The most honest record of my marriage is not in photographs or letters. It is in the mileage log of a recreational vehicle that has traveled 55,000 miles over 20 years. I sit behind the wheel of that camper, with Ellen, my wife, beside me.
I calculated it on a quiet morning: At an average speed of 45 miles per hour, those miles add up to roughly 1,200 hours on the road. At about five hours per driving day (how we actually traveled), that’s about 240 days in transit. Then add the days parked beside oceans and rivers, at campgrounds from Florida to Maine, and at Salisbury Beach in Massachusetts, where I have been going since I was 7 years old.
At some point, the vehicle ceased to be a vehicle. It became the autobiography of a relationship.
Not officially. Not the one with anniversary photographs or family records. This one is measured in departures and arrivals, in what happens between two people as they move through an unfamiliar landscape together, with nowhere to perform and nothing to maintain except each other’s company.
A marriage lived largely in 240 square feet has no room for the public version of yourself. The road strips that away gradually and then all at once. What remains after enough miles is the actual person: the one who gets irritable when hungry, who argues about routes he is wrong about, who stops the camper to fix a curtain that is bothering his wife because it is the only useful thing to do in that moment.
The long silences between us were never a distance. They were comfortable, and we settled into them. They required no explanation.
I have been trying to understand this marriage for 54 years. I do not claim to have succeeded. The understanding I have arrived at hasn’t come from the ceremonial occasions, though those were real. It comes from the accumulated weight of ordinary movement through space together.
Arguments that seem important in the moment become impossible to reconstruct. I defend wrong turns as improvisation; Ellen always correctly identifies them as stubbornness. The weather — because in a camper you are not insulated from the weather — is the condition of the day, and you adapt to it together or suffer the consequences.
Now our dog, Pumpkin, rides between us on trips, or sits with her head at the passenger window or with her body against Ellen’s leg. Sometimes she sits in back where grandchildren once sat, looking out windows that have framed thousands of miles. She is the latest in a lineage of travelers this vehicle has carried, and she has become, without any announcement, part of the story as well.
There is something else the camper has taught me, and it took me a while to put it into words: Every arrival carries within it all previous arrivals.
When we approach Salisbury Beach, we are never simply arriving there. It’s every Salisbury Beach visit we have ever known together — as the young couple who were not yet sure about each other, the parents bringing children to the ocean for the first time, the grandparents watching grandchildren run into the surf. The present trip overlays all the previous ones. We are all of those people simultaneously, and we know it, and we do not need to say so.
As a child, I used to look for the roller coaster before I could see the ocean. It was my signal that we had arrived. The roller coaster is gone now. I still look for it.
That is what a long marriage does, too. It makes you carry all your earlier selves into every present moment, with someone who knew those selves and is still by your side.
It isn’t about where we went. It’s about who we became while traveling there together. Remarkably, after 54 years, I am still finding out.
James A. Lomastro is a writer in Conway. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
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