Road

On the Road: Kerouac’s Wild Trip To Old Age

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Imagine you’re a young man and just have to go, get out on the road, leave home, or skip town, with no plan whatsoever.

You take off from where you live in New York and start hitchhiking West towards the Midwest, toward Colorado, to San Francisco, wherever.

You have just about no money, no clothes, no ambitions, just the need to get on the road and go.

Sal does this in the wild and unique novel On the Road written by Jack Kerouac and published in 1957. This meandering main character meets people along the way, especially a completely hedonistic and lust-for-lifer without inhibitions named Dean who, among many other eccentricities, helps Sal rent beat-up old cars and then drives them over 100 miles an hour across the country with the fearlessness and skill of a Daytona 500 race car driver.

There’s really no place to begin or end in telling what happens to Sal, Dan, and the handful of other misguided and unambitious heathens they encounter and drive with along the way. The broad-brush pattern is to drive West, stop somewhere, drink and womanize all night, scrounge for some gas money, and drive again the next day, to San Francisco and back to Colorado then eastward through Kansas and Missouri and then back to New York where the all-night benders begin all over again. Wake up and back to the West Coast. Rinse and repeat.

The most unforgettable part of these meandering and pointless excursions is they just keep going to the next place, for nearly 300 pages, sentence after sentence, town after town, binge after binge, night after day after night with no real to-do list of strategic focus.

Amid the chaos, commotion, and confusion Sal sometimes reveals how he feels about himself without a whole lot of coherence but a tinge of self-regret and dismay.

“I forgave everybody, I gave up, I got drunk… I drank so much that I had to go to the men’s room every two minutes…Everything was falling apart.”

Everything was absolutely falling apart for Sal, Dean, and everybody else in this travel story to the nether regions of nothingness. Sal gives us another glimpse into his despair:

“Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s room? Then comes the day…when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life?”

 

The nightmare of his life is he doesn’t care what happens in the future only that he needs to keep going on the road in the car, hitching another ride with some stranger when needed, with no thought of consequences, preparing for his future, or settling down anywhere for any length of time. He doesn’t want anything; he only needs to make himself feel good.

Well into this bawdy road and mind trip, he opens a chapter to show just how far away he’s gone from a so-called normal existence:

The following night, singing this little song:

 

Home in Missoula,

Home in Truckee,

Home in Opelousas,

Ain’t no home for me.

Home in old Medora,

Home in Wounded Knee,

Hoe in Ogallala,

Home I’ll never be.

 

None of the countless places Sal, Dean, and others trample through in America feel like home to either of them despite all the pleasures of the flesh they indulge in everywhere they go. Even if they start liking a place, they always leave it.

Near the end of the odyssey, they get back on the road hell-bent on Mexico with the vague belief that there they will find whatever it is they’re looking for that they cannot identify.

En route to the foreign country they ride through Laredo, Texas and that’s where the author describes something special.

“It was the bottom and dregs of America where all the heavy villain’s sink, where disoriented people have to go to be near a specific elsewhere they can slip into unnoticed. Contraband brooded in the heavy syrup air. Cops were red-faced and sullen and sweaty, no swagger. Waitresses were dirty and disgusted. Just beyond, you could feel the enormous presence of whole great Mexico and almost smell the billion tortillas frying and smoking in the night.”

 

For several nights Sal and Dean are moved by the newness of everything in Mexico: the heat, the people’s dark brown eyes, the insects, the down-to-Earth way of living, the simplicity.

Debaucherous parties explode once again, women, everything the way they always want it, but at least it’s something new, a road they haven’t traveled before.

But all roads end somewhere else, and so does the one they took to Mexico. The two-part ways and the road trip has ended, amazingly, after non-stop movement everywhere and anywhere and nowhere every day on every page of this most unique story of woe and fun and disaster.

On the last pages Sal sums it all up in a way that comes across as highly predictable, and in that sense unsatisfying, but also correct so at least inarguable.

“The one thing we yearn for our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nausea of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?…Nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.”

Sammy Sportface

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Sammy Sportface

Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here: Sammy Sportface Has a Vision -- Check It Out Sammy Sportface -- The Baby Boomer Brotherhood Blog -- Facebook Page
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Author Profile

Sammy Sportface
Sammy Sportface
Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:

Sammy Sportface Has a Vision -- Check It Out

Sammy Sportface -- The Baby Boomer Brotherhood Blog -- Facebook Page

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