On the (Mother) Road with Jack Kerouac

Our first day on Route 66 reminds me of the movie On the Road (2012). On so many stretches of The Route, the scenery was so cinematic, unwinding like a film reel on the screen of the windshield while T and I watched with wonder. The film lacks the continuity and poetic rhythm of Jack Kerouac's novel, but it is well worth watching just to enjoy the beautiful cinematography of the road trips.

I can see a bit of myself in Sal Paradise, the main character of the story, who takes to the road as a kind of therapy. Sal seeks to distance himself from the life he leaves in the rear-view mirror; the greater the distance, the better he feels. And so do I. Like Sal, I am searching for answers to Life's questions. For me, this Route 66 road trip is as much a spiritual journey--a homing quest for authentic self--as it is the fulfillment of a long-cherished dream.

The film is based on Jack Kerouac's autobiographical novel On the Road, which chronicles the travels of a young writer across America between 1947 and 1950, beginning with his first long road trip that starts on Lincoln Highway and continues on parts of Route 66, among other highways and byways throughout the country. Like Sal, Kerouac embarked on a journey to find America and the inherent goodness in "American man." His quest for meaning, truth, and authentic experience was shared by other members of the Beat Generation (William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg)--and this Blissful Vagabond. To me, there's no better place to begin this quest than on America's Main Street.

The book is a great read, as a novel and a travelogue. In fact, The Modern Library, The New York Times, and Time magazine ranked On the Road as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. As a milestone in American literature, On the Road continues to inspire new generations of poets, writers, actors, musicians, and filmmakers--and travelers like me.

Perhaps even better than the novel itself is the Audible audio edition of On the Road, superbly narrated by Will Patton. (Matt Dillon's reading is notable, too, but Patton's masterful renditions of the characters make the story come alive.) This 11-CD 50th Anniverary Edition is well worth the listen--especially if you've got an 11-hour road trip ahead of you. The narration expresses Kerouac's notion of language as jazz, "somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis." The story of Sal's road adventures with Dean Moriarty flows with a jazzy, colloquial, improvisational fluidity. I wonder if Kerouac's cross-country road trips introduced him to the pulsating rhythm of the pavement and the liberating promise of the open road, leading him to associate the "beat" of the Beat Generation with the musical term of "being on the beat" and the spiritual state of being "blissful."

I am certainly beat from spending ten hours on the road, but more than mere weariness, I am still feeling the syncopated beat of tires striking control joints in the pavement, still sensing the forward momentum of all that road going, as I receive the benediction of the evening star and the blessing of blissful sleep.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

--Jack Kerouac, On the Road