In the Footsteps of Jack Kerouac -- continuing a literary journey
By Robert Downes • Planet Backpacker
As a young man hitch-hiking around America in the late 1940s, beat writer Jack Kerouac scribbled his observations on a pocketful of scrap paper each day -- notes that went on to become the heart of On the Road.
Long before he was lionized as the voice of the beats in books such as On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur and The Subterraneans, Kerouac was a traveler. Specifically, one who made his way close to the earth: hitch-hiking, jumping trains, riding buses. A traveler who stayed in skid row flophouses and on the couches of friends or in the beds of sexual conquests. Not to mention long periods at his mother’s house in Queens (parental succor is one of the dirty little secrets of being a young adventurer).
What would Kerouac be doing today? I wondered during a solo trip around the world last year -- an odyssey that involved mountain biking across Europe and backpacking on through Egypt, India and Southeast Asia, recounted in my book, Planet Backpacker.
Blogging, no doubt -- Kerouac loved to type and is said to have had an athlete’s endurance at the keyboard, typing more than 100 words per minute. And -- brace yourselves, cynical hipsters -- the writer who penned the world’s greatest hitch-hiking novel would probably be neck-deep in today’s equivalent of thumb-tripping, which is backpacking.
THE GODFATHER
After all, Kerouac is the godfather of the modern backpacking movement.
By backpacking, I mean the scruffy mode of travel around the world through a skein of hostels and train stations, not hiking the high Sierras and sleeping in a dome tent.
Backpacking is the province of college students taking off a gap year to ramble around Asia, or the inveterate travelers of Europe and Australia who are hardwired to wander the Third World. But while writing Planet Backpacker on my way around the world, I also found backpackers in their 40s, 50s and 60s -- including doctors, lawyers, bankers and chefs -- who were swept up by the travel daemon that hammers at the inner walls of every hardcore traveler’s breast.
Kerouac inspired several generations of backpackers who followed in his literary footsteps. Ours is an almost tribal subculture that is said to number more than 100,000 gypsies at any given moment.
Traveling through India, Vietnam and Malaysia, I sometimes felt as if Kerouac was looking over my shoulder. After all, we had traveled together before. As a 17-year-old high school graduate, I was inspired by On the Road and the spirit of the times to hitch-hike from Detroit to San Francisco in 1970 to witness what was left of the hippie experiment in the Haight-Ashbury.
It was the golden age of hitchhiking and thousands of us were criss-crossing the country, making up the adventure travel scene as we went along. Many were searching for Kerouac’s romanticized vision of living “on the road.”
Two years later, I was hitch-hiking and rail-passing my way across Europe with The Dharma Bums in my backpack. I remember nesting under a hedge in Oostende, Belgium and reading the exploits of the book’s would-be Buddhists as night fell on my camp.
On the Road provided a spiritual sequel to Huckleberry Finn, with its impulse to head west into the great unknown of America’s underground. It spurred a generation of young Americans to take up the travel lifestyle. God knows how many copies of On the Road are floating around Afghanistan today, left there 40 years ago by idealistic young backpackers following the Hippie Trail to India.
RETURN TO FOREVER
Cut to 2007 and I found that my experience was eerily similar to that of Kerouac’s during the process of writing Planet Backpacker, a memoir of my trip. I found myself walking in Jack Kerouac’s spiritual footsteps, continuing the journey he began more than 60 years ago.
I too frequently stopped on the streets of Mumbai or Bangkok to scribble notes on whatever scrap of paper was handy, the words flowing from my pen with the bebop fever that filled Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness prose. Later, I’d blog my notes in whatever internet cafè was handy, probing the back alleys and bazaars of Cairo, Mamallapuram, Galway or Budapest to find a keyboard. My book was written in more than 100 internet cafès around the world. Most were dingy, dim holes with the sticky black gum of 10,000 fingers imbedded on the keyboards of their antique computers. I’m sure that Sal Paradise would approve.
There’s little doubt that Kerouac would have “gone global” if he were living today. There was still a sense of mystery and awe to travel in America when Kerouac was kicking around its glamourless places in the ‘40s. You could still find yourself sitting next to a Blackfoot Indian -- wrapped in a coat hacked from a blanket -- at a bus stop high up in the gray mist of the Rockies; or talk with an old rancher about how the Platte River Valley was like that of the Nile.
But that world was nibbled away by the homogenization of America with chain stores, McDonald’s and Red Roof Inns. For Kerouac’s godchildren, there’s no longer much allure in traveling around America -- things have become too “expected.” Today’s adventurers have to roam farther afield to drink the liquor that intoxicated the hitchhikers of the ‘60s.
So if you go looking for Jack Kerouac, expect to find him everywhere. Bitter irony: he died of liver disease at the age of 47 in Orlando, Florida in 1969, a place that was soon to be one of the most unhip places in America.
But his spirit lives on. In fact, I thought I saw him slip into a red phone booth in London and vanish in the mist -- a travel god who will never die.
Robert Downes is the author of Planet Backpacker: Across Europe on a Mountain Bike & Backpacking on Through Egypt, India & Southeast Asia -- Around the World from The Wandering Press. Order from planetbackpacker.net, amazon.com, or your favorite bookstore.
