y husband likes to drive, and I am inclined to daydream, so, mostly, that is what we do on car trips, as the landscape flashes by and the kilometres accumulate. He was born in Saskatchewan, which may explain his driving fetish. The urge to cross that vast, undulating prairie was embedded in his psyche as a child, and it never dissipated, not even in the lush rainforest of the West Coast, where his family moved when he was twelve. The only child in the back seat, he amused himself on long journeys by reading billboards and highway signs back to front and pronouncing them aloud. His ability to speak “sdrawkcab” in complete sentences caught my attention in the late ’60s, and while the novelty has faded over the decades, a rapid-fire blast of incomprehensible speech can still impress and sometimes tickle me.

By contrast, I grew up stranded in the suburbs of Montreal, desperate to flee. Even now, I get empathetic hives when I go back there and see teenage girls standing by the side of the road in their skinny jeans, the wind whipping their long, shiny hair as they silently implore that blasted commuter bus to lurch around a distant curve. Escaping the suburbs usually meant being squished in the back seat of the car, snarling and scratching with my three sisters as we made the almost annual trip to PEI, my father’s birthplace and still our family’s reservoir of idyllic summer holidays.

Daydreaming and reading comic books and trashy romances were my survival techniques, the same way my own children took refuge in electronic gadgets and Tintin when it was their turn to wrestle for space in the back while my husband and I sat up front and set the itinerary and the route on our family trips.

As Canadians, we are hostages to our geography, especially the transportation routes along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. Consequently, we tend to drive straight east or west with minor detours along the way, and we do it at three distinct stages of our lives: carted along for the ride in the back seat of our parents’ car; as adults with our own children strapped in the back; and on our own after the kids have departed to seek their own travelling companions and destinations. Having experienced all three, I’m convinced that what you see and visit on these trips isn’t nearly as important as being hermetically sealed for days on end with family members or their ghosts. To me, the real definition of Canadianness is not the contortions you execute in a canoe, but the intimacies you share sitting in the dark, staring straight ahead, while the flickering beams from your headlights seek out cars approaching from the opposite direction.

Given our disparate childhoods, the fact that my husband and I have bonded over road trips is as mysterious as any of the other encircling links that conjoin two people in a long relationship. In my earliest driving memory, at age three, I am hurtling out of a car on a heavily trafficked Montreal boulevard. At the time, my father was a graduate student and my mother was in a body cast following serious back surgery. A more affluent, and childless, couple offered to take us all on a Sunday afternoon excursion in their Nash sedan. Dressed in matching green wool coats with velvet collars, my older sister and I had each hogged a window seat, with my father between us to keep order in those days before seat belts, when unrestrained children roamed around the car like cats on the prowl.

The chrome handle was irresistible, and after I jiggled it a few times it did what it was designed to do, and the door flew open. As I tumbled out, my mother managed to twist one arm around from the front seat and grab the belt of my coat, but it came off in her grasp. Fortunately, I rolled onto the shoulder — more surprised than hurt — picked myself up, and started screaming in outrage as the cars whizzed by. I can still remember later that day standing on newspapers spread out across our kitchen floor, while my father, under my mother’s direction, delicately picked bits of gravel from my hair.

You’d think, with memories like that, I’d shun car travel but the opposite is true, at least when my husband is driving. It has a lot to do with the fact that he takes charge in the car, leaving me to float in a miasma of memories, dreams, and anxieties. Because reading, unless aloud and from a guidebook, is discouraged, I idly carry on unfinished conversations with old bosses and dead relatives, explaining tensions, rectifying mistakes, refuting accusations. Sometimes, I inadvertently voice a sharp rejoinder to an unseen adversary, shattering a companionable silence with a snarled “How dare you? ” or evoke an ancient abandonment by emitting a heart-rending “Nobody loves me,” in what our son affectionately calls “Mom’s Tourette’s.”

I do offer to drive at least once a day, and sometimes my husband relents, but reversing our customary positions sets us both on edge. He can’t resist pointedly checking the speedometer, glancing in the mirrors, and alerting me to oncoming vehicles, no matter how tiny the specks they form on the horizon. The surveillance makes me twitchy, and we end up bickering. That is not a harmonious environment, especially if you intend to log 600 klicks a day over the course of a week.

Thinking back now, I realize that our last cross-country road trip was as much about our car as it was about us. Skipping the winter in Toronto, we’d spent four months teaching and writing in Victoria to see if it might entice us as a retirement haven. We had shipped our ancient Toyota Camry — with its exasperating screech whenever we activated the turn signals — westward by rail on a bitter New Year’s Day. The trip back to Toronto would mark its farewell tour after eleven years and more than 380,000 kilometres (if it lasted that long).

Our plan was to hug the US border through BC, Alberta, and Saskatchewan before heading north at Regina to the Trans-Canada Highway, stopping in places I had never been and that my husband had first visited while in the back seat of his parents’ 1958 Caddy — “a car,” as he liked to remind me, that “could pass anything but a gas station.” The trip also signified a change in our lives: alone again. Our daughter was teaching in Asia, and our son was getting married. Suddenly, I could imagine a time when we would end up in the back seat of our kids’ cars. Was this the last long car trip we would make on our own, or would we morph into a pair of wizened creatures in a gas-guzzling RV, criss-crossing the country from one mobile hookup to another? All of this imbued our journey with emotional freight: it was either the beginning of the end, or the beginning of a new beginning, as we tried to reclaim the people we used to be before marriage, kids, and “the whole catastrophe” (as Zorba the Greek famously described family life) took over. Who knew which it would be?

he sun was shining, we had ticked off the last five items on the penitent’s checklist — scrub the fridge, do the laundry, make the beds, take out the garbage, put the keys under the mat — and waved goodbye to our rented house in deepest, darkest Broadmead, the leafy Victoria suburb we had shared with towering rhododendrons, and brazen deer that munched placidly on our neighbours’ prize shrubs.

Our pre-dawn diligence meant we had time for a farewell breakfast in Sidney, or rather Sidney-by-the-Sea, as it is called in tourist brochures. “What isn’t by the sea in this place? ” my husband grumbled, as he turned right into the parking lot while jiggling the directional signal like an out-of-control handshaking machine. I glanced in the back seat and suddenly remembered the computer. “Did you put it in the trunk? ” I asked. Our eyes locked in one of those moments that can escalate into nuclear warfare, especially when the combatants are ravenous and overtired. Going back meant missing the ferry; but moving on without the computer activated our back-to-work anxieties into unknowable threats hurtling toward us like the headlights of a runaway truck. Spewing blame, as we might have done in our younger, feistier days, would waste too much time, so we silently wended our way back to the rented house.

The computer sat waiting forlornly inside the side door, like an offspring at the school gate after all the other kids have been collected. We grabbed coffee and sandwiches at a takeout place, picked up a newspaper to do the crossword (one of the few collaborative pastimes two people can engage in while sitting up in a moving car), and set off for the ferry for the second time that morning.

It was smooth sailing, a metaphor that held up as we crossed the Strait and headed inland into the “sea of mountains,” as they were called in Lord Dufferin’s day. The air at Nk’Mip, the Aboriginal winery in Osoyoos, on the northern tip of the Sonoran Desert, was so dry after the soft dampness of Victoria that I felt blasted by a gigantic hair dryer when I finally stepped out of the car. We were too late for a tour of the winery, but we slaked our thirst with one of its reds over dinner in the restaurant at our resort. The meal was punctuated by a nearby couple dropping their forks and fleeing their table every time a roar from the television in the adjoining bar heralded a goal by the Canucks in the 2010 Stanley Cup quarter-finals.

The next morning, we hung around just long enough for the winery to open, so we could buy a couple of bottles to stow away for later in the trip. The road climbed so precipitously that Osoyoos was soon a mere speck at the north end of the town’s sparkling, finger-shaped lake. A few hours later, we were breathing the crisp, clear air of the Rockies in Fernie, a skiing mecca surrounded by jagged peaks that poked vertiginously through the clouds. Instead of the “armpit” of a coal mining town from my husband’s youth, we found a couple of surprisingly good restaurants. So we treated ourselves to oysters on the half shell, roughly 750 kilometres from the sea, a gustatory gesture that celebrated the distance we had covered and the miracle of modern transportation.