On the Road Into the Wild: Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) and Christopher McCandless (1968-1922)

On the Road Into the Wild: Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) and Christopher McCandless (1968-1922)

11/14/07

I heard recently on the radio that this fall was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac’s novels. This book supposedly defined what came to be known as the Beat Generation, and for the rest of his career Kerouac carried the mantle, and the burden, of being its spokesman. Spending all his energy on being a public figure was toxic to this shy and sensitive observer of life in post World War II America, and he never wrote anything that compared after that.

Though I heard some noise about “beatniks,” and had seen Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, I did not really care about who beatniks were or what their philosophy might be. I was seven when On the Road was published, but when I was 18 it was as if it had just been written for me. I dreamed of the romance of setting out on a wild adventure in a carload of crazy companeros (and some young women at various times along the way), transcontinental drives spanning the breadth of America, even turning South to Mexico where the holy spirits of the Maya and native Americans prowled the land and the dusty cities, and where beautiful mestizo girls were waiting.

These big plans devolved into a fairly pathetic trip with my then 15 year old brother who my parents recklessly permitted to fly from Chicago on this trip from Colorado through El Paso through the dry flatlands and then crossing the mountains to Mazatlan, where we were briefly detained by police for sleeping in my new 1971 Datsun 510 wagon until we paid them a few pesos ransom. We crossed Mexico, visited Guadalajara, went to some bullfights, took a dip into the tropics at Vera Cruz where we had the best orange juice ever, and turned around heading back home.

Later, living in Denver, I took lodging off Colfax Street, a skid row immortalized in other Kerouac writings, where in the morning I literally stepped over winos passed out in the apartment lobby. In my third-floor walkup, I sat writing something of my own, a novel consisting of a thinly disguised account of the 24 years in a fairly uneventful life.

Eventually I understood that half-assed efforts of aping a character out of Kerouac was, ultimately, unproductive, unauthentic, and pathetic, and I went about my life in the usual way: making stupid decisions, being pushed to and fro by fortune, by others to whom I yielded power, or by my own willfulness or stubbornness. Somehow, some good things came of this. Still, when I realized that this was the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road, I realized there was still something compelling about it. What was it?

I was (and am at heart) a midwesterner, rootless on the prairie. When I was a child in bed in the dark and silence, out of my window I could hear the moaning of traffic on the highways, the incessant motion across the middle of America. Here the land lay flat and the horizon, for Kerouac and for me, always brought out speculation, thought, and imagination. In such a moment Kerouac wrote tellingly that “in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry” and
. . . the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
Kerouac’s quest is, therefore, a quest for the father, attempted in the company of the character Dean Moriarty (alter ego for Neal Cassady), as well as his other companions. I’m embarrassed that by now I did not appreciate in On the Road the obvious themes of the lost father, and the lost brothers, and the meaning of friendship between men. But recalling how densely packed the novel is with these themes, I now understand why I still admire Kerouac for pursuing his art and vision so passionately and truthfully.

The film Into the Wild recounts the life of Christopher McCandless, a Gen X’r two generations removed from Kerouac. Like Kerouac, McCandless pursued an adventure that perhaps also teaches about the changes in our society and its effect on men. McCandless disdained the values of society, particularly the status-seeking materialism associated with privileged men, and sought his own masculinity in a struggle against the forces of nature. In this quest, he met several men who were mentors to him: one for whom he worked in the Dakotas; another who was a hippie/dropout mentor in Colorado; and an older lonely “grandfather” in Arizona/New Mexico. He could only tolerate these relationships for short periods, and, after weeks or months, always moved on in pursuit of his Alaskan survival adventure, wherein he would face the forces of nature and survival naked: without knowledge, without help, without preparation, as if reborn in an even more hostile world than he was as an infant. McCandless, unfortunately, got probably more adventure than he bargained for, and had no opportunity to learn anything from his experience.

In his lonely pursuit of autonomy, even a grandiose confrontation with forces of nature, McCandless pursued self knowledge by isolation, by throwing himself back upon himself, in a vain attempt to be his own father. Kerouac, on the other hand, sought masculinity in comradeship, admiration, and companionship of other men.

Is it possible that Kerouac exhibits a sort of attachment and deference to the community of men that began to erode with the end of World War II? Is it possible that his expedition on the road was a swan song to, for instance, universal mobilization of men in a great cause; to hobo jungles, friendly wanderers, circuit-riding preachers, medicine hawkers; to lodges and fraternal orders; to lifelong friendships, trade union guilds, apprenticeships, and other institutions attaching men to one another and to society?

Is it possible that McCandless manifested a detachment and scorn for what others might offer? Is it possible that, because of injuries at the hands of the few men/mentors he had ever known, he lived in fear of other men for the rest of his young life? Is it possible that his ill-fated (and ultimately suicidal) trip into Alaska was, in fact, a suicide caused, in part, by the deep void in the heart of a young man with the soul of a lion?

Now question where that leaves some of us, boomers (there I said the dreaded word) born between 1922 and 1968? If the simplest explanation is most often the best first guess, it probably lies between these two extremes. When we gather, when we speak about our experiences in discovering ourselves as men, when we go to the wilderness either alone or with our brothers, we are behaving, in some ways, like each of these men. Unlike each of these men, both of whom came to unhappy ends, we have the power, and the privilege, to overcome isolation, apathy, greed, self-centeredness, materialism, soullessness, fear, if only we open ourselves to each other.

I say let’s do that, now.

Vaughn Clauson