On The Road

I just finished Jack Kerouac's On the Road for the second time. I read it once in grad school, and it's amazing how much I've forgotten about it. I'd rank it as one of my top three favourite novels of all time. It's wild and it's unhinged, and it resonates throughout the generations. It's still so relevant. It's America. I've always agreed with the critic's sentiments that it's the defining novel of the post-war Beat Generation...just as Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (which is what I'm reading next...again) effectively serves the same role for the generation that followed-up...the counter-culture and the hippies of the 60's. What's amazing is that so many of the central characters that you find in On the Road, also played a pivitol role in ushering in the generation that followed their own, and you can see the reverence that many of the central figures of the counter-culture held towards the Beat writers and their comrades.

But one thing that makes me identify so much with On the Road, was something that I completely forgot about until my recent re-read of the novel. It's such a treat and in some way, it's a connection to me, no matter how slight. As their final trip unfolds, Sal, Dean, and Stan head to Mexico City to meet up with Bull Lee. On the way, they pass through Texas from Denver, and the way Kerouac describes this journey he goes into great detail about the Texas landscape and the towns that he passes through. The fact that in 1949 Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady passed through my hometown, on their way to meet William Burroughs in Mexico City, on the highway that my house sits on, even referring to Brady (my hometown) as it's fitting colloquial dressing (the heart of Texas), taking notes for his masterpiece, brings a smile to me. I mean, my hometown...which is so small and so lost...it received a fitting description in one of the great American novels of all time, and it's author passed literally yards from where my house sits en route to his greatest journey. Nothing's ever from Brady. Nothing ever goes through Brady. Sometimes, it seems that nothing ever leaves Brady. But for once, I can identify with Brady and feel pride, because it is so exclusive, and it is so unique, and it is so tangibly small. It's mine.

It's nice to know that about the place you sprang from.