A-dad-ptable
Wanting to be an astronaut wasn’t my first dad-life crisis. Two months into dadhood, I bought a hunting bow on Craigslist. In an apocalypse-type situation, I wanted to be able to provide for my family without running out of ammo or attracting too much attention. I’d had a hunting bow in high school and loved to shoot, especially at the local 3-D range, where I had the chance to sight in on foam rubber lions and tigers in the Alaskan woods. Once, I had a live deer in my sights at fifteen yards, but it’s antlers had barely broken the skin. Since I thought I’d heard somewhere that the antlers had to be at least an inch long to be legal, and my dad was off scouting around and not there to correct me, I didn’t take the shot. That young buck was probably about my age, sixteen or so, in deer years. For about ten years after that, I believed that wild animals had earned their place, sleeping in the cold night after rainy night. It seemed wrong to kill one of them, then wander back to my warm house. Then I became a dad. Many mornings, I saw more moose and elk than I did cars on my commute. Moose trim the bushes around the driveway for us. It began to feel irresponsible watching all that meat walk by. I’ll gladly live on beans (pinto and coffee), rice, oatmeal, and apples, but I don’t see many sacks of them walking around our neighborhood. So I took some hunter’s ed classes in the fall and applied for deer and elk tags (Moose tags are hard to get in Colorado, since too many geniuses shoot them thinking they’re elk. I don’t have the guts to stick a moose with an arrow quite yet anyway).
When we moved into our new house, I debated whether I could shovel our quarter-mile long driveway. If there was a fossil fuel shortage, then we would still be able to make it out the driveway. After thinking about that for a week or so, I realized that if there was no fuel, we wouldn’t be driving anywhere anyway. Plus, a neatly shoveled driveway would probably attract bandits. We’re good backcountry skiers, so I settled on the idea of skiing to safety, and saving a lot of effort in the meantime by not shoveling our ridiculous driveway. I bought a snow plow and got it mounted on a diesel truck, thinking that it could run on homemade biodiesel in a pinch. Turns out the 24-valve Cummins is not the best for that, and biodiesel runs rough in the winter without tank heaters, and it takes a lot of effort to brew. We’re still good at skiing.
Our new house has a soapstone wood stove, centrally located to heat the whole house. I bought a bow saw to stealthily cut wood, and felled and bucked up and hand split a couple cords in the fall. Then I realized that after civilization ended, smoke would attract bandits. We’ve got zero-degree sleeping bags, so we could stay cozy without the smoke signals. I asked for and received a chainsaw for my birthday. My in-laws said we can borrow their hydraulic splitter.
I started using cloth diapers (for the baby), with no doomsday inspiration. The last couple places we’ve lived, we haven’t had curbside garbage service. We just take our trash and recycling to the dump every couple weeks. With the bears and wind knocking people’s cans over in the summer and the snowplows and wind knocking them over in the winter, most people haul their own around here. I also worked at the dump a few times when they needed a fill-in on the weekends. Aware of how much trash we make, and how much trash our community makes, I got on a kick of making as little of it as possible. And I didn’t want to haul a bunch of dirty diapers around. Having one less thing on the shopping list makes me feel super smart now, because of the coronavirus craziness at the grocery store. But, if there’s a power outage, we won’t be washing any diapers in the washer and dryer, or even getting any water up our well. So, we have a couple packs of Huggies.
People are best at adapting, which is different than preparing. Squirrels prepare by hoarding nuts in a tree. I adapted by getting a chainsaw. Preparing is assuming the future will be a certain way. Adapting is focusing on the present, and figuring out the best way to be in it. I have no idea what my 13-month-old son will do next, or what kind of world he will grow up in, but the day before yesterday I saw him take his first steps. Now I have to think about all the new things he can hit his head on. He does something new everyday, which forces me to do something new everyday. It’s like watching the news about COVID-19. We don’t just watch anymore, we have to do things differently than the day before. I’m not comparing my son to a virus, I’m comparing parenthood to a pandemic. People can get used to just about anything, whether it’s baby-proofing a house or sheltering-in-place.