The Good News Is, We're Still Alive

Four days and 1500 miles down, I'm having some minor regrets

We’ve made it from Los Angeles to Tucson to Las Cruces, New Mexico to Marfa, Texas to Austin, and nobody has thrown anybody from a moving vehicle. 

Friends with kids have told me some version of the adage that traveling with a child is parenting in an unfamiliar location. That’s not entirely bad; the best way to get my kid to stop fussing is to present her with something new, and being on the road with her means that we’re constantly surrounded by new things. I can’t begrudge a one-year-old child for sometimes getting antsy on long car rides.

However, I can begrudge myself for not being the greatest at foreseeing things that would go wrong. 

Around day four of a two-week road trip is when all of the things I should have done before I left start to putrefy like the decaying body of a mouse in an engine block. The Should Haves. 

I should have been paying attention when I missed an on-ramp and ended up in an hour of traffic. I should have noticed that time my husband got onto the I-10 ramp in the dark in that no-man’s land of western Arizona, because he got on the I-10 going the wrong way, and because I was in the back seat, nobody realized what he’d done until he’d backtracked about 30 minutes and he started seeing signs for towns we’d already passed. We didn’t get into Tucson until 1:30 am local time. An inauspicious start. 

I should have packed more warm clothing. I only packed four sweatshirts, two of which say “SANTA IS A WOMAN.” I had to purchase hats and gloves for everybody in my family in Las Cruces because the next morning we were going to the White Sands, and the forecasted temperature was only in the 30’s. The following morning, the temperature in Marfa, Texas was 27 degrees. It’s cold everywhere, because it’s the winter in the northern hemisphere, because that’s how seasons work. Why did I pack a pair of shorts? That’s the kind of Indoor Kid Southern California climate provincialism that I would have made fun of in my previous life in places with four distinct seasons. 

I should have been less loosey-goosey with the speed limit, because on Saturday, just past Harper, Texas, a big-gutted highway patrolman in a cowboy hat straight out of central casting issued me my first citation since 2010. The worst thing about it is that he was totally correct to pull me over and ticket me. I was going too fast. In my feeble defense, the speed limit on freeways in that part of Texas is 80, and once you’ve tasted 80 mph it’s hard to settle for 70. I think I get why people live here– easy to make a quick exit. 

I’ve never spent time in Texas before, apart from layovers in the airports, so I entered the western edge of the state like an unprofessional anthropologist who was a little bit afraid of the culture she was about to study. Knowing the Texans I know, the next sentence I write is going to be a dangerous one, so I’ll be diplomatic and say this: Texas contains enormous amounts of nothing, and is also much more beautiful and interesting than I expected it to be. The people are unsettlingly friendly in a way that helped me understand Europeans who complain that Americans are “too nice” and “smile too much.” Texans have figured out a way to be both kind and menacing.

I appreciate that everything in Texas is Texas-themed. 

I should have appreciated the amount of patience my parents had with me when I was a kid. We took road trips most summers, and one year, when my younger sister was really into Barney and Friends, my brother and I customized a version of “This Is The Song That Never Ends” while driving through eastern South Dakota. Our version went: “This is the song that never ends (until we get to the Badlands) yes it goes on and on my friends (until we get to the badlands).” We weren’t great lyricists but we were excellent provocateurs. Imagine three children between the ages of two and eight scream-singing it for hours in a Ford Escort wagon with only a radio dial full of static to protect you. My parents must have wanted to kill themselves. 

If you think being around a whiny child is annoying, it’s nothing compared to the annoyance you’ll feel when it’s your whiny child. In general, Juniper likes car rides and naps easily in them; if she wasn’t pretty good on the road we wouldn’t be doing this. (The level of pride I felt for her when she napped for four hours in the car!) But even a good road trip baby has her limits. Something about knowing we have 142 miles left until we hit Austin and sensing that the kid will be kvetching the entire time makes the hours feel like days. 

I should have asked my doctor to write me an emergency Xanax prescription.

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