gTexts Blog Redux

ON THE ROAD. It was December of nineteen hundred and forty-six when Dean Moriarty and I, Sal Paradise, decided we had to get out of this crazy and noisy city. New York was dead to us, and we counted the days from here to San Francisco. Dean stole a beautiful machine, a real cruiser, and we got out town faster than the cops could touch the powdered-sugar surface of a donut to their lips. Given the donut in their hand was of the powdered sugar variety, of course.

On the way to San Fran we got a ticket in Dakota, burned through Texas, met some girls in Denver and somehow ended up washing dishes in a Bogota way-station. The whole way there I ate nothing but apple pie while Dean ate large sandwiches. He had a way with waitresses. He would wink and smile and give them extra money, and they would make him an extra-big sandwich. Finally we breathed the fresh air of the Pacific.

San Francisco. Dean and I knew that like the ancient Hebrews we had finally reached the Promised Land. Dean was ecstatic. Ecstatic until he realized that he had left his toothbrush back in New York. So we filled the tank for another cross-country trek.

Dean took a wrong turn, and we somehow ended up in Seattle. We took the I-90 East exit number 11 and headed towards Spokane. “No one understands our generation,” Dean said to me.

Dean Moriarty. What a bundle of pure emotion and American emotion-bundles. But there was no time to talk about Dean. “Merge ahead!” I screamed, as Dean was about to crash the cruiser into oncoming traffic. From there we took I-94 East exit number 58B towards Madison, kept left at the fork in the ramp, merged onto I-280 E, took the CR-508 East exit number 17A towards Jersey City, got in front of some guy who was in a hurry and drove really slow just to see his face, merged onto the turnpike, and got on Newark Ave. just like we always do.

“You know, I never really got it until now,” said Dean. “We’ve spent so much time worrying about trying to get somewhere that we never really realized how great it is to be on the road. Forget San Francisco. The road is America’s aorta,” said Dean, with the kind of emphasis that suggested he might jump into his own aorta and cause a self-induced heart-attack at any moment. Luckily, such an act wasn’t really possible.

“Dean, please stop talking crazy talk,” I said anyway.

That was when Dean got really excited. “But there’s so much more,” he countered. “Imagine a highway of billions of computers all talking to each other at the speed of light over synchronous optical networks. Imagine an extremely farfetched system of ansibles connecting space outposts throughout the galaxy. We could be there, surfing the vast information superhighways of the future. Or we could ride two cantankerous donkeys from Ur to Nineveh in Ancient Mesopotamia. Wait, that wouldn’t be so great. But the other stuff would be fantastic—on the road, two wayfarers musing about life incessantly like two wayfaring characters in a book that isn’t really that good but my mom gave to me as a present so I kind of read it.”

Dean and I have been “On the road” ever since.

posted by Garrett Moritz