walking routes and fix the maps.
Speaker 1: At last most, however, lingered a little longer than strictly necessary,
Speaker 1: sipping tea and exchanging puzzle pieces. Hearts warmed by conversation,
Speaker 1: if not by solved geometry. I spent the week that
Speaker 1: followed chasing not the physical line itself, but the echo
Speaker 1: of experience, the short cut's true territory. My curiosity turned
Speaker 1: outward into the town's social fabric. It was time task,
Speaker 1: not what the path was, but how people remembered it,
Speaker 1: and how it lived between those memories. The first stop
Speaker 1: was missus Bridges tidy lounge, where the dust a sideboard
Speaker 1: carried photos of daughters children At once, I suspected the
Speaker 1: very cricket team who had littered the nineteen twenties photograph
Speaker 1: had found. She was ready with tea and sensing my purpose,
Speaker 1: a sheaf of recollections. Boh, well, it was always there
Speaker 1: when you needed it. She began cradling her cup, walking
Speaker 1: to school with a fog on the field. He'd blink
Speaker 1: out in Union Street, then blink again and be at
Speaker 1: the playground gate. I always thought, I mean, I suppose
Speaker 1: that maybe we just hurried, never noticed the gap, but
Speaker 1: it felt sometimes as if minutes dropped away. It didn't
Speaker 1: matter if anyone was with you, I asked, she thought, sipping.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. When you're a child, you don't expect
Speaker 1: to be lost. Maybe it's easier to trust you'll arrive
Speaker 1: at the post office. Sovie arranged for me to chat
Speaker 1: with mister Keene, long retired from the Royal Mail. He
Speaker 1: described a short cut almost entirely practical and quietly baffling.
Speaker 1: It was a necessary evil on a wet day between
Speaker 1: letter boxes. You had to shave every minute you could.
Speaker 1: Odd thing, though, I'd sometimes find myself at the meadow,
Speaker 1: facing the opposite direction than I knew i'd started. I
Speaker 1: never once remember crossing the new fence, but there I'd
Speaker 1: be let us barely damp, thought nothing of it, just
Speaker 1: the wind. Playing tricks among a tasseled group at after
Speaker 1: school club. The story was revived as Ryman rumor. The
Speaker 1: short cut, a girl said, was four laser bones, because
Speaker 1: if you're late, it shortens if you're early. The path
Speaker 1: is slow. Another claim, the path of wriggles away if
Speaker 1: you're adult, and yet anotherough declared, exasperated, it's a path
Speaker 1: for running fast. You can't see it if you're with
Speaker 1: a grown up, except if they really want to get
Speaker 1: home too. A motif emerged. Children recanted the short cut
Speaker 1: is more solid, more permissive, as secret remembered from before
Speaker 1: grown up logic. Intruded teenagers called it myth. It's a
Speaker 1: story to keep old people entertained at the pub. My
Speaker 1: phone never shows it, so just make sure you don't
Speaker 1: get lost, while the older generation wards un a liable promise,
Speaker 1: like a badge. Back at the society, a councilman stopped
Speaker 1: in over lunch and I pestered him into friendly debate.
Speaker 1: Is there any record of pathwrights being revoked or property
Speaker 1: changed hands around the supposed line? He shrugged, Nothing out
Speaker 1: of the ordinary. The registry has a basic right of
Speaker 1: way noted, but only up to where the land it's
Speaker 1: After that, it's all informal. Not to keep their errors,
Speaker 1: and none of the properties have complained not for decades.
Speaker 1: Why would they to tar used except by the odd
Speaker 1: dog walker or shortcut romantic. I collected these stories not
Speaker 1: to tally their differences, but to sense the living pattern.
Speaker 1: It was clear that the shortcut managed and vived upon
Speaker 1: a kind of negotiated ambiguity. Each generation, each walker adapted
Speaker 1: its presence to fit the knee bending fact to feeling,
Speaker 1: geography to expectation. One day, combing the bottom drawers of
Speaker 1: the library, I found a hand made rough sketchyloaded the
Speaker 1: edges of the town as a child might draw at
Speaker 1: cartoonish houses, bright green for the meadow, and a kevil
Speaker 1: confident line for the shortcut, labeled quickest way from Library
Speaker 1: to cricket. There was a satisfaction in the clarity of
Speaker 1: the child's world above in adult hands. The shortcut waver
Speaker 1: it diluted by doubt, had with the admission that perhaps
Speaker 1: not all maps record truth. The more accounts I gathered,
Speaker 1: the clearer it became that the shortcut was living history
Speaker 1: and oral tradition, a local shibbolath, a self renewing art,
Speaker 1: fat braided from a hundred partial memories. It existed in
Speaker 1: the telling as well as the treading. It was more
Speaker 1: solid for some, less so for those who cared for certainty.
Speaker 1: Sifting all the Seclatov forces maps and lived contradiction. I
Speaker 1: found myself freshets for an answer, not about footpaths or
Speaker 1: property lines, but about the very nature of place and
Speaker 1: collective memory. What if the shot cuts persistence had less
Speaker 1: to do with error or bowl planning and more with
Speaker 1: how humans yearning for possibility reach and spoken agreement about
Speaker 1: what kennel should exist. I dove almost obsessively into the
Speaker 1: records again. This time my focus shifted not just maps,
Speaker 1: but annotations, sketch diagrams made by hand dis ovlays attempted
Speaker 1: by enthusiastic new developers, aerial photographs taken in spring and summer.
Speaker 1: The result an orchard of contradictions. Not a single modern
Speaker 1: attempt to register or regulate the shortcut yielded a perfect
Speaker 1: copy of any other. The path was always there, just askew,
Speaker 1: moved by ten feet or notated as route disputed on
Speaker 1: the more cautious surveys diagrams on at least two independent imagisovlays,
Speaker 1: the shot cut surfaced in the data by algorithmic cardity lines,
Speaker 1: linking points most likely used for traffic and unintended echo
Speaker 1: of communal wish in aerial photos or warn strip sometimes
Speaker 1: declared itself for a season, then slipped away behind shade.
Speaker 1: Some years nothing appeared at all, as if the grass
Speaker 1: had resolved the town's in decision with indifference. Where official
Speaker 1: registries kept a blank, the path flowered in pencil voice
Speaker 1: or the quiet steps of those who still half trusted
Speaker 1: its presence. It was infuriating, an oddly before path, immune
Speaker 1: to definition, yet resilient as any fact. The shortcut endured
Speaker 1: not because it was assured de reel or triumphantly fictional,
Speaker 1: but because it was wanted, sought for, and allowed to persist.
Speaker 1: In the overlap of record and recollection. A local planning
Speaker 1: consultant called in to settle of fencing spute along what
Speaker 1: must have been the shortcut's historic line confessed over a pine.
Speaker 1: I mapped it out three times and three new tenants,
Speaker 1: for their boundaries were different and marked it as disputed
Speaker 1: pedestrian route on the plan and let the next severse order.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you have to let the land settle its own arguments.
Speaker 1: I trolld The endless comment. Sections of the town's digitalock
Speaker 1: have notes ranging from ernest pleased to preserve a source
Speaker 1: of local magic to hard nose demands for clarity and
Speaker 1: efficiency in the record, no consensus, only gentle in rest,
Speaker 1: the town voicing its collective inability to let go of
Speaker 1: the shortcut, yet equally unable to entry in it without
Speaker 1: losing the nimbleness that made it fascinating. Finally exhausted and
Speaker 1: no less curious, and even going back over all accounts,
Speaker 1: all data, all passons, as if overlaying transparencies, a broader
Speaker 1: picture took shape, one that stilled my agitation and left
Speaker 1: me quieter, more alive to the town's strange contract with
Speaker 1: its own past. The central revelation came not in the archaus,
Speaker 1: but on the dusk walkup of the old ravine, where
Speaker 1: the day's goal trickled sideways between leaves, and the short
Speaker 1: could glimb of fint as a promise. Listening to the town,
Speaker 1: its stories, its everyday routines, its lines walked a thousand ways,
Speaker 1: I saw that the Shotgut was neither fixed air andr
Speaker 1: purely myth, not quork of mapping up pure human stubbornness,
Speaker 1: but a living instance of a deeper principle, as some
Speaker 1: possibilities become solid enough for those who believe in them,
Speaker 1: not by force of fact, but by a gentle accumulated will.
Speaker 1: The past existence was a question less of physics than
Speaker 1: of permissional latency, a potential in the landscape some whenever
Speaker 1: enough expectation shared or personal pressed the need into grant
Speaker 1: walkers could follow up. Were honesty, hope, or simple need
Speaker 1: conspired with the memory of others. The more one tried
Speaker 1: to fix some measure its coursed to you precisely, the
Speaker 1: more it wriggled, slipped away, or divided the record into contradiction.
Speaker 1: Every map maker who copied Cook's line, every child who
Speaker 1: sprinted her, every resident who told the shortcut story, each
Speaker 1: had contributed layering, not just intension, but the faith that
Speaker 1: such routes could exist. The shortcut therefore became a kind
Speaker 1: of public secret, a local lippol, real enough for those
Speaker 1: opened to it, resistent enough to remind the diligence how
Speaker 1: much of reality runs on anticipation and invitation, not certainty.
Speaker 1: I remembered a phrase from my teaching days about retconning geography,
Speaker 1: the way a community over time will quietly rewrite both
Speaker 1: map and memory to let the world fit its preferred habits.
Speaker 1: The Branfield shortcut was the very hard of that tendency
Speaker 1: and impossibility, worn faintly true by the sole deep wish
Speaker 1: for a world more convenient, more direct, more forgiving. The
Speaker 1: lines between map, memory and ground were not merely blurded.
Speaker 1: They had always been porous and settled generous. The shortcut
Speaker 1: was real and not real. It existed both because it
Speaker 1: was needed and because each telling, each footstep eaching to overline,
Speaker 1: believed it back into relevance. That was what explained the
Speaker 1: shifting path, the ambiguous GPS traces, the inconsistent stories. The
Speaker 1: shortcut was a latent feature a directors sometimes realized, sometimes
Speaker 1: deferred fidelity not just to ground, but to the endless
Speaker 1: human hope that some obstacles mee be quietly set aside,
Speaker 1: if only enough of us agree, even without saying so aloud.
Speaker 1: After this realization, there was much left to test or resolve,
Speaker 1: and nor did I feel the old urgency. The shortcut
Speaker 1: would not and need not resolve into vout any more
Speaker 1: than a below family story demands proof by photograph some truth.
Speaker 1: So I lived, shared, and permitted. Their reality resides in
Speaker 1: mutual scent and humble repetition, not an indeliblestone. For days
Speaker 1: after I felt this softened edge to everything in brenfil
Speaker 1: of the hedges, the hidden gaps, the gentle trespasses, in
Speaker 1: the privately remembered secrets of arrival. I had spent a
Speaker 1: career training ies to see only what could be measured.
Speaker 1: Now I took more care with what could be quietly conjured.
Speaker 1: One morning, the sun still low and the grass beaded
Speaker 1: with dew, I found myself drawn again to the shot
Speaker 1: cut's starting point. Garden birds argued in the laurels. The
Speaker 1: streets were empty. I hesitated at the edge of the ravine,
Speaker 1: searching not for proof, but for the peculiar permission to
Speaker 1: pap once offered the silent invitation to make the long
Speaker 1: route short together, I stepped on to the trace, feeling
Speaker 1: the memory more than the surface. And as I reached
Speaker 1: the far side, a glands back, the path was all
Speaker 1: but invisible, a faint stripe in a lawn some one
Speaker 1: else would mow away in June. But for a moment
Speaker 1: I knew it had been there, because I and so
Speaker 1: many others had needed it, or believe we did. You
Speaker 1: could argue, I suppose that shortcuts like this are accidents
Speaker 1: of communal laziness or bureaucratic inertia are simple stubbornness, but
Speaker 1: just as often I think they are the world deadly
Speaker 1: changed by repeated, hopeful making a line between two points
Speaker 1: not yet real, but always possible. I wonder sometimes how
Speaker 1: many such shortcuts have we built together simply by acting
Speaker 1: as though the world must yield, And how much of
Speaker 1: our landscape inside and out is formed not by what
Speaker 1: is undoubtedly there, but by what we half expect, half invited,
Speaker 1: and quite they agree to notice. Perhaps in the end
Speaker 1: the truest pass so those you believe into being, in
Speaker 1: the deepest wonders, the ones we invent and safeguard together,
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.