This wild American hitchhiking saga by Jack Kerouac can be read as a quasi-tour of the United States. And an introduction to the Beat generation. “Beat” was the new term I learned by reading this book. I thought it was a funny name for a generation—suggestive of music, drums, and defeat. The Beatniks were road-tripping drug experimenters in the 1950s who valued freedom and thrill above all else, like Sal and Dean, the two protagonists of the story.
It isn’t easy to hitchhike your two protagonists across a full country, having them sleep beneath open skies and with many women without getting too sordid or repetitive. But Kerouac does it well, I think, by drawing from the endlessly beautiful character of each state they explore—and so never quite losing that note of hope. From the east coast to the west, they move forward with excitement: plateaus of New Jersey to snake-swamps in Florida, to Utah’s salt lake flats in the evening with lights reflected on the surface. Dean Moriarty in particular is hailed as a personification of the Beat generation. I could easily imagine him as the hero of a 60s western film, bony face bronzed with cowboy bandana flying in the wind. He is a bit caricaturish. People can’t be so larger-than-life, so heroic or demonic at the same time. But that makes his exploits with Sal so enjoyable.
“On the road,” is ironically a term that’ll soon describe me though I am many places and years removed from this book. Having spent the last four years in the United States, the time for graduation and move-out is fast approaching, and then a road-trip with my parents back to Canada awaits—with all my things that were stored in summer storage or arranged in a dorm room packed into one car. As I start to take care of these logistics, the last four years are finally starting coalesce into a tightly-packed unit. Fitzgerald once wrote that one can’t really write about an era until it’s fully over. That makes more sense to me now. Something about looking back on an era in hindsight does give you the extra insight you need to write about it well. My four years in college were sheltered ones, within the gates of a pretty campus midtown, but nevertheless it was through the professors, friends, and books I met that I learned about the vast sea of history and culture that the States really are. (There’s a place called Sugar Land in Texas! Bossier City in Louisiana, and a Winter Garden in Florida!) There are thousands of accents, jokes, insinuations out there I’ll never get, but having lived here once has given me access to all the material it holds.
I can’t believe we’re past halfway through April. I was once in middle school, sad about my impending eighth-grade graduation. I’d walk up and down the stairwells and count how many steps there were in each one, just to have that one extra memory when I was no longer here. In the coming weeks I may start counting Rhodes gates and doors.
