On the Road: Adel, Iowa

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote:  Originally posted on Blogger on June 23, 2006

Unfolding the Map

I've been a little tardy, Littourati! A couple of crises with some friends and a lot of work this week have kept me from getting out these newest posts. I apologize. Click on the image to see the updated Google map.

Book Quote

"A guy with a kind of toolshack on wheels, a truck full of tools that he drove standing up like a modern milkman, gave me a ride up the long hill, where I immediately got a ride from a farmer and his son heading out for Adel in Iowa. In this town, under a big elm tree near a gas station, I made the acquaintance of another hitchiker, a typical New Yorker, an Irishman who'd been driving a truck for the post office most of his work years and was now headed for a girl in Denver and a new life."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Adel, Iowa

I love the all too tiny description of the guy Sal gets a ride with. I suppose that one complaint I have about the book, which isn't that much of a complaint, is that Sal really doesn't say much about these small-town characters that he meets. I wonder if it is because, despite his stated interest in America, that he really isn't interested in them?

I would be questioning why this guy had such a truck. What are the tools for? Is he a plumber, an electrical worker, an auto mechanic, a farm machinery mechanic? Where is he going and what is he doing? It kind of frustrates me that Sal doesn't ask these types of questions. Of course, that could be just where he's at. Sal is very interested, as we'll see later, in the hard drinkers, the hobos, the people who are interesting and "beat." Perhaps the ordinary does not entice him. However, these little snippets are fascinating to speculate about.

Who of us doesn't know the guy with the toolshack on wheels? I think that it is possible that every town, like Adel, had one of them. Picture the guy as slightly eccentric, maybe with a strange feature, like a missing finger or strange tick at the side of his mouth or one eye just a little crossed or pop-eyed that has a fascinating or disturbing story behind it. I grew up in a small town, and it was not uncommon to see every male who had a pickup truck carrying a number of tools (including a chainsaw). But the guy who built a shack on the bed of his pickup when I was growing up was the guy who lived just outside of society, somewhere in the woods, was probably a hippie growing some weed, and only came into town once a month to stock up on supplies.

Even where I live now, in the city of Albuquerque, there's a guy that I usually see riding his bike past my house. He has wild curly hair and a graying beard, and he usually waves hi at me though he never speaks. But when I see him driving, he is driving one of those "toolshacks on wheels," a painstaking little A-frame built carefully on the bed of his 1970s era pickup. What's his story? Why is he living in the city and not off the grid somewhere?

These are some stories that I think Sal missed in his hurry to get to the coast and in his desire to meet "interesting" characters in his definition. Because ultimately, his friends don't seem to be as interesting to me because they all do the same thing, philosophize and drink and philosophize some more. These little glimpses into the oddities of American life that Sal passes over, as seen in Adel, might have turned out to be as interesting or even more so than he imagined.

For more information about Adel, Iowa

Adel city website
Dallas County, Iowa
Wikipedia: Adel

I SO wanted to find a picture of a toolshack on wheels, but I couldn't. Sorry!

Next up: Stuart, Iowa

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