Kerouac Dreams

The odometer broke, thousands of miles and a lifetime removed from the all-night neon hustle of Times Square and the evergreen Zen of the northern Cascades, the pagan thunderclap poetry of the Big Sur coastline and the redbrick sadness of smokestack Lowell. In his final sighs, Jack Kerouac found himself unmoored from the moonlit amphetamine rambling of his own fables. No more thumbs out hitchhiking in ’49 Hudsons, past apple pie diners and the lonesome shadows of grain farms in the flat Midwestern infinity. To riff on a phrase from an Aquarian band inspired by the Beat Generation avatar: This was the end.