Off the Road
With everyone everywhere seeming to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, I thought it fitting to highlight this article ("Rolling Towards the Moon") from the Sierra archives, about the summer Kerouac spent working as a fire spotter in Washington's North Cascades. The year was 1956, just prior to his spectacular rise to fame and subsequent descent into alcoholism. The solitary experience provided much of the material for two subsequent autobiographical novels, Desolation Angels and The Dharma Bums. The lookout ("a funny little peaked almost Chinese cabin" is how Kerouac described it) is still there atop Desolation Peak. You reach it via a steep, dry 7-mile hike (one-way) from Ross Lake in what is now North Cascades National Park. To see more photos, click the image above, by Pete Hoffman.
5 Comments:
Thanks for pointing me in the direction of that article... Very cool!
There is also a great book about the time Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen spent as fire lookouts in the North Cascades called Poets on the Peaks. Chock full of amazing photos too. Kerouac's relationship with the outdoors has always been overshadowed by the Beat stereotype. It was that relationship that really put a lot of the energy into the books of his that I enjoy most (including 'the dharma bums' and 'desolation angels').
I really hope to make that pilgrimage to Desolation Peak someday soon.
Glad you appreciated it.
And thanks for the link to the book, which it so happens is by the same John Suiter who wrote the article for the magazine.
Haha, I'm a little slow sometimes. I had not noticed the author's name. :)
I've always wondered about the relationship between the "conservationists" of the 1950s and 1960s (i.e., David Brower, Sigurd Olson) and people like Kerouac and Snyder. I don't know if there was even that much consciousness of each other, and obviously, they lived very different lifestyles, but each group had some of the same priorities about the spiritual power of wilderness. Kerouac was never much of a conservationist and Snyder only became involved years later after his stint in Japan, and the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society people probably didn't sit around reading "On the Road" and listening to bop, but... it still just makes me wonder if either group knew anything of the other.
The article and Suiter's book hint at how they might have each co-existed, but I haven't ever heard anything else about it.
Good question. I'm guessing the relationship between the Beats and the Conservationists was pretty tenuous. Wallace Stegner had some things to say about Gary Snyder in an interview I read somewhere. If memory serves, he said he didn't find him "sensible."
This whole story was very fascinating. Thanks Pat.
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