On the Road

"The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in the big dust cloud over the American Night.” (5)

“Yes, and it wasn’t only because I was a writer and needed new experiences that I wanted to know Dean more, and because my life hanging around the campus had reached the completion of its cycle and was stultified, but because, somehow in spite of our difference in character, he reminded me of some long-lost brother….I was a young writer and wanted to take off” (7).

What it's all about

“… I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off” (On the Road 1).

Part Vision Quest, part homage to Kerouac, part wanderlust. I'll be a transient for an undetermined amount of time, and there's not much else I'd rather be at the moment nor for the foreseeable future.

I'll be quoting extensively from Kerouac's On the Road, which was published in 1957 but written a year after he took three trips around the continent in 1947, 1949, and finally 1950. We'll see how much has changed in approximately sixty years since he went on his odyssey(s). He had his own experiences, which led him to create what some consider to be one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. I say this because I'm not doing this in hopes of having his experience, but my own; I'm going to assume transient epiphanies come in many flavors, and if I'm fortunate enough to have at least a shred of what some may call a personal revelation, it will be because I'm not going to mindlessly wander from place to place just because it was mentioned in a book. There's a bigger picture, and I believe, as I sit a few days away from taking off on the major leg of my trip, that On the Road will be uniquely helpful in experiencing that bigger picture.

I'll be updating and maintaining this blog every time I get a chance. Obviously, since this is going to be a journey of over thirteen thousand miles which will span fantastic cities to crossroad towns "... in the middle of Coyote Nowhere" (214), there are a lot of factors that will influence the frequency of my posting. However, I'll do my best to have a new post every night. I'll try and take some decent pictures to go along with all these location-specific quotes in the hopes of giving you a taste of my trip, as well as the America Kerouac experienced decades ago.

Bless the ride.

Mike

The primary work:

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1999.

His other works from which I may quote--these are equally beautiful and uniquely inspiring, but are not the focus of this particular trip (for now):

Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Cody. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Kerouac, Jack. Desolation Angels. New York: Riverhead, 1995.