12 Legs Travel

After two months on the road — two months of sharing cramped spaces, squinting at maps, making meal choices, pitching and breaking down camp, packing and repacking bags, cursing bad Internet connections, and waking up in the middle of the night to let sick dogs out of second-floor Motel 6 rooms — Jill and I decided to pick our first fight of the trip on the most beautiful highway in America.

It started over the windows of car. I wanted them down. She wanted them up.

I, of course, was in the right. We were driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, for goodness sake. The sun was out. The ocean sparkled. Iridescent, cottony clouds gave dimension to the impossibly blue sky. I switched on the radio and — no lie — the first chords of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” rang through the speakers. I cranked the volume and fantasized about swerving down the PCH in a convertible Mustang — a 1968 California Special with cream-colored seats and an inlaid-wood steering wheel. Instead I was stuck in a top-heavy Honda CRV that smelled like wet dogs. The least I could do was roll down the windows.

Jill, however, is not crazy about rushing wind. It sets her on edge. It blows wisps of her hair that are too short to be piled atop her head. But, dang, the Pacific Coast Highway on a sunny day? Exceptions must be made.

Or not.

“Can you roll up the windows a little?” Jill yelled over the wind and music. I cast a perturbed glance at her that I’m sure the mirrored lenses of my cheap sunglasses did not conceal. But I complied. The rush of the wind fell to a hoarse whisper. I turned down the Petty. My freedom had been impinged.

“You don’t have to roll them up that much — just a little,” Jill offered. “It’s OK,” I said. But, really, it wasn’t.

At the next overlook I pulled off the road and killed the engine. I leashed the dogs while Jill dug into her camera bag. She shut her door, and I closed the hatch, careful not to let it slam. I started to walk toward our continent’s western edge when Jill stopped me.

“Did you lock it?”

“Yes.”

“The windows are still down. Can you roll them up?”

“We’re not going far.”

“My gear’s in there.”

“We can see the car from the overlook.”

“Don’t fight me.”

“I’m not fighting you. I’m trying to rationalize with you.”

My tone may have suggested otherwise. Exasperated, I tugged the dogs back to the car, unlocked it, and rolled up all four windows. I left the sunroof cracked. Maybe I did so out of logic, to let the car to breathe a little, expelling the odor of wet dogs and dirty laundry. Maybe spite played a small role. Either way, Jill wasn’t having it.

“Can you close the sun roof, too?”

“Seriously? Who’s going to get in? It’s barely open, and the roof rack hangs over it. A double-jointed Chinese gymnast couldn’t get through there.”

But, again, I acquiesced. Then we walked our separate ways, she north, me south. I stared into the deep blue forever of the Pacific and seethed. A hundred feet away Jill hid behind her camera and squeezed the shutter with disdain. When we reconvened at the car, we did so in silence. I started the ignition and cracked the windows. A sliver.

Jill can ride out angry silences forever. I cannot. I have to explain, justify, convince. I have to win. Only then can I have closure. It is, perhaps, a flaw.

So I broke the silence, stating my position in what I perceived to be measured tones. I don’t remember much of what I said, but I do recall telling Jill that her stress over unlocked doors and cracked windows and was unhealthier than my one-dimensional diet of red meat, and that eventually those worries would take years off her life. I suggested salvation lie only in learning from my relentlessly laissez fare world view.

Jill picked up the gauntlet with both hands. She explained how her laptop and portable hard drives contained every photo from our trip, and that her piece of mind was more important than a few inches of ventilation. She said driving with the wind in your hair does not make you carefree, and, after days upon days of eating PBJs, showering in dank bath houses, and camping without water or electricity, I had no right to paint her as a party-pooping nag.

Like any good fight, ours escalated and mutated, oozing through cracks in the walls of reason and rushing past safety barriers of truth and logic. Our disagreement over the windows eventually morphed into referendums on our respective personalities. Ironclad arguments rammed impotently into stubborn wills, and impassioned pleas slid from deaf ears to the floorboards. Sighs got heavy. Words got careless. Then, finally, the crescendo, falling from Jill’s lips as I knew it eventually must:

“Why did I ever decide to do this?”

My heart broke like a bar of motel soap. I didn’t say another word. I just rolled down my window — all the way — and drove. We’d only come a few thousand miles of a 30,000-mile journey, but already I’d gone too far.

I’m not real comfortable writing about personal stuff, and I relate this story only because every person we meet on the road (especially people who are married) eventually asks us one question: “Do you guys fight?” I usually deflect this one by joking that if our trip ends in divorce, it will make a great book. But my joke unfailingly elicits only awkward chuckles, if any chuckles at all.

Some folks we meet, especially the kindly retired couples who are most often our campground neighbors, take a liking to us and then get to worrying about our wellbeing. Others just want us to confirm that life on the road is no more of an emotional picnic than life tethered to work and kids and TiVo.

One day I might tether myself to children, and maybe even to work (never to TiVo), and then I can weigh the joys and pains of that life against those of this one. For now, all I can offer is cliché: Some days on the road are better than others. Jill and I certainly suffer from occasional pangs of homesickness. We miss our friends in Phoenix. We miss eating at Tuck Shop. We miss sitting in our backyard, watching the sprinklers and dreaming up adventures and future life scenarios. One thing that sucks about living the dream is that it makes it difficult to sit around and concoct something better — and that kind of dreaming is life fuel for Jill and me. But, hell, it’s a good problem to have, and we aim to solve it one of these nights around the campfire.

As for our squabbles, at home or abroad, they are infrequent and insubstantial. Which is why the duration and harshness of first big road-trip fight took me aback. But the show had to roll on. Jill and were stuck together, for better or worse, separated by two feet of molded plastic and gray upholstery. Besides, it was lunchtime. Past it, actually.

Off a tip from the proprietor of a small outdoors shop south of Big Sur, I turned off the highway onto a narrow road that descended to Pfeiffer Beach. I parked the car, and we silently went through the now-familiar motions of packing a picnic lunch. We hauled our food to the beach, unleashed the dogs, and sat on a log weathered to a smooth patina by surf and sand and wind.

I don’t remember who spoke first, but thereafter the apologies fell easy, as though pulled by tidal forces. The blessings of our journey were remembered and counted. The dogs ran, the surf rolled, and Jill and I shared a cold can of Coke. I guess old logs aren’t the only things smoothed by surf and sand and wind.

So cheers to the healing power of the Pacific Coast Highway, which taught me that it’s folly to argue about windows when the view beyond them is so distractingly beautiful. Jill and I will no doubt fight again, on another road in another state, but don’t expect to read about it here. I’m done airing dirty laundry. That kind of stuff belongs in the back seat — with the windows rolled up and doors locked.

— Scott