On The Road, Again

With the 50th anniversary of the release of Jack Kerouac's On the Road upon us it is probably not surprising that lots of people are beginning to think about the fundamentally American idea of the road trip.

We all have our personal favorites, of course. In the two years after I graduated from Williams I took to the road for Mardi Gras, picking friends up along the way until the car was chock full. The stories that make up the memories of that trip are not suitable for a family audience by and large, but we lived all of the hallmarks, or perhaps cliches, of the genre: Excess, way too little money for way too many people, sleeping in accomodations that today seem frankly impossible, dangerously little formal planning, and more excess. There are countless other trips as well -- track trips in college, road trips that required me to cover lots of milage in little time and those that allowed me to stretch my legs, road trips that were the result of moving to another part of the country and those that allowed me to meet up with friends coming to a different part of the state, road trips for research and road trips for conferences. Whatever the cause of my various long car trips, my capacity for adventurous international travel probably began with a willingness to jump in the car on a moment's notice and drive wherever a few friends could convince me was worth going.

Today's New York Times has two reminders of how universal the lure of the open road has been for Americans. Matt Gross provides the tale of his frugal road trip, as if there is any other kind. Holland Cotter, meanwhile, has the compelling reminiscence of a 1964 road trip that he took by Grayhound that was inspired by a friend's incarceration in a juvie home and his own reading of On The Road. Race plays a big role in his story.

As for the source material itself, I have always found On the Road to be somewhat lacking as literature. But a recent discussion with dcat's friend Jaime (who was reading On the Road) reminded me that Kerouac's most lasting work is important for reasons beyond its mere literary value. Kerouac captured a segment of American youth at a particular time in US history that may never be recaptured but that nonetheless carries with it a universal resonance. A lot of my readers probably reject Kerouac's (and his cast of characters') proto-beat approach to the world, but I find value in the idea of trying to find options outside of those imposed by the mainstream. The 1950s could not have been the easiest time to be the sort of kid who challenged the status quo. In a sense, the great American road trip is a reminder of the possibility that America offers to evade that status quo, if only for a little while.

Next week I'll be traveling to Kansas (albeit by plane) where I'll spend a week, and in October I'll be driving to Dallas to meet some friends for a road trip weekend. Those days on the road are not entirely in the past tense, I guess, and as long as there is a highway and a full tank of gas, not to mention the prospect of an adult-version of a little excess, it will always be possible to go out on the open road to see what is out there over the horizon and in the great beyond.