Illinois - Chicago, Joliet, Rock Island

“Pretty soon the redness turned purple, the last of the enchanted rivers flashed by, and we saw distant smokes of Chicago via Ed Wall’s ranch, 1180 miles, in exactly seventeen hours, not counting the two hours in the ditch and three at the ranch and two with the police in Newton, Iowa, for a mean average of seventy miles per hour across the land, with one driver. Which is a kind of crazy record.” (225)

(You've got me beat, Dean--The most I've done so far was 800 miles in 13 hours).

“Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes of hobos, some of them sprawled out on the street with their feet on the curb, hundreds of others milling in the doorways of saloons and alleys.” (226)

“Old brown Chicago with the strange semi-Eastern, semi-Western types going to work and spitting.” (226)

“headed straight for North Clark Street” (227)

"To get out of the impossible complexities of Chicago traffic I took a bus to Joliet, Illinois, went by the Joliet pen, stationed myself just outside town after a walk through its leafy rickety streets behind, and pointed my way" (12)

“… drove clear through the rest of Illinois to Davenport, Iowa, via Rock Island. And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up” (12).

(via Rock Island)

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It looks like not much has changed with Chicago traffic since Kerouac's day; like New York, driving through the city once is enough to convince me that public transportation is the obvious way to go. I only spent a couple of hours in Chicago this time around (been there before), but I was alright with that. Cool city, but I wanted to make up for the time I had lost earlier that day, as at that point I was still trying to make it to the Black Hills, South Dakota by the next night.

The rest of Illinois wasn't anything spectacular. Joliet seemed nice enough, but after that it was straight through to Rock Island/the border of Iowa. As for the river with its "... big, rank smell"; God, that's the truth. The smell of the Mississippi was the first thing I noticed as I was coming from Rock Island into Iowa. It's not a bad smell, just noticeable, powerful; you can tell you're by a significant body of water. This was at night, so none of my pictures of the River turned out anything close to visible.

Indiana - Indianapolis, Terre Haute

“We arrived in St. Louis at noon. I took a walk down by the Mississippi River and watched the logs that came floating from Montana in the north—grand Odyssean logs of our continental dream….The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis.” (95)

“Henry Glass was riding the bus with me. He had got on at Terre Haute, Indiana ...” (244)

(What you see is what you get in Terre Haute).

(This wheelie, seen here being performed by this homeless gentleman in downtown Indianapolis early in the morning, cost me $7 but I think it was worth it).

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Indiana. Where to begin. I came into the state at night, and I enjoyed myself then (though the bars close too early). Indianapolis is beautiful, and if there are ugly parts--like, Newark NJ-style ugly--I haven't seen them (though I did stick to downtown and the main roads). After the repetitive scenery of industrial cities and the agonizing country nothingness that plagued my windshield all that day, Indiana was a joy to drive through.

After a rejuvenating hour or two in Indianapolis, I felt ready to drive again for a little while. This energy lasted halfway through to Terre Haute, but by three a.m. I had nothing left; I stopped at a rest stop. It was hot, but I didn't realize how hot until I was cramped in the back of my car, laying on a deflated air mattress (inflated, it wouldn't fit) with the windows cracked just enough to permit some sort of respiration. The humidity was staggering, I spent most of that time swatting mosquitoes and swearing at my then-demolished notions that sleeping in my car wouldn't be that bad; I cursed myself for not finding somebody I could stay with via couchsurfing.org in Indiana. It was miserable. When the sun was coming up, I dozed off for two hours or so.

I was back on the road by eight, the previous day's driving still wearing on me enormously. I stopped for coffee, which was a bad idea considering I was already exhausted and hadn't eaten anything since yesterday afternoon in Detroit. The heat from the night in my car, coupled with the 97-degree day that Thursday, completely wore me out; I caved in and bought a filthy room for six hours at a motel outside Chicago. It was the worst traveling experience of my life, and I thought I'm only two days into it. I was weary from travel, sick and nauseous from the sun, and probably dehydrated (my own damn fault). I took a salt tablet (for the electrolytes), drank some water, and fell asleep thinking that if I were to get sick on this trip I'm out of luck--no health insurance; our great big America's not afraid of anything except for socialized healthcare and other ideas with a five-decade-old cold war stigma attached to them.

I woke up later that evening and remembered this quote:

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.” (14; emphasis added)

Michigan - Detroit

“If you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs couldn’t be better gathered.” (232)

“The moment we were in the new Chrysler and off the New York the poor man realized he had contracted a ride with two maniacs, but he made the best of it and in fact got used to us just as we passed Briggs Stadium and talked about next year’s Detroit Tigers.” (234)

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Detroit consists of lots of beat up American cars. I only know this because I couldn't help noticing how many domestics compared to imports are on the road in that city, though it makes perfect sense. There was also some indistinguishable classic rock show going on downtown (or somewhere near there), which kind of fit the profile I had for Detroit. Perhaps hearing that music is why the first comparable city that popped into my head was Pittsburgh; central to Detroit's identity is Ford/GM/Etc., while central to Pittsburgh's identity is football (specifically the steelers). Aesthetically, though, and in my opinion, Pittsburgh is nicer. Maybe it's a tenuous connection, considering I was only briefly in Detroit, but a parallelism struck me--or maybe it's not so much the perceived connection between Pittsburgh and Detroit, but the connection midwest (and in Pittsburgh's case midwest-esque ... pardon the neologism) cities have with each other. Regardless, I wouldn't want to live there.

Ohio - Ashtabula, Toledo, Cincinatti

“It was an ordinary bus trip with crying babies and hot sun, and countryfolk getting on at one Penn town after another, till we got on the plain of Ohio and really rolled, up by Ashtabula and straight across Indiana in the night” (11).

“In the misty night we crossed Toledo and went onward across old Ohio. I realized I was beginning to cross and recross towns in America as though I were a traveling salesman—raggedy travelings, bad stock, rotten beans in the bottom of my bag of tricks, nobody buying.” (234)

"The dark and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinnati at dawn." (243)

(Unfortunately I have no pictures of Cincinnati; was getting late and I only took one shot, which was motion-blurred. I'm not too broken up about it).

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Ohio is boring as hell to drive through, and I zipped across (and up, and down...) that state as fast as I could. Really, I have nothing remarkable to say about the Ohio portion of this day's trip, despite the fact that it was a considerable haul--I left from Pittsburgh, PA then went up near Ashtabula, through Cleveland (shudder), then cut up to Michigan for Detroit, then back down through Toledo, near Cincinnati, over to Indianapolis, and then stopped for the night in Terre Haute, Indiana. More on that later. No wonder Ohio was little more than a collection of bus stops in On the Road.

For more on Cleveland, and even a little on Detroit, watch this video.

Pennsylvania - Pittsburgh

“I walked five miles to get out of Pittsburgh, and two rides, an apple truck and a big trailer truck, took me to Harrisburg in the soft Indian-summer rainy night. I cut right along. I wanted to get home” (96).

(At this point, Kerouac and I are heading in opposite directions and have different attitudes about home).

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Today was the day I had begun my trip. I'm posting this after-the-fact, but as I anticipated I don't have the opportunity to blog every night. I left home and drove three hours to Ebensburg, PA to see a good friend, then from there stayed the night in Pittsburgh with a friend from college. I took the above pictures in the city before I set out for Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.

Pennsylvania is considered to be divided up between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. As pretty much everyone knows, it has more to do with sports than geography. It's not exactly a bustling metropolis like NYC, but sometimes that's a good thing.

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).

New York - Bear Mountain, Newburgh

“I started hitching up the thing. Five scattered rides took me to the desired Bear Mountain Bridge, where Route 6 arched in from New England” (9).

(It was raining, but I didn't hear any thunder. I like to think the fog enveloping this mountain looks exactly as it had when Kerouac stopped here).

(I had to zoom in to get this train, just to give you an idea of how high up the bridge is)

This is a terrible shot, but I'm including it because it cost me a $100 citation for not wearing a seatbelt--I removed it as I was parking to take this shot, and a cop who was dealing with somebody he had pulled over saw me drive a few feet to a stop. Absolute bullshit, but at least I get to use this quote:

“The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don’t frighten them with imposing papers and threats. It’s a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don’t exist to its satisfaction” (127). Amen.

“High up over my head the great hairy Bear Mountain sent down thunderclaps that put the fear of God in me. All I could see were smoky trees and dismal wilderness rising to the skies” (9).

“In Newburgh it had stopped raining. I walked down to the river, and I had to ride back to New York in a bus with a delegation of schoolteachers coming back from a weekend in the mountains—chatter-chatter blah-blah, and me swearing for all the time and the money I’d wasted …” (10).

The Bear Mountain Bridge is an imposing piece of architecture. There are taller bridges, but the feeling of the height being absolutely himalayan may be because when you cross, you're crossing between two mountains--Mountains whose peaks I couldn't even see due to the rain. That too probably added to the mystique. As for Bear Mountain itself, the first thing I noticed was how fresh the air felt/smelled. It was beautiful, and it wasn't exactly a nice day.

Newburgh, on the other hand, wasn't anything special. Parts of it had cobblestone streets, which abused my car horribly. One odd thing, however--there are a hell of a lot of Taxis in Newburgh.

New York City

“As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean” (4).

“Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again” (292).

“Dean stood outside the windows with his bag, ready to go to Penn Station and on across the land” (292).

“Whenever spring comes to New York I can’t stand the suggestions of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I’ve got to go. So I went. For the first time in our lives I said good-by to Dean in New York and left him there. He worked in a parking lot on Madison and 40^th” (237).

(No parking lots these days)

(looking down Madison)

“One night we talked on the corner of 47^th Street and Madison at three in the morning” (238).

(So it's a 12-hour difference)

“Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemeteries beyond Long Island City” (98).

“St. Patrick’s Cathedral: most striking of the windows and I didn’t expect strikingness at this late hour—is at upper front left—a lonely icy congealed blue with streaks of hot pink—little blue holes—painted with an immeasurable blue ink, noir comme bleu, black like blue, I was going to say three Apostles bur there are only two, third slot is not figure, is three one-third-size endisced figures almost like holes in skating ice—but with a winter swamp water full of mill dyes and midnight—no sky has had the color of this glass, and I know skies—all other windows here now dimming except this—it faces East, must be amazing tomorrow morning—faces East like my poor hospital window—Lord, I scribbled hymns to you—the other windows grow rich, brown, dark, secret, get better with age of light like wine with age of Time—the halo round the head of first figure remains bright and shining in the now general midnight blue of the window—halo of second figure is more humble—this window is secreted away and almost has same color as windows at halfway point turningpoint of stairs in old Victorian homes—concealed too—Only now I begin to notice the green—The similar triple window behind and above altar is now gone into the night—but not here.” (Visions of Cody 28).

The hints at the window mentioned in Visions of Cody were a lot more difficult to decipher once I was actually in the Cathedral. I'm not absolutely certain, but after I scrutinized every pane of stained glass in the place I believe the above window is Kerouac's window.

(across from the Cathedral)

“Since the Dakar Doldrums he [Carlo] had gone through a terrible period which he called the Holy Doldrums, or Harlem Doldrums, when he lived in Harlem in mid-summer and at night woke up in his lonely room and heard ‘the great machine’ descending from the sky; and when he walked on 125^th Street ‘under water’ with all the other fish. It was a riot of radiant ideas that had come to enlighten his brain” (On the Road 121).

(Taken on 125th Street, Harlem. There's the "'great machine' descending from the sky.")

(Harlem, 125th Street)

“I took the Seventh Avenue subway to the end of the line at 242^nd Street, and there took a trolley into Yonkers; in downtown Yonkers I transferred to an outgoing trolley and went to the city limits on the east bank of the Hudson River. If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, think of all the places it journeys by as it goes out to sea forever—think of that wonderful Hudson Valley” (9).

(The 1 train to 242nd Street, 125th Street stop in Harlem)

(End of the line)

(dreary day in the Bronx).

(looking out over the 125th Street stop)