On the Road: Des Moines, Iowa

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote:  Originally posted on Blogger on June 17, 2006

Unfolding the Map

In this post I offer reflections of motel stays and loss of self On the Road. As usual, click on the image to see the progress of Sal Paradise's journey across the country as we move place by place through the book.

Book Quote

"Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to the Y to get a room; they didn't have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks - and there're a lot of them in Des Moines - and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved in the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Des Moines

I don't really know much about Des Moines, other than that it is the state capitol of Iowa and that nearby Ames is the home of Iowa State University, but I like this passage because of how Sal describes his room. In my 20s, I did a lot of traveling by car, and I stayed in a lot of cheap motel rooms because I didn't have a lot of money for extra amenities. I can't say that I've ever stayed in someplace where filthy graffiti is written on the wall next to the bed, but you can see how for Jack Kerouac and perhaps Sal Paradise, that's a mark of distinction. Really, one doesn't care what the room looks like, if you're tired enough. As long as the bed is clean, you are doing fine.

One thing that always happened to me when I stayed in motel rooms is that I would always oversleep -- I would plan to leave the next day around 9 or 10, and I'd go to sleep. The next morning, I invariably would awake to the sound of the maid, and find that it was easily 12 or 1 o'clock and that they were wondering if I was dead or something. Part of the problem is that instead of the "beat yellow windowshades," most motels would have those heavy dark curtains that kept the room dark even on the brightest sunny days. When you combine that with the old air conditioning units and heaters which made a lot of noise, and the fact that I was really tired from driving about 14 hours, it was a perfect combination to keep me sleeping.

The other thing that Sal realizes, after he sleeps, is that he doesn't really know who he was. As he describes it:

"I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and rally didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon."

On the Road: Chapter 3

I think we've all had that experience where we don't know who we are. For me, it seems to be related with age. I wake up, and realize that I'm now 42. My 20s AND my 30s are behind me, and I'm still trying to figure out what I am supposed to be and do in this life. Sometimes I know who I am, whether it's flattering or not, and sometimes I don't. And unlike Sal, I can't say that I'm not scared sometimes.

If you want to know more about Des Moines and the State of Iowa

City of Des Moines
Internet Tour of the Iowa State Capitol
Iowa State University (in Ames)
Netstate: Iowa
Official State of Iowa website
Wikipedia: Des Moines

Next stop: Adel, Iowa

On the Road: Iowa City, Iowa

Click on Thumbnail for Map

Note:  First published on Blogger on June 17, 2006

Unfolding the Map

This post will be a reflection on the US highways. As always, click the image to see the updated map of Sal's journey.

Book Quote

"Here the big trucks roared, wham, and inside two minutes one of them cranked to a stop for me....And what a driver - a great big tough truckdriver with popping eyes and a hoarse raspy voice who just slammed and kicked at everything and got his rig under way and paid hardly any attention to me...And he balled that thing clear to Iowa City....Just as we rolled into Iowa City he saw another truck coming behind us, and because he had to turn off at Iowa City he blinked his tail lights at the other guy and slowed down for me to jump out...."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Iowa City, Iowa

Sal doesn't really stop in Iowa City. The truck slows down, he gets off, gets on another truck, and heads toward Des Moines. It's too bad he didn't stop, because he would have seen a quiet, pleasant university town. My wife's parents, her father just returned from duty in the Navy during World War II, would have been moving into a basement apartment near the downtown. A lot of returning GIs would have been wandering around, taking classes at the university on the GI bill.

But Sal moves on, heading down Route 6 west. Route 6, which he mentions earlier in the book when he's first planning this adventure, at one time was the longest federally funded highway in the U.S. It was even longer than the famed Route 66, which as the song says "...winds from Chicago to L.A." It was shortened slightly later, so that instead of going from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it now stops short of the Pacific at Bishop, California, but it still is the longest continuous highway in the U.S.

Today, many of us have grown up in the era of interstates. The interstate system came about in the 1950s in a wave of highway building meant originally as a strategic and efficient way to move supplies and troops around the U.S. in case we ever faced an attack on our own soil. By bypassing the downtowns, it also made commerce and pleasure travel more efficient as well.

However, had Sal Paradise been making his trip in 2006 rather than in 1947, he would have found travel much different. Sal is often dropped off in downtowns. Every route he takes takes him through the hearts of towns and cities. And because very few business chains existed at the time, each town is a unique experience, with its own culture, shops, and cuisine on display. This stands in stark contrast to today, when we can simply zip past each town on the highway, and stop for the same McDonald's Big Mac, fries and a Coke regardless of whether we are in Pennsylvania or Utah.

I have always been somewhat fascinated with the US highways. I remember when I lived in Milwaukee and US 41 ran a few blocks away from my home on its way up into northern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I was fascinated when I found out that the same US 41 ends up Miami. I wondered about what kinds of things one would see on US 41 traveling from it's top to its bottom. At one point, I thought that a good basis for a book would be traveling the US highways and documenting what I saw along the way. Later, after reading William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, where he intentionally travels along highways that are marked "blue" in his map and are thus anything but interstates, and documents his experiences in small towns of America, I began to take such highways whenever I felt I had the chance and the time to get off the interstate.

To find the America that Jack and Sal experienced, one must get off the interstates and back onto the US highway system -- the system that existed before the interstates were built. These US highways still, for the most part, penetrate the cities which in turn reveal their dirty laundry -- their ghettos, their backyards, their seedy motels and their less flattering sides -- as much as they reveal the states of their downtowns, whether they be brand new and gleaming or in a state of disrepair. I find that the trip is much more interesting when you come upon a unique town square, or find a restaurant that looks interesting and different. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you might chance on a civic celebration. If you take a US highway, rather than an interstate, you may take longer to get where you are going, but you will still see some semblance of the America as it existed when Jack and Sal were on the road.

If you want to learn more about Iowa City or the U.S. highway system

City of Iowa City
Iowa City/Coralville Online Resource
University of Iowa
Wikipedia: Iowa City

History of the US Highway System
Route 6 Tourist Association
US Highways from US 1 to (US 830)
Wikipedia: The US Numbered Highway System

Next up: Des Moines, IA

On the Road: Davenport, Iowa

Click on the Thumbail to get MapNote:  Originally published on Blogger on June 13, 2006.

Unfolding the Map

Today's blog really hits the heartland as Sal crosses the Mississippi, and I reflect on the big muddy. As always, you are free to click on the image, oh Littourati, to see the updated map!

Book Quote

"My first ride was a dynamite truck with a red flag...Along about three in the afternoon, after an apple pie and ice cream in a roadside stand, a woman stopped for me in a little coupe. ...But she was a middle-aged woman...and wanted somebody to help her drive to Iowa...and, though I'm not much of a driver, drove clear through the rest of Illinois to Davenport, Iowa, via Rock Island. And here for the first time, I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up. Rock Island - railroad tracks, shacks, small downtown section; and over the bridge to Davenport, same kind of town, all smelling of sawdust in the warm midwest sun."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Davenport and the Mississippi

I'm not going to dwell much on Davenport, because I've really never been there so I won't know what I'm talking about. I have, however, seen the Mississippi. I've been lucky enough to see it in five places, and unlucky enough to not have seen it in a sixth.

The first time I saw the Mississippi, I crossed over it in that bus to Wyoming up in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. My recollection is hazy, but I don't remember it as being that big up there, since you are getting close to the headwaters, but as a young child we all knew the name of the Mississippi even if we couldn't spell the damn thing and therefore it was an important moment in my life. My second time seeing the the river was crossing over it by car in La Crosse, Wisconsin as I headed out to a retreat, a gathering, of the volunteer program I was a part of in Milwaukee. I remember a bigger river, with a barge or two tied up along the side, but I also have a vivid recollection of the main sight in La Crosse, the world's largest six pack of beer!

The third time I saw the river was in St. Louis, where the river really gets big and packs a punch because the Missouri River joins it just on the north side of the city. I almost personally experienced its power that time. I was up in the magnificent St. Louis Arch with a friend and had parked my car on a parking lot the literally sloped down into the river. Little did I know it was the beginning of the Mississippi floods. From the top I noticed that a few cars that had been dry before had their tires in the water and people were rushing up to get their cars out. By the time I got out of the arch and down to my car, its tires were in the water and the spaces where those other cars had been were completely submerged!

The fourth time I saw the Mississippi, I was in Quincy, Illinois and I also went across the river to Hannibal, Missouri to see Mark Twain's boyhood hometown. If any writer is synonymous with the Mississippi, it is Mark Twain, who lived on it, worked on it, and set what may be the greatest American novel, Huckleberry Finn, on and around it.

The fifth time I saw the Mississippi was when I lived in New Orleans. There was always something magical about taking the ferry from Algiers back into the downtown. The current was so strong at that huge sweeping curve in the river that the ferry would often labor upstream, allowing us to drift back to the downtown ferry terminal. Occasionally we would have to dodge a big freighter coming through. One night Megan, EB and I watched the biggest ship we had ever seen, towering some 10 stories over us, silently slip by and disappear under and past the Crescent City Connection bridge and on up the river. EB and Megan tried to chase it, but even as silent as it seemed, it was moving faster than they could run.

The sixth time I didn't see the Mississippi was up in the Delta country, where the blues was born. It was always something that we meant to do. We were going to drive up the river to the blues country, to Natchez or some other area. And we never did.

The river is an amazing thing. It has a life of its own, as Mark Twain will tell you, despite the fact that the Army Corps of Engineers and others have tried to tame it. It empties a continent, like a giant artery, pumping life AND waste down it's length and into the Gulf. It has contributed mightily to our culture and music. A legendary story from the Mississippi concerns the great cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, who evidently heard from the shore the amazing trumpet playing of Louis Armstrong on a riverboat in the Mississippi, and decided to take up the trumpet. "The raw body of America itself." Jack Kerouac and Sal describe it well.

For more information on Davenport or the Mississippi

City of Davenport
Downtown Davenport
E-Podunk: Davenport
Wikipedia: Davenport

Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" Online
Mark Twain's Mississippi River 
Songs of the Mississippi River
Wikipedia: Mississippi River

Next up: Iowa City and Des Moines, Iowa

On the Road: Joliet, Illinois

Click on the Thumbnail for the Map

Note:  First published on Blogger on June 13, 2006

Unfolding the Map

In this post, Sal's hitchhiking begins in earnest, and we will look at some reflections it stirs in yours truly. So stick your thumb out and get ready to catch a ride across the plains with Sal Paradise. As usual, click on the image to get the updated map!

Book Quote

"...I took a bus to Joliet, Illinois, went by the Joliet pen, stationed myself just outside town after a walk through its leafy rickety streets behind, and pointed my way."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Joliet, Illinois

After a false start back in New York, Sal finds himself standing on the the side of the road, his thumb pointing the way west. I'm sure that Sal would have preferred to do this long before, and not have spent most of his $50 on a bus ticket to Chicago, but a lot of times one has to ease into something new.

Hitchhiking, of course was a lot more common in 1947 than it is now. I'm not sure about the statistics of hitchhiking, and how much crime occurs to the unwary motorist who decides to pick up a hitchhiker or the unwary hitchhiker who jumps in a car with a psychopath, but the way it was always explained to me, if I ever picked up a hitchhiker I would end up being slowly dismembered somewhere in a dirty warehouse or an out of the way collapsing barn. If I ever hitchhiked, I would meet the same fate. Nobody would ever find me, and my fate would become another horrible story that parents would use to scare their driving-age children out of ever thinking of picking up a hitchhiker, or scare their kids out of ever thinking of hitchhiking.

Okay, so now I've tried to look up hitchhiking and statistics, and I can't find any, and from various posts on various groups, I see that other people haven't found any either.

The sad thing is that these types of stories make me pass people by, without picking them up. It seems to be a double edged sword on both sides of the road. How many drivers might that perfectly nice but somewhat scary looking hairy guy on the side of the road see pass by before he gets a ride? How many hitchhikers might the motorist who has a seat or two for room in the back of his or her car pass by? Who might I meet if I just took the time to pull over and open a friendly door when I see someone by the side of the road? What new relationships might open up as a result. I'll never know because I'm sure (thanks society!) that the ONE time I do I will pick up a psycho and I'll end up as cat food somewhere.

But in 1947, crime didn't seem to be a problem. Today, hitchhiking is much less common, and urban legend and the wider availability of cars probably has a lot to do with it. Back in 1947, I'm sure that a lot of people didn't pick up hitchhikers, but it seems that many more people did than today. You had a lot of people who didn't have cars and didn't have a lot of money to travel, and hit the road with their thumb out, and they got rides! Just follow along with these posts and see how many people picked up Sal, often because they needed an extra driver. They don't even know if he can drive (and because he's from New York and doesn't have to rely on a car that much, he fully admits that he's not a good driver!). They don't know him from Adam, but he gets rides and even some responsibility in the process! And since this trip is based on a trip Jack Kerouac took himself, it is not necessarily all fiction -- Jack himself hitchhiked across the country and neither he nor the motorists he rides with seem to have much of a problem with it.

So where does this leave us? I don't know if I'll pick up a hitchhiker, especially if they are male, seem to need a bath/shave/haircut and I have a feeling that deodorant has never touched their body. I just have too many common misconceptions running around in my brain that are really hard for me to let go. But I would love to see some statistics about hitchhiking and crime. And I would love to know what drives people today to get out on the road and stand for long periods, waiting for that ride even though they know that most motorists will scream on by. I think it is the same motivation that Jack and his alter-ego Sal Paradise both have -- the call of the open road and the new vistas ahead, and the hope that America is still a land that believes in helping out its fellow citizens get to where they need to go.

For more information on Joliet and hitchhiking:

Can Hitchhiking Save the Country? (interview on Alternet)
DigiHitch
Hitchhiking Tips
What Killed Hitchhiking? (on MSNBC.com)

City of Joliet
Joliet Penitentiary
Wikipedia: Joliet

Next up: Mississippi River and Davenport, Iowa

On the Road: Chicago

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote:  First published on Blogger on June 10, 2006.

Unfolding the Map

In this post, Sal gets to Chicago. I'll reflect on Chicago mostly and whatever else comes to mind. As usual, click the image at left to get to the updated map.

Book Quote

"I arrived in Chi quite early in the morning.... I dug Chicago after a good day's sleep. The wind from Lake Michigan, bop at the Loop, long walks around South Halsted and North Clark, and one long walk after midnight into the jungles, where a cruising car followed me as a suspicious character.... The fellows at the Loop blew, but with a tired air, because bop was somewhere between its Charlie Parker ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis. And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same backyard doing something so frantic and rushing about. And for the first time in my life, the following afternoon, I went into the West."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Chicago

The first time I ever saw Chicago, it was from the air. What a lucky way to see it! I had flown into O'Hare from California on the first flight I ever took. I transferred to a small plane run by Air Wisconsin -- I later learned it was commonly called "Scare Wisconsin" -- and the small, 10 passenger or so prop plane took off. We flew up and over the city, straight past the shore and out over Lake Michigan, on our way to Benton Harbor, Michigan. Seeing the city from the air was magnificent. I had never seen a city so huge, with so many buildings that were that tall. Unfortunately, I don't remember picking the Sears Tower out of the bunch, but I do remember the John Hancock building off to the left side, the side I was sitting on.

When I next saw Chicago, it was on the trip from Benton Harbor to Milwaukee, my new home, by car. However, we took the loop around the city, not the freeway through, and it sat on the horizon, a bunch of tall buildings framed only by my imagination. Later that year, I made my first trip to Chicago, but didn't see much of it. I was headed down for a party and had visions of getting lucky with a young lady I thought highly of. Alas, that didn't happen.

When I finally got to know Chicago better, I liked it immensely. New York likes to consider itself a tough and gritty place, and I suppose it is in various sections. Chicago just seemed to be tough and gritty place all around, even within the Loop. It's where the beef of the heartland hits the china of the chic urban landscape. Don't get me wrong -- Chicago has everything you could want in a city. If you want to be a hip highrise dweller in a condo overlooking Lakeshore Drive, you can. And if you want to live on the Southside, eat polish sausage (that's pronounced sassage) and get in evening fights in the bars, you can do that too. But you have to be willing to brave brutal winters, ungodly hot summers, and perpetual highway construction. Those things, and the Chicago Bears, bring everyone together. Chicagoans will bitch about their city but they will defend their Chicago against outsiders at a drop of a hat.

Sal wanders around this landscape, most likely after arriving at Union Station or in that general area, which was probably even more tough and gritty in 1947. He makes mention of bop and jazz, which is interesting because I consider Chicago more of a blues city than a jazz city though it has both. The blues, as in those electric blues that developed out of the influx of all the Delta bluesmen riding the rails into Chicago looking for a place to live and places to play their music.

My sister Pauline's friend (and hopeful "more than that"), Ernest, just moved to Chicago to take a job at the Apple store (he's one of the Apple genius's). I don't know if he'll delve much into the gritty Chicago, but it always lurks there just below the surface. Literally. There is a pub on Lower Wacker Drive, the multilevel street that runs through the heart of Chicago's Loop, called the Billy Goat Tavern. On Lower Wacker, it exists in almost perpetual twilight. The tavern is famous for a couple of reasons. First, it was THE place, and may still be, for Chicago journalists to hang out and rub elbows with the politicians and other glitterati of the Chicago scene. Second, it was the inspiration for John Belushi's repeating sketch on Saturday Night Live, Cheezborger, Cheezborger, No Coke, Pepsi. It is the only place I've ever been that served Schlitz Dark on tap. In fact, before I went there, I didn't even know there was a Schlitz Dark. It is an easy place to spend an hour and find that you've spent six. Perhaps Sal looked into that subsurface Chicago. I'm sure Jack Kerouac did.

If you want to know more about Chicago and the jazz and blues of the times:

Billy Goat Tavern
Bop Jazz
Chicago Loop
City of Chicago.org
Schlitz Dark
Wikipedia: Chicago blues
Wikipedia: Schlitz Beer
Wikipedia: Union Station

Next Stop: Joliet, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa