My father was a man who refused to cross the street unless the crosswalk signal was with him. Even on quiet side streets with no moving cars anywhere to be seen, he would insist on walking to a marked crosswalk and waiting there until the appropriate symbol appeared on the display across the street. I think he believed that by doing this, he was setting a good example for his children. While I can understand his reasoning, it must have been fundamentally flawed in some way: of his five children, four have been struck and killed while trying to cross the street. I’m the fifth, the only one left. Each of these incidents occurred while the sibling in question was in college, pursuing undergraduate or graduate studies. I believe my good fortune, if it can be called that, must be at least partially attributed to my total lack of interest in higher education. I got my high school diploma, and that was good enough for me.
There is one incident in particular which stands out to me, in relation to my father and traffic signals. It was a day in the summer when it was only me and him around. Two of my siblings were at a retreat for high schoolers who had demonstrated superior mathematical proficiency, and the other two were at a training camp for promising young track and field athletes. I was twelve years old. We had walked to the gas station so my father could fill up three canisters of gasoline. He would carry two of them and I would carry the third. This was the understanding we had come to. We had set out very early in the morning, around seven, to avoid the midday heat. The walk over was without incident, as was the experience at the gas station. It was on the return trip that the problem arose: while we had been at the station, road workers had begun to block off an intersection we had previously passed through. At this still-early hour, it would have been fairly easy to simply skirt around the barricades, but this was, of course, out of the question for a man like my father. A detour was necessary. We turned and walked down the block, to the next-nearest crosswalk. This crosswalk was at a four-way intersection, much like the one we had intended to cross at, but much smaller, and with much lower traffic. When we got there, there was one vehicle there, a pickup truck on the opposite side of the intersection. It turned right, towards where we wanted to go. But, of course, it had turned because the light was green, which meant we were not supposed to cross. There were no other cars coming, but that didn’t matter. We stood and waited. And waited.
An abnormally large portion of my youth was spent looking at crosswalk signals. As such, I have more well-developed opinions on the symbols used on them than most people. There are two, of course, that are in common usage: the “red hand” and the “walking figure.” The walking figure could be described equally accurately as the “white figure,” or even the “white man,” but I’m leery of the potential racial complications of these terms. I don’t wish to offend anyone, especially not when discussing such an anodyne subject. The walking figure is only white because this makes it easy to see. It would be wrong to think of the figure as having a race; it would be wrong to even think of it as being a person. This is why I call it a “figure,” because this is all it is. It is a shape. It is the visual representation of an idea, of the idea of a person walking. Although it represents this idea, the figure itself does not move. It is totally stationary, frozen as if in mid-stride but never actually advancing. The figure, in reality, is standing in place. Its stride is only pantomime. When I first realized this, I found it so disturbing that I could barely sleep for a week. As for the red hand, it is something else entirely. The red hand is discipline. It is law. Its color is a warning: your blood, which is red like I am red, will be spilled if you disobey me. Of course, in reality spilled blood is much darker than the red hand, especially blood spilled on which is itself something dark, like asphalt. But if the hand were darker it would be harder to see, which would be contrary to the purpose of a crosswalk signal. These are practical devices, after all. They are meant to be understood intuitively and automatically, without any conscious thought being necessary. Most people, I’m sure, have scarcely ever thought about them at all. As I said, I simply had an abnormal upbringing.
Sometimes, I will have dreams in which I wake up in my trailer and discover that a crosswalk signal has been installed somewhere strange, such as the door to my bathroom or atop the stump outside, the one I use to chop firewood. I am always very perplexed by this, in the dream, and am convinced that this must be a prank perpetrated by one or more of my siblings, even though I know all of them are dead. In these dreams, these signals only ever show the red hand. They never switch to the walking figure.
What we hadn’t known, my father and I, was that there was a problem with the lights at this intersection. A bolt of electricity had come down from the sky and zapped the control box the night before, and now everything was out of whack. The crosswalk signals couldn’t communicate properly with the traffic lights. This triggered a failsafe in the system that switched them permanently to the red hand. I should say this is mostly a conjecture. I’m not a municipal electrician or city planner. I have no professional knowledge of how these systems operate. But in discussing this incident with my siblings later, it was the only plausible explanation we could come up with for what happened, which was that the crosswalk signal did not change, even though the light did. I saw the light change from green to yellow, and then from yellow to red, and nothing happened. No walking figure appeared. Then the light turned green again. There were no cars at the intersection. There hadn’t been any cars at the intersection the entire time, since the pickup truck had turned and driven away. This hadn’t made a difference to my father, of course. There was no walking figure, and so we didn’t walk. I watched the light change, again, from green to yellow, and yellow to red, and again, no walking figure appeared. My arm, the one holding the full gas canister, was beginning to get sore. I looked up at my father. He was staring straight ahead with a grim, determined expression. I tried to communicate with my eyes, because I knew there would be no point in trying to say anything. I’m sure he noticed me, but he didn’t show it. In any case, it didn’t make a difference. As long as there was no walking figure, we were not going to cross. I set the gas canister down on the sidewalk beside me. “Pick it up,” my father said. He didn’t turn to look at me. I picked it back up. We stood and waited. And waited. I don’t know how much time passed. The light changed back and forth. The sun got higher in the sky. It started to get warmer out, and there was no shade at this intersection. The sun began to feel very bright, very hot. I started wondering if I was going to get sunburned. I started to feel thirsty. I felt very weak. My knees ached. My arm ached. The gas canister felt impossibly heavy. I was swaying in place. The red hand glowed implacably. I looked at my father again. His expression hadn’t changed. He hadn’t moved a muscle in what felt to me, at that time, like forever. Like a lifetime. I felt like I had been standing at this intersection before this red hand since before anything had existed. Suddenly, I realized couldn’t take it anymore. I had reached my breaking point. I remember feeling a vague sort of surprise at this, at the calmness with which this realization had come. Before this moment, I couldn’t have said if I even had a breaking point, or if I did, what it would mean for me to reach it. And now, here I was. I had found it. The thing I had not known was there, and yet which always had been. I stepped forward. I stepped into the road. I felt my knees give out beneath me. I blacked out. At the hospital, they said it was heatstroke. That I had nearly died. In retrospect, I’m surprised my father didn’t lose custody of us. He must have been able to talk his way out of it somehow. He was always good at that sort of thing.
These days, I don’t talk to my father much. Not out of any particular animus; we just don’t have anything we really need to say to one another, and I live a long, long ways away now. I think it’s enough for him that I’m still alive, and it’s enough for me that he knows that. Yesterday, I climbed up into the mountains. The air was warm. The sun was very bright. I found someone’s jacket shoved into a fissure in the rock. It looked like it had been there awhile. This was high above the timberline. Even now, in the height of summer, you can find patches of snow. In the final stages of hypothermia, it’s known that people will often shed their clothing. The exact reasons for this aren’t well understood. The jacket had strips of highly-reflective material on it, like on the jackets of road workers. A road worker’s jacket is yellow, though, and this one was red.