On the road back to 1957

If I could turn back time, I’d go on a road trip with Jack Kerouac

On Sept. 5 this year, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road turned 65.

I’m not sure why I consider it the wildest road trip of my life, though it was more like a road trip to hell, with Kerouac always high on drugs, short of money, probably reeking of great insecurity. After all, in life as in most of his works, Kerouac was a sad character, “this deep, lonely, melancholy man,” as a Jack Kerouac specialist from the University of Massachusetts Lowell once described him. Even the success of On the Road caused him grief, if only because what the readers found sensational, more than the excellence and originality of his writing and his technical virtuosity, was the wild adventures, the wild characters, the freedom of the road, all the madness that his protagonist, narrator, and alter ego in this semi-autobiographical work, Sal Paradise, described in the sentence “The only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything.” 

Oh but On the Road, for sure, was a wild adventure and wilder in the way he wrote it in manic stream of consciousness. With characters representing the Beat Generation writers like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, Kerouac’s lifelong friends whom he met at Columbia University, On the Road has eloquently captured the spirit of the 1950s in a way that no other writer before him had done, not since F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the spirit of the time through The Great Gatsby’s depiction of the 1920s.

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars. —Jack Kerouac

Beat is a Kerouac contribution to American letters, a movement of which he had since been considered the leader, though it was a junkie and petty thief in New York who introduced him to the word beat, which at once meant high and low, beat meaning “down and out” and beatific or rapturous, sublime, euphoric, on a Benzedrine high.  The movement espoused a break from tradition, typified by writing that was raw, whimsical, and meandering. In this style, Kerouac wrote about loss, as well as about a search for something greater than life or self, a search for meaning or redemption that would counteract the banality of plain existence.

I wish I read On the Road on a cross-continental VW Beetle road trip from San Francisco to New York, but the most I’d ever done was a Greyhound bus ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, with a pit stop at a gas station shrouded in a cloud or fog, in the middle of nowhere, while I was with no one, except for my mostly Mexican co-passengers. I’ve also meandered on a stretch of Pacific Highway along the coast of the Pacific Ocean on a Mercedes Benz with its top down from San Francisco to the Big Sur. That was lovely.

A memorable book I read while on the move was, rather aptly, Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. I read all 17 chapters in the back of a sedan from Manila to Pagudpud, the northernmost tip of the mainland of Luzon, while third-wheeling with a friend and his girlfriend on a summer adventure. While I remember no more books on other such excursions, especially now that I am mostly behind the wheel, eyes on the road, I would say that everyone on a trip is Jack Kerouac, in a search of their own for adventure, for meaning, for joy, for God, who knows? When was the last time you’ve been on a road trip?