Big Sur

by Jack Kerouac

  Trudging up and getting further away from the sea roar I get to feel more confident but suddenly I come to a frightening thing in the road, I stop and hold out my hand, edge forward, it’s only a cattle crossing (iron bars imbedded across the road) but at the same time a big blast of wind comes from the left where the bluff should be and I spot that way and see nothing. “What the hell’s going on!” “Follow the road,” says the other voice trying to be calm so I do but the next instant I hear a rattling to my right, throw my light there, see nothing but bushes wiggling dry and mean and just the proper high canyonwall kind of bushes fit for rattlesnakes too—(which it was, a rattlesnake doesnt like to be awakened in the middle of the night by a trudging humpbacked monster with a lamp.)

  But now the road’s going down again, the reassuring bluff reappears on my left, and pretty soon according to my memory of Lorry’s map there she is, the creek, I can hear her lappling and gabbing down there at the bottom of the dark where at least I’ll be on level ground and done with booming airs somewhere above—But the closer I get to the creek as the road dips steeply, suddenly, almost making me trot forward, the louder it roars, I begin to think I’ll fall right into it before I can notice it—It’s screaming like a raging flooded river right below me—Besides it’s even darker down there than anywhere! There are glades down there, ferns of horror and slippery logs, mosses, dangerous plashings, humid mists rise coldly like the breath of death, big dangerous trees are beginning to bend over my head and brush my pack—There’s a noise I know can only grow louder as I sink down and for fear how loud it can grow I stop and listen, it rises up crashing mysteriously at me from a raging battle among dark things, wood or rock or something cracked, all smashed, all wet black sunken earth danger—I’m afraid to go down there—I am affrayed in the old Edmund Spenser sense of being frayed by a whip, and a wet one at that—A slimy green dragon racket in the bush—An angry war that doesnt want me pokin around—It’s been there a million years and it doesnt want me clashing darkness with it—It comes snarling from a thousand crevasses and monster redwood roots all over the map of creation—It is a dark clangoror in the rain forest and doesnt want no skid row bum to carry to the sea which is bad enough and waitin back there—I can almost feel the sea pulling at that racket in the trees but there’s my spotlamp so all I gotta do is follow the lovely sand road which dips and dips in rising carnage and suddenly a flattening, a sight of bridge logs, there’s the bridge rail, there’s the creek just four feet below, cross the bridge you woken bum and see what’s on the other shore.

  Take one quick peek at the water as you cross, just water over rocks, a small creek at that.

  And now before me is a dreamy meadowland with a good old corral gate and a barbed wire fence the road running right on left but this where I get off at last. Then I crawl thru the barbed wire and find myself trudging a sweet little sand road winding right thru fragrant dry heathers as tho I’d just popped thru from hell into familiar old Heaven on Earth, yair and Thank God (tho a minute later my heart’s in my mouth again because I see black things in the white sand ahead but it’s only piles of good old mule dung in Heaven).

  4

  AND IN THE MORNING (after sleeping by the creek in the white sand) I do see what was so scary about my canyon road walk—The road’s up there on the wall a thousand feet with a sheer drop sometimes, especially at the cattle crossing, way up highest, where a break in the bluff shows fog pouring through from another bend of the sea beyond, scary enough in itself anyway as tho one hole wasnt enough to open into the sea—And worst of all is the bridge! I go ambling seaward along the path by the creek and see this awful thin white line of bridge a thousand unbridgeable sighs of height above the little woods I’m walking in, you just cant believe it, and to make things heart-thumpingly horrible you come to a little bend in what is now just a trail and there’s the booming surf coming at you whitecapped crashing down on sand as tho it was higher than where you stand, like a sudden tidal wave world enough to make you step back or run back to the hills—And not only that, the blue sea behind the crashing high waves is full of huge black rocks rising like old ogresome castles dripping wet slime, a billion years of woe right there, the moogrus big clunk of it right there with its slaverous lips of foam at the base—So that you emerge from pleasant little wood paths with a stem of grass in your teeth and drop it to see doom—And you look up at that unbelievably high bridge and feel death and for a good reason: because underneath the bridge, in the sand right beside the sea cliff, hump, your heart sinks to see it: the automobile that crashed thru the bridge rail a decade ago and fell 1000 feet straight down and landed upsidedown, is still there now, an upsidedown chassis of rust in a strewn skitter of sea-eaten tires, old spokes, old car seats sprung with straw, one sad fuel pump and no more people—

  Big elbows of Rock rising everywhere, sea caves within them, seas plollocking all around inside them crashing out foams, the boom and pound on the sand, the sand dipping quick (no Malibu Beach here)—Yet you turn and see the pleasant woods winding upcreek like a picture in Vermont—But you look up into the sky, bend way back, my God you’re standing directly under that aerial bridge with its thin white line running from rock to rock and witless cars racing across it like dreams! From rock to rock! All the way down the raging coast! So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.

  5

  IT WAS EVEN FRIGHTENING AT THE OTHER PEACEFUL END of Raton Canyon, the east end, where Alf the pet mule of local settlers slept at night such sleepfull sleeps under a few weird trees and then got up in the morning to graze in the grass then negotiated the whole distance slowly to the sea shore where you saw him standing by the waves like an ancient sacred myth character motionless in the sand—Alf the Sacred Burro I later called him—The thing that was frightening was the mountain that rose up at the east end, a strange Burmese like mountain with levels and moody terraces and a strange ricepaddy hat on top that I kept staring at with a sinking heart even at first when I was healthy and feeling good (and I would be going mad in this canyon in six weeks on the fullmoon night of September 3rd)—The mountain reminded me of my recent recurrent nightmares in New York about the “Mountain of Mien Mo” with the swarms of moony flying horses lyrically sweeping capes over their shoulders as they circled the peak a “thousand miles high” (in the dream it said) and on top of the mountain in one haunted nightmare I’d seen the giant empty stone benches so silent in the topworld moonlight as tho once inhabited by Gods or giants of some kind but long ago vacated so that they were all dusty and cobwebby now and the evil lurked somewhere inside the pyramid nearby where there was a monster with a big thumping heart but also, even more sinister, just ordinary seedy but muddy janitors cooking over small woodfires—Narrow dusty holes through which I’d tried to crawl with a bunch of tomato plants tied around my neck—Dreams—Drinking nightmares—A recurrent series of them all swirling around that mountain, seen the very first time as a beautful but somehow horribly green verdant mist enshrouded jungle peak rising out of green tropical country in “Mexico” so called but beyond which were pyramids, dry rivers, other countries full of infantry enemy and yet the biggest danger being just hoodlums out throwing rocks on Sundays—So that the sight of that simple sad mountain, together with the bridge and that car that had flipped over twice or so and landed flump in the sand with no more sign of human elbows or shred neckties (like a terrifying poem about America you could write), agh, HOO HOO of Owls living in old evil hollow trees in that misty tangled further part of the canyon where I was always afraid to go anyhow—That unclimbably tangled steep cliff at the base of Mien Mo rising to gawky dead trees among bushes so dense and up to heathers God knows how deep with hidden caves no one not
even I spose the Indians of the 10th Century had ever explored—And those big gooky rainforest ferns among lightningstruck conifers right beside sudden black vine cliff faces rising right at your side as you walk the peaceful path—And as I say that ocean coming at you higher than you are like the harbors of old woodcuts always higher than the towns (as Rimbaud pointed out shuddering)—So many evil combinations even unto the bat who would come at me later while I slept on the outdoor cot on the porch of Lorenzo’s cabin, come circle my head coming real low sometimes filling me with the traditional fear it’ll get tangled in my hair, and such silent wings, how would you like to wake up in the middle of the night and see silent wings beating over you and you ask yourself “Do I really believe in Vampires?”—In fact, flying silently around my lamplit cabin at 3 o’clock in the morning as I’m reading (of all things) (shudder) Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde—Small wonder maybe that I myself turned from serene Jekyll to hysterical Hyde in the short space of six weeks, losing absolute control of the peace mechanisms of my mind for the first time in my life.

  But Ah, at first there were fine days and nights, right after Monsanto drove me to Monterey and back with two boxes of a full grub list and left me there alone for three weeks of solitude, as we’d agreed—So fearless and happy I even spotted his powerful flashlight up at the bridge the first night, right thru the fog the eerie finger reaching the pale bottom of that high monstrosity, and even spotted it out over the farmless sea as I sat by caves in the crashing dark in my fisherman’s outfit writing down what the sea was saying—Worst of all spotting it up at those tangled mad cliffsides where owls hooted ooraloo—Becoming acquainted and swallowing fears and settling down to life in the little cabin with its warm glow of woodstove and kerosene lamp and let the ghosts fly their asses off—The Bhikku’s home in his woods, he only wants peace, peace he will get—Tho why after three weeks of perfect happy peace and adjustment in these strange woods my soul so went down the drain when I came back with Dave Wain and Romana and my girl Billie and her kid, I’ll never know—Worth the telling only if I dig deep into everything.

  Because it was so beautiful at first, even the circumstance of my sleepingbag suddenly erupting feathers in the middle of the night as I turned over to sleep on, so I curse and have to get up and sew it by lamplight or in the morning it might be empty of feathers—And as I bend poor mother head over my needle and thread in the cabin, by the fresh fire and in the light of the kerosene lamp, here come those damned silent black wings flapping and throwing shadows all over my little home, the bloody bat’s come in my house—Trying to sew a poor patch on my old crumbly sleepingbag (mostly ruined by my having to sweat out a fever inside of it in a hotel room in Mexico City in 1957 right after the gigantic earthquake there), the nylon all rotten almost from all that old sweat, but still soft, tho so soft I have to cut out a piece of old shirt flap and patch over the rip—I remember looking up from my middle of the night chore and saying bleakly “They, yes, have bats in Mien Mo valley”—But the fire crackles, the patch gets sewn, the creek gurgles and thumps outside—A creek having so many voices it’s amazing, from the kettledrum basin deep bumpbumps to the little gurgly feminine crickles over shallow rocks, sudden choruses of other singers and voices from the log dam, dibble dabble all night long and all day long the voices of the creek amusing me so much at first but in the later horror of that madness night becoming the babble and rave of evil angels in my head—So not minding the bat or the rip finally, ending up cant sleep because too awake now and it’s 3 A.M. so the fire I stoke and I settle down and read the entire Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde novel in the wonderful little handsized leather book left there by smart Monsanto who also must’ve read it with wide eyes on a night like that—Ending the last elegant sentences at dawn, time to get up and fetch water from gurgly creek and start breakfast of pancakes and syrup—And saying to myself “So why fret when something goes wrong like your sleepingbag breaking in the night, use self reliance”—“Screw the bats” I add.

  Marvelous opening moment in fact of the first afternoon I’m left alone in the cabin and I make my first meal, wash my first dishes, nap, and wake up to hear the rapturous ring of silence or Heaven even within and throughout the gurgle of the creek—When you say AM ALONE and the cabin is suddenly home only because you made one meal and washed your firstmeal dishes—Then nightfall, the religious vestal fighting of the beautiful kerosene lamp after careful washing of the mantle in the creek and careful drying with toilet paper, which spoils it by specking it so you again wash it in the creek and this time just let the mantle drip dry in the sun, the late afternoon sun that disappears so quickly behind those giant high steep canyon walls—Nightfall, the kerosene lamp casts a glow in the cabin, I go out and pick some ferns like the ferns of the Lankavatara Scripture, those hairnet ferns, “Look sirs, a beautiful hairnet!”—Late afternoon fog pours in over the canyon walls, sweep, cover the sun, it gets cold, even the flies on the porch are as so sad as the fog on the peaks—As daylight retreats the flies retreat like polite Emily Dickinson flies and when it’s dark they’re all asleep in trees or someplace—At high noon they’re in the cabin with you but edging further towards the open doorsill as the afternoon lengthens, how strangely gracious—There’s the hum of the bee drone two blocks away the racket of it you’d think it was right over the roof, when the bee drone swirls nearer and nearer (gulp again) you retreat into the cabin and wait, maybe they got a message to come and see you all two thousand of em—But getting used to the bee drone finally which seems to happen like a big party once a week—And so everything eventually marvelous.

  Even the first frightening night on the beach in the fog with my notebook and pencil, sitting there crosslegged in the sand facing all the Pacific fury flashing on rocks that rise like gloomy sea shroud towers out of the cove, the bingbang cove with its seas booming inside caves and slapping out, the cities of seaweed floating up and down you can even see their dark leer in the phosphorescent seabeach nightlight—That first night I sit there and all I know, as I look up, is the kitchen light is on, on the cliff, to the right, where somebody’s just built a cabin overlooking all the horrible Sur, somebody up there’s having a mild and tender supper that’s all I know—The lights from the cabin kitchen up there go out like a little weak lighthouse beacon and ends suspended a thousand feet over the crashing shore—Who would build a cabin up there but some bored but hoary old adventurous architect maybe got sick of running for congress and one of these days a big Orson Welles tragedy with screaming ghosts a woman in a white nightgown’ll go flying down that sheer cliff—But actually in my mind what I really see is the kitchen lights of that mild and tender maybe even romantic supper up there, in all that howling fog, and here I am way below in the Vulcan’s Forge itself looking up with sad eyes—Blanking my little Camel cigarette on a billion year old rock that rises behind my head to a height unbelievable—The little kitchen light on the cliff is only on the end of it, behind it the shoulders of the great sea hound cliff go rising up and back and sweeping inland higher and higher till I gasp to think “Looks like a reclining dog, big friggin shoulders on that sonofabitch”—Riseth and sweepeth and scareth men to death but what is death anyway in all this water and rock.