On the Road

When my friend Jason told me to read On the Road, I ignored him, which was really me just snubbing him for finding something with culture before I could wrap my mind around it.

I think we were in high school, Jason was telling me about the Beats, Allan Ginsberg, this guy named Neal Cassady and of course Jack Kerouac. I finally read On The Road, which is turning 50 Wednesday, when I was in college studying to be a preacher in the Lutheran church. By this time Jason still lived in the great plains of the Mid West as I was living in California. I called L.A. the basin of hell with smog, cars and some mountains somewhere but no one could ever see them.

As I studied for seminary I began to see holes popping up everywhere, and I had decided to ignore them by traveling to Montana to simply preach and work in Glacier National Park. But I was disinterested in sharing the Gospel to the children of God because I thought it was a sham, so I set out on a highway east in the northern states of America. I traveled for two weeks and ended up in St Louis visiting Jason, who was like my Neil Cassady.

We partied. Had fun. Never missed a beat. But I knew soon that my long road trip would be over. I knew I had to go back to school. I had to drive to L.A. after living in the mountains and seeing hundreds of miles of the road and desolate landscape.

In the dorms, I had a tiny space that was given to me from my dad’s money, whereas when I drove with the top down in my Jeep, the entire landscape was mine. I felt like part of me was going to die when I reached the city of angels. I knew I would leave behind this free-spirited love for the land and the road. The reason I was leaving this spirit I used to know was to give back to the machine of society… the dark, blood-sucking and soul-taking form that confused people into thinking they were lost.

And since that summer when I drove all around picking up hitchhikers, I have accepted this machine and I am actively adding everything I can to it: propaganda, money, pollution.

But thank God, or thank this machine, for creating On the Road. For whatever kind of horrible person Jack Kerouac was, he reminds us that we know nothing in this life, no matter where we go and how long our journey is… all we know is the “forlorn rags of growing old.” And the only way to be free of this disgusting knowledge of mortality is to go on the road and forget about our obsession with time and death.