Lonesome Traveler

by Jack Kerouac

  Most days, though, it was the routine that occupied me.— Up at seven or so every day, a pot of coffee brought to a boil over a handful of burning twigs, I’d go out in the alpine yard with a cup of coffee hooked in my thumb and leisurely make my wind speed and wind direction and temperature and moisture readings—then, after chopping wood, I’d use the two-way radio and report to the relay station on Sourdough.— At 10 AM I usually got hungry for breakfast, and I’d make delicious pancakes, eating them at my little table that was decorated with bouquets of mountain lupine and sprigs of fir.

  Early in the afternoon was the usual time for my kick of the day, instant chocolate pudding with hot coffee.— Around two or three I’d lie on my back on the meadowside and watch the clouds float by, or pick blueberries and eat them right there. The radio was on loud enough to hear any calls for Desolation.

  Then at sunset I’d roust up my supper out of cans of yams and Spam and peas, or sometimes just pea soup with corn muffins baked on top of the wood stove in aluminum foil.— Then I’d go out to that precipitous snow slope and shovel my two pails of snow for the water tub and gather an armful of fallen firewood from the hillside like the proverbial Old Woman of Japan.— For the chipmunks and conies I put pans of leftovers under the shack, in the middle of the night I could hear them clanking around. The rat would scramble down from the attic and eat some too.

  Sometimes I’d yell questions at the rocks and trees, and across gorges, or yodel—“What is the meaning of the void?” The answer was perfect silence, so I knew.—

  Before bedtime I’d read by kerosene lamp whatever books were in the shack.— It’s amazing how people in solitary hunger after books.— After poring over every word of a medical tome, and the synopsized versions of Shakespeare’s plays by Charles and Mary Lamb, I climbed up in the little attic and put together torn cowboy pocket books and magazines the mice had ravaged—I also played stud poker with three imaginary players.

  Around bedtime I’d bring a cup of milk almost to a boil with a tablespoon of honey in it, and drink that for my lamby nightcap, then I’d curl up in my sleeping bag.

  No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.— Learning, for instance, to eat when he’s hungry and sleep when he’s sleepy.

  Also around bedtime was my singing time. I’d pace up and down the well-worn path in the dust of my rock singing all the show tunes I could remember, at the top of my voice too, with nobody to hear except the deer and the bear.

  In the red dusk, the mountains were symphonies in pink snow—Jack Mountain, Three Fools Peak, Freezeout Peak, Golden Horn, Mt. Terror, Mt. Fury, Mt. Despair, Crooked Thumb Peak, Mt. Challenger and the incomparable Mt. Baker bigger than the world in the distance—and my own little Jackass Ridge that completed the Ridge of Desolation.— Pink snow and the clouds all distant and frilly like ancient remote cities of Buddhaland splendor, and the wind working incessantly—whish, whish—booming, at times rattling my shack.

  For supper I made chop suey and baked some biscuits and put the leftovers in a pan for deer that came in the moonlit night and nibbled like big strange cows of peace—long-antlered buck and does and babies too—as I meditated in the alpine grass facing the magic moon-laned lake.— And I could see firs reflected in the moonlit lake five thousand feet below, upside down, pointing to infinity.—

  And all the insects ceased in honor of the moon.

  Sixty-three sunsets I saw revolve on that perpendicular hill—mad raging sunsets pouring in sea foams of cloud through unimaginable crags like the crags you grayly drew in pencil as a child, with every rose-tint of hope beyond, making you feel just like them, brilliant and bleak beyond words.—

  Cold mornings with clouds billowing out of Lightning Gorge like smoke from a giant fire but the lake cerulean as ever.

  August comes in with a blast that shakes your house and augurs little Augusticity—then that snowy-air and woodsmoke feeling—then the snow comes sweeping your way from Canada, and the wind rises and dark low clouds rush up as out of a forge. Suddenly a green-rose rainbow appears right on your ridge with steamy clouds all around and an orange sun turmoiling …

  What is a rainbow,

  Lord?—a hoop

  For the lowly

  … and you go out and suddenly your shadow is ringed by the rainbow as you walk on the hilltop, a lovely-haloed mystery making you want to pray.—

  A blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock, and for your own poor gentle flesh no answer.

  Your oil lamp burning in infinity.

  ONE MORNING I found bear stool and signs of where the monster had taken a can of frozen milk and squeezed it in his paws and bit into it with one sharp tooth trying to suck out the paste.— In the foggy dawn I looked down the mysterious Ridge of Starvation with its fog-lost firs and its hills humping into invisibility, and the wind blowing the fog by like a faint blizzard and I realized that somewhere in the fog stalked the bear.

  And it seemed as I sat there that this was the Primordial Bear, and that he owned all the Northwest and all the snow and commanded all the mountains. He was King Bear, who could crush my head in his paws and crack my spine like a stick and this was his house, his yard, his domain.— Though I looked all day, he would not show himself in the mystery of those silent foggy slopes—he prowled at night among unknown lakes, and in the early morning the pearl-pure light that shadowed mountainsides of fir made him blink with respect.— He had millenniums of prowling here behind him, he had seen the Indians and Redcoats come and go, and would see much more.— He continuously heard the reassuring rapturous rush of silence, except when near creeks, he was aware of the light material the world is made of, yet he never discoursed, nor communicated by signs, nor wasted a breath complaining—he just nibbled and pawed and lumbered along snags paying no attention to things inanimate or animate.— His big mouth chew-chewed in the night, I could hear it across the mountain in the starlight.— Soon he would come out of the fog, huge, and come and stare in my window with big burning eyes.— He was Avalokitesvara the Bear, and his sign was the gray wind of autumn.—

  I was waiting for him. He never came.

  FINALLY THE AUTUMN RAINS, all-night gales of soaking rain as I lie warm as toast in my sleeping bag and the mornings open cold wild fall days with high wind, racing fogs, racing clouds, sudden bright sun, pristine light on hill patches and my fire crackling as I exult and sing at the top of my voice.— Outside my window a wind-swept chipmunk sits up straight on a rock, hands clasped he nibbles an oat between his paws—the little nutty lord of all he surveys.

  Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize “The stars are words” and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind. There’s no need for solitude. So love life for what it is, and form no preconceptions whatever in your mind.

  WHAT STRANGE SWEET THOUGHTS come to you in the mountain solitudes!—One night I realized that when you give people understanding and encouragement a funny little meek childish look abashes their eyes, no matter what they’ve been doing they weren’t sure it was right—lambies all over the world.

  For when you realize that God is Everything you know that you’ve got to love everything no matter how bad it is, in the ultimate sense it was neither good nor bad (consider the dust), it was just what was, that is, what was made to appear.— Some kind of drama to teach something to something, some “despised substance of divinest show.”

  And I realized I didnt have to hide myself in desolation but could accept society for better or for worse, like a wife—I saw that if it wasnt for the six senses, of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting and thinking, the self of that, which is non-existent, there would be no phenomen
a to perceive at all, in fact no six senses or self.— The fear of extinction is much worse than extinction (death) itself.— To chase after extinction in the old Nirvanic sense of Buddhism is ultimately silly, as the dead indicate in the silence of their blissful sleep in Mother Earth which is an Angel hanging in orbit in Heaven anyway.—

  I just lay on the mountain meadowside in the moonlight, head to grass, and heard the silent recognition of my temporary woes.— Yes, so to try to attain to Nirvana when you’re already there, to attain to the top of a mountain when you’re already there and only have to stay—thus, to stay in the Nirvana Bliss, is all I have to do, you have to do, no effort, no path really, no discipline but just to know that all is empty and awake, a Vision and a Movie in God’s Universal Mind (Alaya-Vijnana) and to stay more or less wisely in that.— Because silence itself is the sound of diamonds which can cut through anything, the sound of Holy Emptiness, the sound of extinction and bliss, that graveyard silence which is like the silence of an infant’s smile, the sound of eternity, of the blessedness surely to be believed, the sound of nothing-ever-happened-except-God (which I’d soon hear in a noisy Atlantic tempest).— What exists is God in His Emanation, what does not exist is God in His peaceful Neutrality, what neither exists nor does not exist is God’s immortal primordial dawn of Father Sky (this world this very minute).— So I said:—“Stay in that, no dimensions here to any of the mountains or mosquitos and whole milky ways of worlds—” Because sensation is emptiness, old age is emptiness.— T’s only the Golden Eternity of God’s Mind so practise kindness and sympathy, remember that men are not responsible in themselves as men for their ignorance and unkindness, they should be pitied, God does pity it, because who says anything about anything since everything is just what it is, free of interpretations.— God is not the “attainer,” he is the “farer” in that which everything is, the “abider”—one caterpillar, a thousand hairs of God.— So know constantly that this is only you, God, empty and awake and eternally free as the unnumerable atoms of emptiness everywhere.—

  I decided that when I would go back to the world down there I’d try to keep my mind clear in the midst of murky human ideas smoking like factories on the horizon through which I would walk, forward…

  When I came down in September a cool old golden look had come into the forest, auguring cold snaps and frost and the eventual howling blizzard that would cover my shack completely, unless those winds at the top of the world would keep her bald. As I reached the bend in the trail where the shack would disappear and I would plunge down to the lake to meet the boat that would take me out and home, I turned and blessed Desolation Peak and the little pagoda on top and thanked them for the shelter and the lesson I’d been taught.

  7. BIG TRIP TO EUROPE

  I SAVED EVERY CENT and then suddenly I blew it all on a big glorious trip to Europe or anyplace, and I felt light and gay, too.

  It took a few months but I finally bought a ticket on a Yugoslavian freighter bound from Brooklyn Busch Terminal for Tangier, Morocco.

  A February morning in 1957 we sailed. I had a whole double stateroom to myself, all my books, peace, quiet and study. For once I was going to be a writer who didnt have to do other people’s work.

  Gastank cities of America fading beyond the waves here we go across the Atlantic now on a run that takes twelve days to Tangier that sleepy Arabic port on the other side—and after the west waved land had receded beneath the cap lick, bang, we hit a bit of a tempest that builds up till Wednesday morning the waves are two stories high coming in over our bow and crashing over and frothing in my cabin window enough to make any old seadog duck and those poor Yugoslavian buggers out there sent to lash loose trucks and fiddle with halyards and punchy whistling lines in that salt boorapoosh gale, blam, and twasnt until later I learned these hardy Slavs had two little kittykats stashed away belowdecks and after the storm had abated (and I had seen the glowing white vision of God in my tremors of thought to think we’d might have to lower the boats away in the hopeless mess of mountainous seas—pow pow pow the waves coming in harder and harder, higher and higher, till Wednesday morning when I looked out of my porthole from a restless try-sleep on my belly with pillows on each side of me to prevent me from pitching, I look and see a wave so immense and Jonahlike coming at me from starboard I just cant believe it, just cant believe I got on that Yugoslav freighter for my big trip to Europe at just the wrong time, just the boat that would carry me indeed to the other shore, to go join coral Hart Crane in those undersea gardens)—the poor little kitty cats tho when the storm’s abated and moon come out and looked like a dark olive prophesying Africa (O the history of the world is full of olives) here are the two little swickle jaws sitting facing each other on a calm eight o’clock hatch in the calm Popeye moonlight of the Sea Hag and finally I got them to come in my stateroom and purr on my lap as we thereafter gently swayed to the other shore, the Afric shore and not the one death’ll take us to.— But in the moment of the storm I wasnt so cocky as I am now writing about it, I was certain it was the end and I did see that everything is God, that nothing ever happened except God, the raging sea, the poor groomus lonesome boat sailing beyond every horizon with big long tortured body and with no arbitrary conception of any awakened worlds or any myriads of angel flower bearing Devas honoring the place where the Diamond was studied, pitching like a bottle in that howling void, but soon enough the fairy hills and honey thighs of the sweethearts of Africa, the dogs, cats, chickens, Berbers, fish heads and curlylock singing keeners of the sea with its Mary star and the white house lighthouse mysterioso supine—“What was that storm anyway?” I manage to ask by means of signs and pig English of my blond cabinboy (go up on mast be blond Pip) and he says to me only “BOORAPOOSH! BOORAPOOSHE!” with pig poosh of his lips, which later from English-speaking passenger I learn means only “North Wind,” the name given for North Wind in the Adriatic.—

  Only passenger on the ship beside myself is a middleaged ugly woman with glasses a Yugoslavian iron curtain Russian spy for sure sailed with me so she could study my passport in secret in the captain’s cabin at night and then forge it and then finally I never gets to Tangier but am hid belowsides and taken to Yugoslavia forever nobody hears from me ever again and the only thing I dont suspect the crew of the Red ship (with her Red Star of the blood of the Russias on the stack) is of starting the tempest that almost done us in and folded us over the olive of the sea, that was how bad it was in fact then I began to have reverse paranoiac reveries that they themselves were holding conclaves in the sea sway lantern foc’sle saying “That capitalist scum American on board is a Jonah, the storm has come because of him, throw him over” so I lie there on my bunk rolling violently from side to side dreaming of how it will be with me thrun in that ocean out there (with her 80 mile an hour sprays coming off the top of waves high enough to swamp the Bank of America) how the whale if it can get to me before I drown upsidedown will indeed swallow me and leave me in its groomus dick interior to go salt me off its tip tongue on some (O God amighty) on some cross shore in the last curlylock forbidden unknown sea shore, I’ll be laying on the beach Jonah with my vision of the ribs—in real life tho all it is, the sailors werent particularly worried by the immense seas, to them just another boorapoosh, to them just only what they call “Veoory bod weather” and in the diningroom there I am every evening alone at a long white table cloth with the Russian spy woman, facing her dead center, a Continental seating arrangement that prevents me from relaxing in my chair and staring into space as I eat or wait for the next course, it’s tuna fish and olive oil and olives for breakfast, it’s salted fish for breakfast, what I wouldnt have given for some peanut butter and milkshakes I cant say.— I canna say the Scotch neer invented seas like that to put the mouse scare in the hem haw roll plan—but the pearl of the water, the swiggin whirl, the very glisten-remembered white cap flick in high winds, the Vision of God I had as being all and the same myself, the ship, the others, the dreary kitchen, the dreary slob
kitchen of the sea with her swaying pots in the gray gloom as tho the pots know they’re about to contain fish stew in the serious kitchen below the kitchen of the serious sea, the swaying and clank clank, O that old ship tho with all her long hull which at first in Brooklyn dock I’d secretly thought “My God it is too long,” now is not long enough to stay still in the immense playfulnesses of God, plowing on, plowing on and shuddering all iron—and too after I’d thought “Why do they have to spend a whole day here in gastank majoun town” (in New Jersey, what’s the name, Perth Amboy) with a big black sinister I must say hose bent in over from the gas dock pumping in and pumping in quietly all that whole Sunday, with lowering winter skies all orange flare crazy and nobody on the long empty pier when I go out to walk after the olive oil supper but one guy, my last American, walking by looking at me a little fishy thinking I’m a member of the Red crew, pumping in all day filling those immense fuel tanks of the old Slovenia but once we’re at sea in that God storm I’m so glad and groan to think we did spend all day loading fuel, how awful it would have been to run out of fuel in the middle of that storm and just bob there helpless turning this way and that.— To escape the storm on that Wednesday morning for instance the captain simply turned his back to it, he could never take it from the side, only front or back, the roll-in biggies, and when he did make his turn about 8 A M I thought we were going to founder for sure, the whole ship with that unmistakable wrack snap went swiftly to the one side, with elastic bounce you could feel she was coming back the other way all the way, the waves from boora-poosh helped, hanging on to my porthole and looking out (not cold but spray in my face) here we go pitching over again into an upcoming sea rise and I’m looking face to face with a vertical wall of sea, the ship jerks, the keel holds, the long keel underneath that’s now a little fish flapper after in the dock I’d thought “How deep these pier slips have to be hold in those long keels so they wont scrape bottom.”—Over we go, the waves wash onto the deck, my porthole and face is splashed completely, the water spills into my bed, (O my bed the sea) and over again the other way, then a steady as she goes as the captain gets the Slovenia around with her back to the storm and we flee south.— Soon enough I thought we’d be deep with inward stare in an endless womb bliss, drowned—in the grinning sea that restores impossibly.— O snowy arms of God, I saw His arms there on the side of the Jacob’s Ladder place where, if we had to disembark and go over (as tho lifeboats would do anything but crash like splinter against the shipside in that madness) the white personal Face of God telling me “Ti Jean, dont worry, if I take you today, and all the other poor devils on this tub, it’s because nothing ever happened except Me, everything is Me—” or as Lankavatara Scripture says, “There’s nothing in the world but Mind itself” (“There’s nothing in the world but the Golden Eternity of God’s mind,” I say)—I saw the words EVERYTHING IS GOD, NOTHING EVER HAPPENED EXCEPT GOD writ in milk on that sea dip—bless you, an endless train into an endless graveyard is all this life is, but it was never anything but God, nothing else but that—so the higher the monstrous sinker comes fooling and calling me down names the more I shall joy old Rembrandt with my bear cup and wrassle all the Tolstoy kidders in this side of fingertwick, pluck as you will, and Afric we’ll reach, and did reach anyway, and if I learned a lesson it was lesson in WHITE—radiate all you will sweet darkness and bring ghosts and angels and so we’ll put-put right along to the tree shore, the rocky shore, the final swan salt, O Ezekiel for came that afternoon so sweet and calm and Mediterranean-like when we began to see land, twasnt till I saw the keen little grin on the captain’s face as he gazed through his binoculars I really believed it, but finally I could see it myself, Africa, I could see the cuts in the mountains, the dry arroyo rills before I could see the mountains themselves and finally did see them, pale green gold, not knowing till about 5 they were really the mountains of Spain, old Hercules was somewhere up there ahead holding up the world on his shoulders thus the hush and glassy silence of these entry waters to Hesperid.— Sweet Mary star ahead, and all the rest, and further on too I could see Paris, my big kleig light vision Paris where I’d go get off a train at outside town Peuples du Pais, and walk 5 miles deeper and deeper as in a dream into the city of Paris itself arriving finally at some golden center of it I envisioned then, which was silly, as it turned out, as tho Paris had a center.— Faint little white dots at the foot of the long green Africa mountain and yessiree that was the sleepy little Arab city of Tangier waiting for me to explore it that night so I go down into my stateroom and keep checking my rucksack to see it’s well packed and ready for me to swing down the gangplank with and get my passport stamped with Arabic figures “Oieieh eiieh ekkei.”—Meanwhile a lot of trade going by, boats, several beat Spanish freighters you couldnt believe so beat, bleak, small, that have to face boorapooshes with nothing but half our length and half our girth and over there the long stretches of sand on the shore of Spain indicative of dryer Cadizes that I had dreamed yet I still insisted on dreaming of the Spanish cape, the Spanish star, the Spanish gutter song.— And finally one amazing little Moroccan fishingboat putting out to sea with a small crew of about five, in sloppy Catch-Mohammed pants some of them (balloony pantaloons they wear in case they give birth to Mohammed) and some with red fezzes but red fezzes like you never thought they’d be real fezzes with wow grease and creases and dust on them, real red fezzes of real life in real Africa the wind blowing and the little fishing sloop with its incredible high poop made of Lebanon wood—putting out to the curlylock song of the sea, the stars all night, the nets, the twang of Ramadan …