Reading Dharma Bums on the Road

“Desolation Angel and Ross Lake” photograph by Jim Henterly

In the early days of Covid, fourteen friends from across the country decided to reach out to each other. We had graduated in 1972 from Walsh Jesuit High School, an all-boys school (at that time) located ten miles north of Akron, Ohio. Although I’d stayed in touch with a few of those guys, I hadn’t seen most of them since our twentieth reunion. We met via Zoom, and then continued our conversation in long email chains that were remarkable for the shared camaraderie and the synchronicity of our moral values, political views, and cultural opinions.

Recently, we decided to read (or re-read) and discuss Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. This all started with a post on one of those email chains. Mike Owen[1] shared a photo of Kerouac and Philip Whalen in May 1956, at Gary Snyder’s going-away-to-Japan party, just before Kerouac headed off for a stint as the fire lookout on Desolation Peak. It got us talking about what many of us agreed was our favorite Kerouac novel. Eventually Jim Henterly, back home for a few days from his post as the Desolation Peak fire lookout, joined the conversation with stories and photos from his lonely sentry post in the Northern Cascades of Washington. Ten of us agreed to read the book and post our comments on a schedule that would allow for discussion.  

Week One

Cile and I listen to the first eight chapters[2] while driving south from Iowa City through early morning rain cornfields to St. Louis and then east through southern Illinois and across the Ohio River on a narrow two-lane, iron-grate-deck, steel-truss bridge into Paducah, and on eastward to a state park on Kentucky Lake, a reservoir formed in 1944 by damming the Tennessee River.[3] We would share a cottage with my daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons, while four other families in the Duer clan stayed nearby – an informal family gathering.

How does one establish time, place, tone, and style in travel writing? Kerouac does it with this great opening sentence: “Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara.”

I first read The Dharma Bums in the summer of 1975 while hitchhiking around the western half of the country, including my first trip to the Pacific Northwest – west to Seattle, spending a week with Margi, who had given me a ride from the arid grasslands of eastern Washington to the coast, and down I-5 to stay with Pammie, a friend of my frequent traveling companion Jim Prchlik, just south of Eugene, and then on to San Francisco to meet up with Michael, a classmate from high school. If I ever needed guidelines or inspiration for hitchhiking, it was all there in those pages.

Some parts of the novel function as cultural history. In Chapter 2, Kerouac describes the Gallery Six reading, which took place in October 1955 in San Francisco, the setting of Allen Ginsberg’s (Alvah Goldbook in the novel) inaugural performance of his poem “Howl.” For anyone familiar with American poetry, it’s not hard to figure out Kerouac’s key to the poets: Reinhold Cacoethes is Kenneth Rexroth, Ike O’Shay is Michael McClure, Francis DiPavia is Philip Lamantia, Warren Coughlin is Philip Whalen, and Japhy Ryder is Gary Snyder. Kerouac didn’t read, but participated in his own way by “sitting on the right side of the stage giving out little wows and yesses of approval and even whole sentences of comment with nobody’s invitation but in the general gaiety nobody’s disapproval either.”

I remember how moved and inspired I was fifty years ago by Kerouac’s portrait of Gary Snyder. In Chapter 8, he writes, “In the way he did things, hiking, he reminded me of Mike my boyhood chum who also loved to lead the way, real grave like Buck Jones, eyes to the distant horizons, like Natty Bumppo, cautioning me about snapping twigs or ‘It’s too deep here, let’s go down the creek a ways to ford it.’” A true Northwest Wobbly logger and backpacking Zen Buddhist poet-scholar hero. I was smitten. And still am.

I think The Dharma Bums has survived better than Kerouac’s other novels because his focus on seeking the enlightenment and compassion of Buddhism somewhat softens his depictions of women, whom he too often objectified. I’m going to leave it there so I can find a place where Cile and I and my grandsons can jump in the lake.

Week Two

It was a sweet couple of days, hanging out with not only my daughter Emma’s family but some of my siblings and their spouses and children. A different family each night hosted everyone for dinner at their cottage. We celebrated the recent marriage of Emma and Lindale and, miraculously, avoided the pitfall that usually happens at our gatherings, where we all revert to the worst version of ourselves as children. On Sunday, Cile caught a ride back to Iowa City with my niece and nephew Grace and Ryan. I followed Emma’s family as they drove Big Ruby down to Nashville, and we met up at an airbnb conveniently located within walking distance of the Nashville Farmers’ Market. This morning we’re getting ready to head toward Lynchburg, where I’ll lend a hand as Emma and Lindale consolidate their two households.

A Hot July Morning in Nashville

The sun is beating down unmercifully on Jackson Street, a few blocks from the State Capitol. I’m lugging a cooler from the airbnb to my car, getting ready to head east across Tennessee.

An older Black man sitting on his front stoop across the street calls out to me, “Hey brother, you got a couple extra beers there?” 

“Uh, sure. You need two?”

“Yeah, one for me and one for my buddy. He’s still asleep.”

I put the cooler in the back of the car, open it up, and reach in for two Busch Light Limes left from the six-pack my nephew brought to last night’s party, which I would drink only if there was nothing else. 

As I walk over to his house and up his front steps, the two ice-old cans in my left hand, he makes a point of letting me know he’s a veteran.

I shake his hand and set the cans of beer on a crate beside him, saying somewhat apologetically, “I hope these’ll do.”

He gives me a big smile that reveals how many teeth he has left. “Son, you’ve just made my day.”

And he’s just made mine.

I listen to the next seven chapters while driving from Nashville east through Tennessee and northeast into Virginia. Chapter 9 opens with an idyllic passage of Snyder and Kerouac hiking up Matterhorn in the Sierra Nevada – “We went on, and I was immensely pleased with the way the trail had a kind of immortal look to it, in the early afternoon now, the way the side of the grassy hill seemed to be clouded with ancient gold dust and the bugs flipped over rocks and the wind sighed in shimmering dances over the hot rocks, and the way the trail would suddenly come into a cool shady part with big trees overhead, and here the light deeper.” 

If Kerouac ain’t imitating or channeling Mark Twain here, well, I’m a monkey’s uncle. Read the chapters of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn[4] of Huck and Jim floating down the river on their raft before their journey got complicated by the Duke and the King.[5] Twain’s Mississippi River becomes Kerouac’s Matterhorn Trail.

Because the novel is autobiographical,[6] I respect that Kerouac, in Chapter 11, is willing to portray himself approaching the summit as weak, lacking in fortitude – “‘This is too high!’ I yelled to Japhy in a panic. He didn’t hear me. I raced a few more feet up and fell exhausted on my belly, slipping back just a little. ‘This is too high!’ I yelled. I was really scared. Supposing I’d start to slip back for good, these screes might start sliding any time anyway. That damn mountain goat Japhy … ‘How can I keep up with a maniac like that?’”

He contrasts his own irresolution with Snyder’s determination and success – “Suddenly I heard a beautiful broken yodel of a strange musical and mystical intensity in the wind, and looked up, and it was Japhy standing on top of Matterhorn peak letting out his triumphant mountain-conquering Buddha Mountain Smashing song of joy. It was beautiful… I had to hand it to him, the guts, the endurance, the sweat, and now the crazy human singing: whipped cream on top of ice cream.”

My attention and interest flag during the party at Ginsberg’s Berkeley cottage in Chapter 13. But I do wonder (am in wonder at) how Kerouac was able to recreate so much of the drunken rapid-fire improv-jazz-and-Zen-lunatic poetry being tossed around amongst Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, and Kerouac himself that night. How much of this scene was based on notes he took at the time?[7]

Driving north into Virginia on I-81, the Blue Ridge east of me, the easternmost ridge of the Appalachians to the west, I listen to the last two chapters. After the scene of Snyder helping outfit the narrator for his backpacking adventures, I reflect on how the novel informed and inspired me. He mentions a “beautiful nylon poncho with hood, which you put over you and even over your rucksack (making a huge hunchbacked monk) and which completely protects you from the rain. It can also be made into a pup tent, and can also be used as your sleeping mat under a sleeping bag.” In my trips to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize and to Europe, I carried two Army-issue ponchos (one in great shape, one threadbare) that could be snapped together, the grommets along their edges allowing me to stake down and string up a one-person tent.

The story in Chapter 15 of Rosie Buchanan’s tragic suicide dive from the roof of her apartment building throws some cold water on all the high-minded talk of satori, nirvana, bodhisattvas, Hinayana compassion, and the Four Noble Truths, the third of which is “The suppression of suffering can be achieved.” Neither Kerouac nor Cody (Neal Cassady) was able to listen to or sympathize with Rosie, whose paranoid fears of the police and Russia were not all that crazy, given that the events leading up to the end of her life took place within a year of the downfall of Joe McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities and its Communist witch hunts and blacklisting.

Week Three

After spending a week in Lynchburg, helping my daughter and her husband sort out their households, spending time with my grandsons, getting to know the city a little, I head home, listening to the next seven chapters as I do so. The first leg of the trip is a delight, following the James River and then the Maury River on a steep winding road through the Blue Ridge to Lexington, on west through the Appalachians into West Virginia to Charleston, eventually getting as far as Mason, Ohio, home of Kings Island amusement park. As Kerouac’s story of traveling from San Francisco to Rocky Mount to spend Christmas with his mother unfolds, I realize our paths are crisscrossing. He hitchhiked, hopped trains, or if all else failed, traveled by bus: “By Tuesday dawn he [the semi driver Beaudry] let me off in downtown Springfield Ohio in a deep cold wave and we said goodbye just a little sadly…. Then I bought a bus ticket to Rocky Mount, as it was impossible to hitchhike from Ohio to North Carolina in all that winter mountain country through the Blue Ridge.”

Kerouac’s trip east becomes a test of his Buddhist peace and clarity. He describes being trapped in “the industrial jungle of L.A. in mad sick sniffling smog night.” This was always a hitchhiker’s nightmare: being unable to find a quiet safe place to lay down one’s rucksack and sleeping bag for the night. “Cops kept looking at me suspiciously with that big bag on my back. Everything was far away from the easy purity of being with Japhy Ryder in that high rock camp under peacefully singing stars.” I still feel a twinge of uneasiness when I see a sign on gas station convenience store doors: No Shoes No Shirt No Service.[8]

The next day, driving through Indiana, I tune in to a New Yorker Critics at Large podcast discussion of the movie Eddington. One of the critics mentions a Philip Roth essay, “Writing American Fiction,” published in Commentary magazine in 1961. The novelist was addressing a challenge he (and others) faced: “The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”

Although Roth was primarily referring to the difficulty of writing fiction at a time when reality seemed stranger than the most fantastic tale and impossible to make sense of (a fact that applies even more so in 2025), I can see how this relates to the Beat quest of The Dharma Bums, as well as my own feelings of alienation from American culture and society. In the winter months of early 1975, I camped out in the basement of my parents’ home in suburban Des Moines and worked three jobs to save enough money to go back to school that fall. Wandering those suburban streets on my rare nights off, past houses darkened except for the flickering blue light of a TV, I felt like a “stranger in a strange land.”[9]

As Snyder explains in Chapter 5, “You know when I was a little kid in Oregon I didn’t feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but when I discovered Buddhism and all I suddenly felt that I had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of faults and sins in that lifetime … my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.”

Faced with a stupefying and sickening American reality, Kerouac, Snyder, and other Beats were seeking another reality. So they escaped to Mexico, they escaped to Japan, they escaped to Tangier, they escaped to the wilderness, they studied Zen Buddhism, they took mind-altering drugs. This was at least one reason for my own wandering during the 1970s, when I “walked off to look for America.” I was part of that “rucksack revolution,” looking for myself, seeking a way to find or build an alternative America.

At his mother’s home in North Carolina, Kerouac retreats daily to the piney woods, fashioning a space where he can meditate – Twin Tree Grove beside Buddha Creek. The local guys at the country store ask, “What you do in those woods?” His mother and sister complain, “You and your Buddha, why don’t you stick to the religion you were born with?” How could he explain his magical visions: “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form and we’re here forever in one form or another which is empty…. I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.” And what Kerouac wants to do is escape to the Desolation Peak fire lookout.

Footnotes:
[1] Among his many other ventures, Mike owns a bookstore in Cuyahoga Falls, Trust Books, which operates per the farmstand model. A sign instructs shoppers to “put your money in the safe.”

[2] An audiobook read by Tom Parker, which is well done, although others are listening to Ethan Hawke’s version, which they say is excellent.

[3] This was a project of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal electric utility created by Congress in 1933 as part of FDR’s New Deal.

[4] If you can bear to see the N-word over 200 times in print.

[5] From Chapter 12: “The second night we run between seven and eight hours, with a current that was making over four mile an hour. We catched fish, and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off the sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed, only a little kind of low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.”

[6] These days we might call it autofiction.

[7] Kerouac’s memory was so sharp that his friends bestowed on him the nickname Memory Babe.

[8] Some signs used to include “No Backpacks.”

[9] Hear echoes of both Robert Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel and Leon Russell’s 1971 song: “Well, I don’t exactly know what’s goin’ on in the world today/ I don’t know what there is to say about the way the people are treating each other, not like brothers/… Stop the money chase, lay back, relax and get back on the human track.”