Existential Crossroads at the Overpass

Let's say it's been raining for too many days to count, and you've just spent two of them cleaning and re-cleaning the kitchen after successive waves of marauding hordes have cheerfully trashed it, with minor breaks spent excavating dirty socks, couch pillows, nerf darts, and almost-empty yogurt cups out from under the computer table. You long ago quit flipping the corner of the dining room rug back into place, because it gets in the way of the scooter loop -- dining room living room front hall kitchen dining room living room front hall kitchen -- and you have (for now) come down (barely) on the side of allowing this questionable treatment of your hardwood floors only because it seems to be the one thing that's keeping a certain child from spending the whole weekend watching Mythbusters episodes on the family computer.

Until, that is, the computer slows to a crawl, and then grinds to a halt -- whereupon it is revealed that said child has, in the course of six months, downloaded eighty Mythbusters episodes off iTunes (at $1.99 a pop), completely clogging the hard drive with 46.7 gigabytes of ballistics tests, reenacted automotive explosions, and experiments involving bodily functions. (Let's say -- just hypothetically speaking -- that you discover this while attempting to google instructions for unclogging the dishwasher drain. And that you also discover that a well-meaning member of the family has made a misguided and unsuccessful attempt to solve the problem by deleting a whole library of adorable Photo Booth photos going back to 2005.)

Let's say on the third day of this three-day "weekend" you wake to more rain. The Mythbusters-obsessed child appears to be coming down with a cold, and his sister needs to be picked up in Everett, having spent the night at a Skate Deck sleepover party where (you will discover) she stayed up until 6 am skating on a bloody blister, and awoke at 8 under a still-spinning disco ball. You should probably start steeling yourself now for the hell of getting them out of bed and off to school tomorrow... But you can cross that bridge when and if you come to it, because there's still today to be got through, right? You head for Everett, still in your pajamas.

Upon your return, you contemplate a couple of intriguing invitations for the day -- some friends have proposed an outing to Fern Cove on Vashon Island; others have organized a goofy "Battle of the Network Stars (Stand Ins)" field day at Garfield High School. The neighbors are making noises about a rainy forest walk in nearby Seward Park, if you're feeling less ambitious. Any of these activities would be fine with you -- but they all involve getting everyone fed, dressed, shod, and properly outfitted with raingear -- a project you find too daunting to contemplate without first making another pot of coffee.

Let's say that while you're waiting for the coffee to brew, you make the mistake of getting sucked into finishing off the thousand piece puzzle that kept you marginally sane yesterday as you and your son burned eighty episodes of Mythbusters, two at a time, onto DVDs. ("Marginally sane" may be an exaggeration, but you are willing to admit that this part of the afternoon was actually pretty enjoyable: with you hunched over the coffee table in the living room sorting out dark edges and colorful blobs, slowly but steadily discerning abstract patterns and assembling them into recognizable objects, while checking in regularly on the burning process. It was hard not to share your boy's immense satisfaction as the carefully-labeled DVDs piled up ("Exploding Toilet/Steel Toe Amputation" "Escape from Alcatraz/Poppy Seed Drug Test" "Duct Tape Hour 1 and 2") and the computer slowly but steadily regained speed -- especially when he would pause proudly as he scooted through the living room to tell you the latest gigabyte count, and give you a kiss.)

Alas, today the puzzle is your undoing: by the time you've popped the second-to-last piece into place (you're way beyond caring where the last piece has got to), a motley crew of six semi-bickering children have embarked upon a plan to clean out the garage and turn it into a clubhouse -- after they make five packs of ramen and heat up some clam chowder -- and the prospects for an outing of any kind are dimming fast.

Cleaning out the garage is actually a marvelous idea, and long overdue. You're reluctant to leave them to it unsupervised, however, as it probably means finding a new home for the piles of books you never brought back in after the upstairs remodel three years ago, the dusty boxes of gay history archives that have been awaiting pick-up since the Clinton Administration, a dozen bright orange koi-head bike helmets, two enormous cardboard pipes (16' x 6"), and a whole slew of other unwieldy items from parades and projects past and future.

But then, as you watch four kids wrestling brooms and dustpans and buckets of soapy rags out to the garage (and you suddenly remember the freaky chain e-mail you got once about how mouse droppings are full of deadly viruses), the two others begin to argue about whose turn it is to wash out the mac 'n' cheese pan from yesterday and whether there's enough clam chowder for everyone. And you realize: I have to get out of here.

So out the door you go -- out into the rain, with five dollars in your pocket and no idea where you're headed.

Forty minutes later you are sitting in the Comet Lodge Cemetery, on a rock you're pretty sure is not someone's grave. The rain has stopped for a bit, and the sun is trying to peek through. The birds are doing their best to drown out the airplanes overhead. The highway sounds like a distant river.

Let's say you let twenty minutes go by. Now the sun has come out for real, and you have taken off your coat. A brilliant green caterpillar with a beetle-black head is crawling up your arm, its whole body waving erratically as it susses out the path ahead. You stand up, carefully deposit the caterpillar on a mossy stone, and head down the hill toward Georgetown. A yellow maple leaf on the sidewalk catches your eye. Not the brittle gold of autumn leaves: this one is tender, buttery, glowing. When you pick it up, its softness astounds you. You carry it with you for a while, then drop it gently over the side of an overpass.

It drifts down across the railroad junkyard below like an open hand, slowly spinning, eventually vanishing between a massive black coil of hose and what looks like a rusting back-hoe seat.

As you stand at the crest of the overpass, with the city spread out along the horizon (and beyond that, the distant mountains still shrouded in clouds), you try to decide: Is this little sojourn of yours a way of centering down and gathering strength, or is it simply an exercise in avoidance? Have you managed to plug in to a reservoir of peace and joy out there in the universe -- deep within yourself, even? Or is this just a temporary reprieve, an hour's delay before the inevitable next round of cleaning and nagging and bickering?

There's only one way to find out, of course: You have to go back.

That's right. Back up over the hill, under the power lines, across the light rail tracks. Back up your front steps and through the open door and into your kitchen -- now sprinkled liberally with ramen bits, peanuts, broken crackers, loose Puffins, and powdered Ovaltine.

It's time to determine if you've been transformed by that moment in the sun. To see if you've carried those treasures -- the birdsong in the graveyard, the yellow leaf's dreamy descent, the blindly groping progress of the caterpillar -- over the threshold and back into your life. You have this feeling they could help you, somehow: that with them you could tame the chaos, turn it into something beautiful and powerful, something worthwhile. Or at least learn to ride it out with a little more grace.

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