Why I’ve always hated the term “At a Crossroads”

**NOTE: I ORIGINALLY WROTE THIS IN MARCH 2016. IT'S TAKEN ME A YEAR TO PUBLISH IT.**
-NJH, APRIL 2017

When I was a kid growing up, my family didn’t own a television. But once a year we would make the epic drive from Halfway, OR, to Toppenish, WA, where we’d stay with family friends, go to the State Fair up in Yakima, and, most significantly, wake up at the crack of dawn to watch all the Saturday morning cartoons we could stomach. So while I have no idea what people are talking about when they mention past (or current—I’ve never owned a TV) shows, I at least have a basic cultural reference point when it comes to, say, Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.

One iconic image has been replaying itself over and over in my head of late: that combined suspension of disbelief, and gravity, where Wiley has run off the edge of a cliff but not yet accepted the fact of his fall.

“Hate” is a strong word (see “Cars”, 8/31/13). So I’ll just say I’ve always found the term “at a crossroads” woefully inadequate to describe situations such as less than half of Earth’s current species surviving into the 22nd century, where we humans are driving this cataclysm. The reversal needed to give our planet better odds is just not captured by the image of a bucolic

footpath on which stands a culturally neutral forest critter—a squirrel comes to mind—calming choosing between the left and right arrows hand-painted on a quaint wooden sign. The action needed is not a leisurely choice between two paths both rooted on solid ground. The action needed is an emergency pair of (solar-powered, of course) rocket thrusters to be turned on full throttle in reverse, in hopes of crashing backwards into the side of the cliff rather than continuing to plummet into thin air.

I’ve long favored (and recently employed) the image of Wile E. Coyote to describe humanity’s race through the next 50-100 years. I never imagined that such a picture would describe the state of my own future as a husband and a father.

As a spouse and a dad right now I’m in that very thin air. I’m trying to activate my emergency rocket boosters and catch the edge of the cliff instead of plummeting to the rocks far below.

Right now I’m writing this blog on a scrap of paper. I’m sitting in my parked car listening to a marimba CD for the 11th time straight through. In the back seat my 3-year-old son is finally starting to stir, having slept the last 30 minutes here in the parking lot of our hotel near Stanley Park. The hour before that he passed out and slept for a fossil-fuel-consuming driving tour of Vancouver, BC, that eventually, and thankfully, included 30 minutes parked in a quiet residential neighborhood on the north side of the Lion’s Gate Bridge. Prior to that, the epic, screaming, kicking meltdown in the Japanese restaurant, and before that, last night’s head-turning, child-protective-services-call-eliciting (had anyone had a conscience), absolute meltdown in Stanley Park itself. A couple days before that, my own loud, cursing meltdown on a public street in Victoria. My frustration had been in part at having waited half an hour in the cold for a bus that came only minutes after we’d abandoned the bus stop. It was part at being back in a walking orthotic boot as another chapter in a saga of chronic foot injuries. And it was in no small part at the dawning recognition that I am not being the parent nor the person I aspire to be.

It’s been quite the Canadian vacation.

On our ferry ride up from Port Angeles, we found ourselves engaged in a warm exchange with two men. Amusingly, I mistook them for father and son. The “son”, it turned out, was working to put up signs advising motorists of the planetary health effects of our fuel emissions, akin to how cigarette packages carry a human health warning label. The “dad”—they were, in fact, travelling together—was working at similar if less-direct action at Victoria’s Environmental Law Center.

He had written a book, he told us, that at one time was a Canadian best-seller, “Becoming the Kind Father.”

The universe works in funny ways. Sometimes clues are subtle and other times (as when, for example, one chooses to ignore the subtle ones) they are more direct. Here we were, journeying through Victoria on our way to Vancouver to see Naomi Klein speak on climate change and capitalism, and we run into a man offering a possible path to better parenthood. At the time I thought, “that sounds kind of interesting.” Now, several collapses of serenity later, I am feeling more and more that I, like Wile E. Coyote, am not at a crossroads. I’m about to crash and burn.