On the Road: Blythe, California

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on October 23, 2008

Unfolding the Map

First, an apology. It has been over a year since I have posted to this blog. In the intervening time, I got my Ph.D. and I am now doing a one-year position at a university somewhere in Texas. But I've always had this at heart and wanted to return. So now, I will finish this. When last we left Sal, he was on a bus heading back home. Here's the updated map - click the thumbnail - and it will only go forward from here until we finish this trip of Sal's.

Book Quote

"...Blythe..."

On the Road, Chapter 14

Blythe, California

That wasn't much of a quote. I'd like to think that Kerouac put Blythe in the book, out of the other small towns he passed through, because of some literary allusion. Perhaps it was because he seemed to blithely leave California after his various adventures there. Perhaps it was because he had a blithe spirit. Perhaps Kerouac just liked the sound of the town, or the look from his bus window. It's hard to know. Given that Sal doesn't have much to say about it, in fact he is just ticking off the places until he arrives home, I really don't have much to say about it either. It doesn't really bring out any kind of feeling in me at all. Perhaps I'm being too blithe about it. I don't know.

If you want to know more about Blythe

Blythe Chamber of Commerce
Blythe Intaglios
City of Blythe
The Desert Independent (Newspaper)
Wikipedia: Blythe

Next up: Salome

On the Road: Indio, California

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on September 25, 2007

Unfolding the Map

We're now zooming on through the night and into the dawn with Sal as he leaves California on his cross country trip back home. Click on the map and you'll see where we are.

Book Quote

"At dawn, my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert -- Indio..."

On the Road, Chapter 14

Indio, California

Obviously, this is just a little place that Sal zooms through as he heads back home. He most likely didn't stop. But one thing that I understand from this book now is that Sal really finds place names fascinating. He mentions this before as he is hitchiking through the towns of California's Central Valley - Manteca, Madera etc - drawn by their exotic Spanish monikers. And now, he mentions Indio, another Spanish word, and he will mention at least a couple other places that stick in his imagination. Kerouac, being a poet, would gravitate to these words -- words that stick out there almost as if you can hang your coat or hat on them.

I know nothing about Indio, but I do know about cross-country bus rides. I may have mentioned it before. I traveled from Milwaukee to Billings, Montana and back via bus in the late 1980s to attend a friend's wedding in Wyoming. The trip was long, with many stops. I was solicited by a guy in a bathroom in Fargo, North Dakota. All of North Dakota and eastern Montana were about the flattest things I had ever seen in my life. Periodically, the smell of weed came from the bathroom at the back of the bus. At one point, a woman got on with her two children...whatever drove them onto the bus had not been good because she was angry and the children were crying and it was something besides the normal mom angry at cranky kids. It was night, and someone shushed the kids, and the mother yelled "Don't you EVER shush my f&^%king kids again!"

The funny thing is, I remember all of the things that happened on the way out to Montana. It was new territory that I had never seen, and I was excited. I remember very little about what happened on the way back. It was long, but suddenly I was old hat to this traveling stuff.

I think maybe this is just in the way of warning. Sal will not describe much about what happens to him on this bus ride. Unlike the trip out to California, his mission here is to get home as soon as possible. The mileage that took chapters to get through on the way out to San Francisco is done in one chapter on the way back. So, we'll try to fill in some blanks, or at least ruminate a bit.

If you want to know more about Indio

City of Indio
Coachella (Huge music festival near Indio)
Desert USA: Indio
Village Profile: Indio
Wikipedia: Indio

Next up: Blythe, California

On the Road: Columbia Studios, Hollywood, California

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on September 23, 2007

Unfolding the Map

Sal is back in Hollywood, but this time he's looking to get out of town. Join the journey by clicking on the map.

Book Quote

"Terry bought my breakfast. I had my canvas bag all packed and ready to go to New York, as soon as I picked up my money in Sabinal. I knew it was waiting there for me by now. I told Terry I was leaving. She had been thinking about it all night and was resigned to it. Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.

"I got out on the highway and hitched a ride at once. It was the fastest, whoopingest ride of my life....We made Sabinal to LA in the amazing time of four hours flat about 250 miles. He dropped me off right in front of Columbia Pictures in Hollywood."

On the Road, Chapter 13

Columbia Studios, Hollywood, California

I was listening to a story on Studio 360, a radio program distributed over the public radio networks, a few days ago. You can access the program here. The show was devoted to the concept of being On the Road, and there was a segment about a discussion/disagreement between people who were just married. I started listening in the middle of the story, so I didn't hear how it started, but it appeared that the husband counted On the Road as one of his favorite books, a book that spoke to him. The segment seemed to have been put together by his wife, who read the book for the first time, and she did not understand what appealed so much to her partner about the book. For her, the book was simply about Sal Paradise careening from place to place, looking for a questionable character (Dean), doing drugs, and displaying questionable attitudes and actions toward women throughout the journey. Not only that, she could not get into the writing -- she was only able to find one instance where the writing sort of moved her. She was on a journey to understand the book so that she could understand why her partner felt so strongly about it.

I must say that on my first reading of the book, I had much similar attitudes toward it. I was underwhelmed by the writing, and I was underwhelmed by the things that were important to Sal. I still wonder about places and people that Sal met that he did not describe to their fullest in his haste to catch up with Dean in Denver, or get to San Francisco. I wanted to know more about those things and people in between (hence me using this book as my first project on Littourati).

However, to me Sal's relationship with Terry was one of the only times in the book where he truly had more than a fleeting relationship with a woman. It feels like he truly fell in love, and that for a moment in time he planned to spend time with her. Jack uses his best writing about women and love and Sal's feelings in the book to describe this relationship. Ultimately, Sal's restlessness, the lure of the road, the less than romantic nature of the life he would have to live, and the need to get back to familiar places on the East Coast overcome what Terry has to offer. She is Mexican, after all. She has lots of family and support, hardscrabble though it may be, where she is. Sal realizes that he is not cut out for, nor is he very interested in, a life of picking cotton or trucking manure around. So he leaves. Terry does not whine or throw things at him (constant themes among the women involved in relationships with his friends). She is emotionless as she walks away. Perhaps she wasn't in love. Perhaps she knows how Sal really is -- within a day or so he'll be making moves on some other woman on a bus. I don't know. But I do know that of all Sal's relationships, this one rings most true for the multi-sided facets of Sal's (and Jack's) nature.

By the way, the woman in the radio story gains a deeper understanding of the book after a professor who teaches the book tells her what he thinks Sal's motivations are. The book may be like my experience of the Three Stooges. Men get them, like them, and laugh. Women just don't find them humorous. Perhaps On the Road is similar.

If you want to know more about Columbia Studios, or more about the relationship that Sal's relationship with Terry was based on

Jack Kerouac and Bea Franco: an excerpt from Jack Kerouac: A Biography by Michael Dittman
Jan Kerouac (Jack's daughter) reading her poem about Jack Kerouac (on Studio 360)
On how Jack's relationship with Bea Franco was emblematic of Beat fascination with Mexican culture

Old Columbia Studios: Sunset and Gower
Wikipedia: Columbia Studios

Next up: Indio, California

On the Road: Selma ("Sabinal"), California

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on September 21, 2007

Unfolding the Map

Sal reaches "Sabinal," which from everything I've read is supposed to represent Selma, California. Hang with Sal, picking cotton, and get ready for the long trip back east. Check out how far we've come by clicking the map.

Book Quote

"Terry had a new idea. We would hitchhike to Sabinal, her hometown, and live in her brother's garage....On the road I made Terry sit down on my bag to make her look like a woman in distress, and right off a truck stopped and we ran for it, all glee-giggles. The man was a good man, his truck was poor. He roared and crawled on up the valley. We got to Sabinal in the wee hours before dawn.

"Her brother's name was Rickey. He had a '38 Chevy....The buddy did the explaining -- his name was Ponzo, that's what everybody called him. He stank. I found out why. His business was selling manure to farmers...

"Nothing was going to happen except for starvation for Terry and me, so in the morning I walked the countryside asking for cotton-picking work....I pictured myself picking at least three hundred pounds a day and took the job....But I knew nothing about picking cotton....Every day I earned approximately a dollar and half. It was just enough to buy groceries in the evening on the bicycle."

On the Road, Chapter 13

Selma, California

I'm not sure why Jack substituted "Sabinal" for Selma, but he's an author, and author's can do what they want. Perhaps he didn't want people going to look for traces of him there if his book got big. Perhaps he didn't want people looking up a girl who might be "Terry." But for whatever reason, it seems he changed the name.

Have you ever done jobs that seemed like they would be a good thing, only to find that they are much harder and make you a lot less money than you'd hoped? I think even when we get old enough to know better, a need for money makes us do things we might have been better off not doing. I recently had such an experience myself.

I am a student, and am making little money. So I decided to take a job catering. Now, my only other experience around the food industry was when I was 16. I did all right as a dishwasher, but I learned then that restaurant owners and chefs were troublesome people to deal with. The chef is quite well known in the city where I live, and at the time he was running a catering business out of the kitchen where he was a head chef. I thought it would be an easy, part-time gig with few problems. However, I learned otherwise. I couldn't please the chef. He constantly belittled me. I made some mistakes, it is true. But something about his demeanor and the way he related to me pushed all the wrong buttons. I finally quit after I found out just what kind of person he was. I knew that one patron had given me and a colleague a tip on the check, because she told me. After I gave him the check (and he was boasting about how he had gotten a big tip that night even though he was 30 minutes late for the delivery because he got lost) I said "maybe we got a tip too, because we helped the person light her fondue pot when she couldn't do it." He made a show of looking at the check, and then said "Nope, written for the exact amount of the bill." I didn't complain, but I didn't show up for any more catering gigs. The money wasn't all that great, the work was difficult, and I had come to hate the chef for that incident, and for others I had heard.

Sal isn't in such a difficult situation, but he has taken work in a low-income profession. These were the professions available to Terry and her family at the time. Low-wage, dirty, and hard. In a sense, you have to admire Sal for trying. He doesn't seem to be afraid of trying new and difficult jobs - perhaps the adventuresome spirit of a writer. But, he isn't going very far on that kind of money, and he's dreaming of he and Terry in New York. Something has to give - and it will very soon.

If you want to know more about Selma

City of Selma
Selma Chamber of Commerce
Selma Enterprise (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Selma
Wikipedia: Victor Davis Hanson (historian and columnist who grew up in Selma)

Next up: Columbia Pictures Studios, Los Angeles, California

On the Road: Bakersfield, California (again)

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on September 19, 2007

Unfolding the Map

Who would have thought we'd be heading back to Bakersfield with Sal. But, here we go. Curious about where we are? Check out the map by clicking on it.

Book Quote

"In the morning we boldly struck out on our new plan. We were going to take a bus to Bakersfield and work picking grapes. After a few weeks of that we were headed for New York in the proper way, by bus....We arrived in Bakersfield in late afternoon....But there were no jobs to be had....We went across the SP tracks to Mexican town. Terry jabbered with her brethren, asking for jobs....I was beginning to despair...so we bought a quart of California port for thirty-five cents and went to the railroad yards to drink. We found a place where hobos had drawn up crates to sit over fires....Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing. This we did....Occasionally bums passed, Mexican mothers passed with children, and the prowl car came by and the cop got out to leak, but most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by."

On the Road, Chapter 13

Bakersfield, California

In my first post on Bakersfield, I focused on how Bakersfield is a proverbial end of the road for many Californians, a gate of hell almost. At least it was for this native Northern Californian where all California south of San Francisco was painted with "Here Be Dragons" on my parents' imaginary map. Sal certainly uses it as a gateway to the LA area. But now we see that it is a gateway of sorts again. Sal foreshadows the end of his romance with Terry by alluding to the eventual goodbye. But not yet. They sit and in terms both vulgar and romantic, they have a bit of romance.

We have all passed in and through doors. If we think of Los Angeles as a big room where Sal played for a while, then we see that Sal is leaving by the same Bakersfield door as he came in. A little wizened perhaps, maybe a little chastened. He's thinking about heading back to New York. Not that there isn't any more adventure. He will still have some more experiences in California, as we will see, before he sets his sight to the east. But the point is, we know when it's time to enter a place, and we all know when it's time to exit. I think Sal knows now that he's beginning the end of his trip and that California will be a distant memory (for now). Unlike Orpheus, he won't be looking back as he goes.

I don't have too much more to say since I've already written about Bakersfield.

Even more About Bakersfield? Let's let some bloggers and such point the way

Bake Town, CA
Bakersfield Californian
Bakotopia
Eye of Bakersfield
Hello Bakersfield
One Bakersfield Woman's Blog to Mankind

Next up: Selma, California