Reading Dharma Bums on the Road, Part 2

Desolation Office photograph by Jim Henterly

Week Four

As Cile and I get ready for a five-day writing-biking-swimming retreat at Gills Rock on the northern tip of Door County, Wisconsin, I’m thinking about the seven chapters I’ve just read (Chapters 23-29). I was captivated by Kerouac’s description in Chapter 23 of hopping trains from L.A. to San Francisco: “The Ghost came right on schedule and I got on a flatcar, under a truck, spread out my bag, stuck my shoes under my balled coat for a pillow, and relaxed and sighed. Zoom, we were gone. And now I know why the bums call it the Midnight Ghost, because, exhausted, against all better judgement, I fell fast asleep.”

Kerouac had worked as a brakeman for the Union Pacific, so he knew which trains to hop and how to avoid the railroad detectives. In all my days on the road, I tried hopping just one train. I was hitching outside of Little Rock on a hot July morning in 1975 when I saw a freight train slowly pulling out, headed north. I thought I had a good chance, but by the time I reached the tracks, the train had picked up speed. I ran alongside, hoping to toss my pack into an open boxcar and jump in after it, but running on gravel that sloped away from the tracks for drainage wasn’t easy. After tripping and falling, I headed back to the highway, licking my wounds.

In the last third of the novel, Kerouac’s straightforward retelling of the events of 1956 exposes some of his internal conflicts. We follow him to Sean Monahan’s proto-hippie spread outside Corte Madera, in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, where he reunites with Gary Snyder as Snyder is about to set off for Japan to study Zen Buddhism and Kerouac is about to set off for Desolation Peak to work as a fire lookout.

Kerouac’s interactions with women are deeply flawed. By the time he wrote this novel, he’d been married twice – to Edie Parker and Joan Haverty. Neither marriage lasted more than eight months; neither woman is mentioned in the novel. The few women who do appear play secondary and clichéd roles. Sean’s wife, Christine, is “a beautiful young honey-haired girl, her hair falling way down over her shoulders, who wandered around the house and yard barefooted hanging up wash and baking her own brown bread and cookies.” Snyder’s girl Polly Whitmore is “a beautiful brunette with a Spanish hairdo and dark eyes, a regular raving beauty actually.” Snyder’s “favorite doll Psyche” is “real cute in jeans and a little tender little body and face.” All the women are described primarily by their physical appearances, their personalities limited to the gender stereotypes of saintly madonna or sensuous temptress.

In one scene in Chapter 25, “three well-stacked nymphs” dance naked in front of Kerouac as he assures his Buddhist friend Bud Diefendorf, “we were the old monks who weren’t interested in sex any more.” But later in that paragraph he admits, “Every now and then Bud and I looked at all that flesh and licked our lips in secret.” In contrast to Kerouac’s repressed sexuality,[1] Snyder states in Chapter 5, “I distrust … any kind of philosophy or social system that puts down sex,” as he strips naked with one of his girlfriends and they proceed to demonstrate the Tantric Buddhist practice of yab-yum, the natural and uninhibited union of male and female.

Cile and I discuss the novel. Not surprisingly, she too feels Kerouac’s attitude toward women is troubling. However, she appreciates that the book portrays a loving and supportive brotherhood of writers. We agree there are few, if any, instances of these men being hyper-competitive, whether in their writing, philosophizing, hiking, or loving – no macho attempts to outprowess each other, except in fun.

In Chapter 27, Snyder pleads with Kerouac about his drinking. “How do you expect to become a good bhikku or even a Bodhisattva Mahasattva always getting drunk like that?… How can you understand your own mind essence with your head all muddled and your teeth all stained and your belly all sick?” A page later, Kerouac states that Snyder “was really sad about it, and worried about me, but I just went on drinking.” Snyder was more spot-on than he might have hoped. Kerouac never did possess the will to become a dedicated practitioner of Buddhism, and died thirteen years later of internal hemorrhaging caused by cirrhosis of the liver.

One of the more beautiful sections of the novel takes place in Chapter 29, when Snyder and Kerouac take off hiking around Mount Tamalpais. Rebecca Solnit writes about it in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking:

In 1956, just before he left for Japan, Snyder led Jack Kerouac on an overnight hike to the sea and back across Mount Tamalpais, a 2,571-foot peak on the other side of the Golden Gate from San Francisco. On that walk, Snyder told his footsore companion, “The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.” The scholar David Robertson comments, “This sentence states what is perhaps not only the central idea of Gary Snyder’s poetry and prose, but the fixed point around which rotate the thought and practice of many who take to trails. If one habit beats in the ritual heart of the lives and their literature, surely this is it: the practice of ‘mattering,’ of repeatedly accessing the thing that is at one and the same time both spirit and matter.”

On their hike, Kerouac has a metaphorically prescient dream of Snyder as a ragged Chinese hobo wandering down from the wilderness into a market, “the Han Shan ghost of the Orient mountains.” I don’t know if 95-year-old Snyder still wanders around the Sierra Nevada foothills of his homestead in Northern California. I like to think he does.

Stratus Seas photography by Jim Henterly

Week Five

As Cile and I listen to these last five chapters (30-34), we’re driving toward Door County, northeast on Iowa Highway 1 and US Highway 151 through farmed prairie. As we approach Dubuque and the Mississippi River, the land transitions from tallgrass prairie to what is known as the Driftless Region. Because it was never covered by ice during the last ice age, the area lacks characteristic glacial deposits, or drift. Its landscape is characterized by steep hills, forested ridges, and deeply carved river valleys.

Coasting down into the Mississippi Valley and pulling up to a stoplight in downtown Dubuque, we hear about Kerouac’s last ride to the meeting site for his lookout assignment: “I got my final ride from a mad drunk fastswerving dark long-sideburned guitar-playing Skagit Valley wrangler who came to a dusty flying stop at the Marblemount Ranger Station and had me home.” Cile and I look at each other and laugh. High on the brick wall of one of the old mill factories in Dubuque we can barely make out the faded lettering:

“BULL” DURHAM – The Old Reliable – Standard of the World.

And then we cross the Mississippi into Wisconsin and its lovely hillside dairy farms.

Making dinner that evening in the communal kitchen at Harbor Light Inn – spaghetti with my homemade pesto, a big garden salad from Cile’s plot at Prairie Hill – I’m reflecting on the role that food plays in the novel. When one lives a vagabond life – whether hitchhiking, backpacking, camping, or mountain climbing – one never takes food for granted. Access to food becomes essential, the means to sustenance and survival. In Chapter 31, Kerouac writes, “I recalled with a twinge of sadness how Japhy was always so dead serious about food, and I wished the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody’s food money to blow their heads off anyway.”

I recall the indelible image of Snyder at the end of Chapter 24 “standing in the doorway of the shack with a big frying pan in his hand banging on it” and reciting Buddhist chants to let Kerouac know a stack of buckwheat pancakes is waiting for him. Was this the inspiration for my family tradition of making pancakes for the kids on Saturday morning from my special mix of flours and corn meal?[2] That tradition has been carried on to the next generation. Whenever I visit my grandsons, they always ask for “Poppy pancakes.”

In Chapter 30, Snyder makes dinner for Kerouac after they’ve returned from their hike around Mount Tamalpais: “He brought me my supper and we sat crosslegged and chomped away as on so many nights before: just the wind furying in the ocean of trees and our teeth going chomp chomp over good simple mournful bhikku food.” In another scene Snyder promises Kerouac, “Tomorrow morning I’ll make you another nice breakfast, slumgullion,” which for Snyder was eggs and potatoes scrambled together in a frying pan, a logger’s breakfast. This is simple food, democratic food, comfort food. Reading this passage brings back memories of Jim Prchlik making slumgullion for me in the farmhouse on the edge of Ann Arbor he shared with friends in 1975. Did he take the term from this novel?

Alpenglow on Castle Peak photograph by Jim Henterly

In those last three chapters, which describe Kerouac’s two months as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, he seems to be experiencing some kind of vision. Chapter 33’s first paragraph starts off: “Lo, in the morning I woke up and it was beautiful blue sunshine sky and I went out in my alpine yard and there it was, everything Japhy said it was, hundreds of miles of pure snow-covered rocks and virgin lakes and high timber, and below, instead of the world, I saw a sea of marshmallow clouds flat as a roof and extending miles and miles in every direction.” And a page later, that paragraph ends with “And suddenly I realized I was truly alone and had nothing to do but feed myself and rest and amuse myself, and nobody could criticize. The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one asked them to grow, or me to grow.” He is entranced by the natural beauty of the scene, yes, but also relieved to be free from public scrutiny – nobody to criticize him or ask him to grow up.

One can interpret Desolation Peak as Kerouac’s Walden Pond. When he says, “I was feeling happier than in years and years, since childhood, I felt deliberate and glad and solitary,” we hear echoes of Thoreau’s “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” In contrast to Kerouac’s time at Desolation Peak, Thoreau lived two years and two months at the cabin he built in the woods beside Walden Pond, although his experience was far less reclusive. In the week I spent in Concord in 2019, studying Thoreau and Transcendentalism as part of a NEH Landmarks Workshop for K-12 teachers, I’d get up early to run the 3-mile route from Concord Inn to Walden Pond and back, sometimes stopping for a quick swim in that deep cold pond.

In light of the exquisite detail of Thoreau’s Walden, Kerouac’s depiction of his Desolation experience feels almost generic. There are moments of despair and loneliness: “I was alone on Desolation Peak for all I knew for eternity.” Moments of uplift: “In the late day peaks I saw the hope. Japhy had been right.” Moments of grappling with doubt: “O gnashing teeth of earth, where would it all lead to but some sweet golden eternity, to prove that we’ve all been wrong.” Moments of self-realization: “My oil lamp burned in infinity.” Moments of optimistic insight: “The vision of the freedom of eternity was mine forever.” But the more he contends with the concept of eternity, the more he ignores the “real matter” that is the basis for Snyder’s spirituality.

As some of these quotes indicate, Kerouac is continuing his conversations with Snyder in absentia. Kerouac recalls his advice and guidance, his finger pointing the way.[3] Even when he’s not physically present, Snyder stands at the center of this novel. This is best summed up in Kerouac’s comment near the end of their Mount Tamalpais hike: “What hope, what human energy, what truly American optimism was packed in that neat little frame of his! There he was clomping along in front of me on the trail and shouting back ‘Try the meditation of the trail.’”

At Schoolhouse Beach, Washington Island, Door County

After a day of writing and reading in our spacious room at the inn, Cile and I get ready to bike over to Newport State Park for a swim in Lake Michigan. It’s an unseasonably cool August day, but the swim will refresh us. Reading this novel a second time, fifty years later, my reactions are decidedly more mixed. I’m still enthralled by the propulsive energy of the hiking and hitchhiking sections, where Kerouac’s prose becomes most poetic, but it’s the portrait of Gary Snyder as Japhy Ryder that holds my attention. I may no longer be as ready to join his “rucksack revolution” as I was in my youth, but his story continues to inspire me.

Three years after first reading Dharma Bums, I took Sherman Paul’s American Criticism and Culture class at the University of Iowa.[4] For my final project, I wrote a paper on Snyder’s then recent book of poetry and essays, Turtle Mountain, and included this poem as a kind of epigraph:

During Research on Gary Snyder

painful labors

trying to spell

the fullness of his vision

with the dryness of words

i

walk away from that

through a cemetery

to the woods

(this is the way he wants it to be)

filling my pockets

with hickory nuts

watching nuthatches

searching otherwise-

bare trees for insects

tasting wild apples

two great cottonwoods

forking skyward

i will let this speak for him

But I want to give Snyder the final word. His haiku “On Climbing the Sierra Matterhorn Again After Thirty-One Years” recalls that first climb with Kerouac in 1955:

Range after range of mountains

Year after year after year.

I am still in love.

Footnotes:

[1] For all his interest in Buddhism, Kerouac was raised Catholic by devoutly religious French-Canadian parents. I too was raised Catholic, and it took time for me to unlearn such misguided teachings as the “sin” of masturbation.

[2] When the kids got older, as they smelled the pancakes cooking on the griddle, they’d playfully sing John Lurie’s song “Pancakes” from his The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits album.

[3] Because Kerouac’s relationship to Snyder is that of student to mentor, it’s surprising to realize that at that time, Kerouac was 34 years old and Snyder only 26.

[4] Educated at Harvard and one of the most distinguished professors in the UI English Department, Paul wrote and edited over twenty books, nearly all exploring an Emersonian tradition he called “the green American tradition.”