PCH: peaceful, calming, and healing?

“Carefree highway—let me slip away on you…”—Gordon Lightfoot

A trip to the Internet’s equivalent of the Yellow Pages reveals listings for more than 500 Orange County psychologists. During my divorce, my daughters and I frequented a few—who of us hasn’t? For a while, my oldest daughter, Clary, and I saw one whose advice required a drive from San Juan Capistrano to Costa Mesa; at the painful appointment’s conclusion, we drove home along Pacific Coast Highway right about sunset. It took us several weeks to figure out that the reason we felt so much better was not due to professional intervention—it was the route we traveled afterwards.

PCH: “Predictable Congestion Headache,” “Parking Car Hassle,” “Pedestrian Crossing Hell”—the acronyms abound. Drive the 15 miles between Corona del Mar and Dana Point just once and you’ll understand. Weekday or weekend, the road is rarely free of traffic. Parking is a crime: the meter maids mean business. Ominous orange construction cones signal the narrowing of the only artery in or out. The Festival of the Arts summer season? You’re better off walking.

The secret is to surrender to delay. My oldest daughter and I, spent from our emotional, hour-long sessions, would sit in silence and let our minds drift as we gazed out to sea. Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, we’d watch people, window shop, and peer down Laguna’s side streets that lead to astonishing glimpses of Pacific paradise.

Our sparse and only conversation was memory—we both had them. Hers were all about beach and bakery outings, Duffy boat rides on the bay, and photographs snapped at Laguna’s Main Beach boardwalk. Mine, of course, were more complicated, and some went way back. I remembered the night my parents dined at Five Crowns and my mother sat down on the barstool next to Humphrey Bogart. How they’d met as teenagers at the Balboa Bakery, danced during their first date at the Hotel Laguna—over fifty years ago. Theirs was the partnership I’d intended to emulate. Instead, I had embarked on a marital potholed path that had not traveled well.

Like friendly ghosts, my reverie hovered around those idyllic childhood summers at Balboa when I could escape from Pasadena’s heat and smog to enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks at my grandparents’ beach cottage at Three Arch Bay. These generations of marriage had both endured—despite hardship, I was certain. Behind the wheel with what little parental permanency I could now bequeath to my own child, I wondered: Living in this Eden, what had driven so many of us to separate?

We’d roll down our windows and turn off the radio, talk of nothing to do with our circumstances—the real reason for our heading home from a doctor whom we hoped might heal our heartache. We’d had enough reality for one afternoon session—for a lifetime, in fact. The nuts and bolts of beach town existence caused our own wounded one to evaporate—there was healing in the roadway minutiae.

“How do these people back out of their driveways without getting killed?” my daughter asked. This allowed me to segue into the tale of the delivery truck that ran straight through the front door of that little liquor store on the corner in South Laguna when I was 10 years old. Eiler Larson, the infamous “greeter,” was the story of which she never tired. I’d once gone to interview him near the end, when he lay, demented, in a rest home. I told her I preferred the memory of him at the intersection of PCH and Forest Avenue as he pounded on car hoods to elicit a return hello.

The stretch between Corona del Mar and North Laguna was empty not too long ago—just that ribbon of highway, the Date Shack, and the salty sea. I rode my first horse from the rickety stable alongside PCH that has long since vanished. She pointed to where the mobile homes in our favorite tiny cove disappeared.

No matter. There was, is, and always will be nothing more therapeutic, more utterly romantic, than that road where anyone can twist and weave through ocean air. On a good day, sunsets stretch out across Catalina. A couple of times, she and I even thought we caught the green flash.

We eventually canceled the counseling appointments; the drive was smoother medicine to swallow. So whenever we had cause to be in Newport or Costa Mesa we took PCH home to San Juan Capistrano. Sometimes, we just needed a hit of PCH.

My oldest girl lives in New York now. She’s the same age I was when I rented my first apartment on Balboa Island. I moved out of Orange County to Montana, where I no longer feel those glorious Santa Ana gusts in September by the sea. She called me last winter during a snowstorm.

“I miss you,” she said after our conversation had unwound as far as it could go. She has started a new job and hasn’t yet accrued paid vacation allowance. “I don’t know when I’ll get to see you again.”

I reassured her that love is not measured in time and distance.

“We’ll always have Coast Highway.”