Catching Up With Kerouac

Despite my ambition of only a year ago, Jack Kerouac's compact prose wasn't enough of a motivator to make it over the finish line; I'm only halfway done with the relatively short 305-page Penguin paperback of his most famous work, On the Road (1957).

In my defense there's no burning mystery to be solved, and little desire to see how the main characters turn out. I do enjoy the colorful, free-flowing prose as the first person narrator, Sal Paradise, parties with his friend Dean Moriarty through the towns of postwar America.

However, I've come across a new reason to finish the book. I want to read his next novel, The Dharma Bums, that arguably has more relevance to the world of today.

But when “On the Road” was published in 1957, the road trips it chronicled were already 10 years in the past. By then Kerouac had already emerged as a different kind of writer, one who found rapture off the road, prowling in thick forests “to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars.” As we celebrate his centenary on March 12, it’s Kerouac the nature writer who glows most brightly...

Gary Snyder (1930- ) in 1975
(Frank Beacham's Journal)

Kerouac’s feeling for nature took a religious turn after he met the poet Gary Snyder in 1955. A first-rate mountaineer, Snyder was a practicing Buddhist who wrote haiku-inspired verse about the Pacific Northwest’s flora and fauna. Influenced by Native American cultures, Snyder envisioned preserving the entire Pacific Coast as a zone where people could live in harmony with nature. As “Japhy Ryder,” he became a main character in Kerouac’s ecstatic 1958 novel “The Dharma Bums,” whose early pages detail their meeting in San Francisco...

The novel helped launch the “rucksack revolution” predicted in its pages, inspiring legions of young Americans to abandon materialism and seek revelation in nature...These day hikers dressed in North Face and Patagonia gear climb Desolation Peak to stand where Kerouac once dreamed of satori while scoping for wildfires.

The latter sentence refers to Jack Kerouac's experience in the mountains of Washington state. [bold added]

The next summer, he headed to Washington’s ethereal North Cascades to begin a two-month stint as a U.S. Forest Service firewatcher, a job that Snyder had once held. At Marblemount on the fast-flowing Skagit River he received a week of fire training before beginning the three-day trek to his station atop 6,102-foot Desolation Peak. While Kerouac’s job was to scan the horizon for wildfires, his goal was to write and meditate, take botanical hikes, gaze at the Northern Lights and cleanse himself of anxiety and alcohol.

"the twin-peaked Hozomeen was his mystical muse," and the result was The Dharma Bums.

Note: firewatching is a lonely job, but its enforced isolation is a boon to writers and other introspectives.