KINGSVIEW

DREAMING INTO THE WEST
On the Road with Jack Kerouac and Jesus Christ

Michael A. King

This is a story about dreaming into the West in body and spirit, accompanied on the road by Jack Kerouac and Jesus Christ.

Dreaming into the West

When I first began to dream into the West I don’t know. I just know that despite my sorrow and anger over the ways Manifest Destiny impelled Americans to drive relentlessly West even over the bodies of Native Americans and wild beings beyond the counting, I too am yet another American drawn by their dream.

Until my late 30s I knew the West only from photos and the vistas I had created in my mind’s eye. In some ways I had made a myth of a land that in spots is as ordinary as any. But in other ways the myth wasn’t even as large as the reality, I concluded when in the early 1990s I first explored those mountains that rise into forever from the deserts and vast forests and even, so much more often than in the quieter East, from the base of that Pacific sea itself.

After that first trip, every excuse I could find to return I took. I no longer remember how many times I’ve wandered those still-fabled lands between Colorado and New Mexico on the eastern edge (that’s where it begins for me) of the West; or California, Oregon, and Washington in the western West, not to mention the glories of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, plus the states yet to be explored.

My need for ever more West only deepened the day I was myself on the road to Virginia and heard National Public Radio profile Jack Kerouac and his most famous book, On the Road (Penguin Books, 1991; first published Viking Books, 1957). Kerouac helped start what became the Beat Generation in the 1950s and evolved into the hippies of the 1960s (though hippies Kerouac disliked). Between commenting on the role the book has played in American literature, NPR played excerpts of Kerouac himself reading from it. I had never read Kerouac, but as soon as I heard him start reading in his own voice, I knew I would have to go straight to a bookstore.

I’m not sure precisely what passage I heard him read. But if it wasn’t the one I’m about to quote it was one like it, mixing as often in Kerouac the past tense of narrative and the present tense of immediate experience. Here through Sal, who stands for Kerouac in this book labeled a novel but in reality largely autobiographical, Kerouac says of the California town of Tracy that it is "a railroad town; brakemen eat surly meals in cinders by the tracks. Trains howl across the valley. The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled—Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragrant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments" (80-81).

And on the way West toward that most beautiful of moments, Sal/Kerouac tells of how under a tarpaulin in the back of a truck he watched as "The stars seemed to get brighter the more we climbed the High Plains. We were in Wyoming now. Flat on my back, I stared straight up at the magnificent firmament, glorying in the time I was making, in how far I had come from Bear Mountain after all, and tingling with kicks at the thought of what lay ahead of me in Denver—whatever, whatever it would be" ( 29-30).

Listening to and later reading these words and others telling of Kerouac’s reckless, rollicking, beauty-and-joy-seeking trip with his friend Nick Cassady (named Dean Moriarty in the book), I felt a surge of almost unbearable longing for the West and its kicks. Kerouac’s words set aflame my own reasons for loving the West: Because I was stricken with hunger for the journey itself, for the process of getting from East to West.

Because the West always seemed to have space in it for everything a soul could need, including two-lane roads stretching on in desolate but wonderful emptiness far beyond the horizon established by the last light from the West-setting sun, stars sprayed across a sky big enough and dark enough to see them in.

And because of the air, oh air so dry and soft and sweet and fresh that, as my daughter Katie said on first feeling it, it seems to carry all by itself the very glory and purpose of being alive.

On the Road West with Jack

Even as I felt Kerouac’s road to the West burning in me, I was pondering taking a sabbatical from pastoring. Soon Kerouac and sabbatical were interweaving into a wild vision of my taking a month of sabbatical time to go on the road myself, from Pennsylvania to the West Coast, roaming wherever I felt led along the way.

It took long months of planning, discussions with church and family, strategizing how to keep my affairs going while away. But soon enough what had seemed only wild dreaming gave way to that redletter Wednesday evening. On April 30, 2003, at 6:10 p.m., having determined that my sabbatical officially began at 5:00, I waved my first good-bye to spouse and daughters.

There were tears on their faces and some threatening on mine, because now the dream seemed as terrifying as it did exciting. It seemed doubtful that I would ever again see my family; surely more than enough dangers lurked in the thousands of miles I intended to drive to do me in well before I could ever return home.

But like the first pioneers, I found my courage. I turned the ignition key of my 1991 Honda Civic, a trusty car but not likely, at 159,200 miles, to make it across the burning deserts. I waved my last good-bye . I steered toward the sun setting quickly now in the west and West.

Because WEST, west in all its true westerness was what I so craved, I wanted no dawdling in mundane Eastern haunts. Within two days beyond that first evening, my Honda and I had gulped down nearly 2,000 miles. Finally the edge of the true West drew near, I felt, shortly after Amarillo, Texas, as the land dried out, the sagebrush appeared, and the sky seemed to double in size.

Then as once more the sun faded west, the unmistakable West itself was there, yes, right there. The interstate curved around a bend near the Texas-New Mexico state line and what had been plains became rough gullies and washes interspersed with mesas.

I stopped soon after at the first New Mexico rest area. Reality and dream merged as at the edge of the parking lot I gazed out at that classically Western landscape, listened to the constant twitter of hordes of unfamiliar Western birds, and felt the caresses of breezes such as the East, humidity-ridden, knows only on rare air-from-Canada days. Some part of me was home as it is never home anywhere else.

On the Road with Jack and Jesus

The joy of that first encounter with the land itself was to be repeated in the weeks thereafter, and indeed love for the land remains a primary aspect of my dreaming into the West. But I was not only on a generic trip; I was also specifically on the road with both Jack Kerouac and Jesus Christ.

As much as Kerouac’s own celebration of the land is evident in On the Road, there is more. Kerouac is also on the road toward a type of living beyond the cramped, guilt-ridden constraints he thought post-World War II conventional American culture and his Catholic heritage had inflicted on him and his generation.

I wanted to learn two things from being on the road with this Jack and with Christ. I wanted to explore what he could teach me about living a wilder life than I sometimes do as a Christian shaped by my own many guilts and conventions. And I wanted to learn how not to do so as Kerouac finally did.

As he himself chronicles in such novelized autobiographies as Desolation Angels, Big Sur, and more, he lived with such undisciplined abandon, such inability to place boundaries around following joy and feeling wherever they led, that he died in 1969 at age 47. He was a dissolute shadow of his former self, killed by the alcoholism which finally sent his stomach into uncontrollable bleeding.

Kerouac followed the call of the blood fizzing in his veins, then was killed when all the blood fled him. I wanted my own blood to fizz like his but not for it to bleed back out. That too became a vital aspect of dreaming into the West.

As part of setting that part of the trip in motion, long months before I left on sabbatical I told my congregation in a sermon that I was moved by the example of Katie Funk Wiebe, who in Border Crossing (DreamSeeker Books, rev. ed. 2003) says that if she has any regrets, as she thinks back over her nearly 80 years, it’s that she didn’t live wildly enough.

I reported how inspired I was by this white-haired woman who says that "I recognize now, as I look back over my many experiences, that I have known too much fear. I have been too hesitant at times to move ahead. I have seen a ferocious lion behind every blade of grass. . . .

"I wish now that I had had more courage to move forward decisively and been less concerned about what the church community would think of some of the vision I felt entrusted with. . . .

"If I have learned anything about myself as I look back, it is how little I have galloped at breakneck speed. . ." (46-47).

I wanted to learn from Katie, I told my congregation, and I might want to symbolize that with an earring: "A price of being a pastor is the feeling, sometimes, that my wild side must be suppressed. Always I know that, like it or not, someone may be watching, pondering what I do, wondering about my perfections and imperfections, whether I’m a model to be followed or avoided. That can put a damper on adventure.

"So one reason I may wear a ring on sabbatical is to symbolize that for those brief months I’m at play, still in the fields of the Lord, but at play, taking a break from 20 years of carrying the role. In our culture, men who wear an earring are at least a little wild or maybe, when viewed from within this congregation, a lot wild and too wild. I don’t want to be too wild. I don’t want to do anything that goes against my understanding of Scripture and of Jesus’ teachings or what God calls me to do with the next part of my life. But I’d like to be a little wild."

So a little wild I became, and the day before heading West I set out with advisers—wife and daughters who know far more about these things than I—for Montgomeryville Mall. There, at Pagoda Piercing, family consensus settled on the tiniest, least wild stud to be found, my ear was pierced, and for weeks after I’d find it hard to believe it was my own face staring back out of the mirror when I’d spy that gleam in my left ear.

It’s due to come out shortly; it was mainly a statement suited to that wild Western dreaming and the sabbatical break from pastoring. But it did what I hoped it would: reminded me to aim to do more of the wild living Wiebe wished she had and Kerouac actually had. Still that didn’t mean simply copying Kerouac’s wildness but learning from it while remaining true to my Christian values. How?

This is not the type of thing for which you get a software quick-install guide; it’s a lifelong project. Yet I did stumble across what seemed two principles. First, I concluded I could learn from those aspects of Kerouac’s vision rooted in the word underlying the Beat Generation label: beatific. As his biographer Ann Charters explains, Beat had emerged as slang for "a state of creative exhaustion" but "was also linked in Jack’s mind to a Catholic beatific vision, the direct knowledge of God enjoyed by the blessed" (Introduction, On the Road, viii).

As Kerouac himself put it, "I was asked to explain beatness on TV, on radio, by people everywhere. They were all under the impression that being beat was just a lot of frantic nowhere hysteria. What are you searching for, they asked me? I answered that I was waiting for God to show his face" (Good Blond & Others, rev. ed., Grey Fox Press, 1998, 51).

Kerouac’s search in turn became linked in my mind with Jesus’ own beatific vision in Luke 12 of life shaped by ability truly to see the lilies lovelier than "Solomon in all his glory," and to trust that if we live toward such beauty we will experience the God who nurtures it likewise blessing us. Is not Kerouac offering a beatific view of our world’s lilies when he tells of the grapy California dusk within which he breathes the fragrant air?

My second principle was this: to seek to experience the grapy dusk and lilies not outside of but within the teachings of Jesus. Kerouac helped me see afresh the wild ability of Jesus to feel the fizz of the world in his blood. But then seeing Kerouac through Jesus once again reminded me that Kerouac’s experience of his culture and Catholic heritage largely as impediments to the fizz blocked his finding in them guides for keeping the quest in bounds or managing the intensities of joy and suffering, fame and censure, triggered by publication of On the Road.

So in addition to nonstop drinking he lurched from drug to drug, woman to woman, friend to friend, country to country. Ever he sought the fizz, the beatific direct experience of the divine, and offered haunting descriptions of it when find it he did. But also ever he was forced to experience, as he flirted several times even with madness, that fizz with too few rules can go as flat as soda lacking a sealed bottle.

So on the road West I sought with Jack the fizz but also with Jesus the boundaries within which to keep the fizz fizzy. Thus I didn’t lurch from woman to woman or drug to drug. But I did awake each day of the trip not, as so often in ordinary life, pondering the tasks and weights of the day, but as both Jack and Jesus mean to invite, I believe: Each hour’s task was simply the search for the beatific gifts, the holy hints, each wild day might hold.

Some people hate it, but for me there is something homey and comforting about the experience, thus one of my dreams for my trip was for a server to call me "dear" or a variant. So one day the beatific gift came in the form of the waitress who in Farmington, New Mexico, asked while I ate my country breakfast, "Do you need anything else, Sir?"

Just for you to call me honey, I bleakly thought.

But oh there is a God, oh the fizz does fizz, the world does after all offer its doorways into the divine. Did she see that earring, sparkling on in the morning sun? Did she see the glow of my soul radiating toward her? Or was it unearned grace? I know only this: About halfway through my breakfast, as she stood some 20 feet away, she said, "Are you doing okay . . . Sweetie?"

"Are you talking to me?" I asked in some disbelief. Maybe she was addressing someone at the cash register just behind me. But no. No and no and no. The Sweetie was me.

Another day the gift arrived as my friend Don and I drove to a restaurant he wanted to share with me after we learned we would be in Arizona at the same time. While yet another grapy dusk fell on the West, this time on the desert outskirts of Phoenix, we listened to the haunting chords of Ry Cooder’s guitar as Don told of what happened one night: Across the sleeping landscape they had sped, he and his son, hour after hour, talking and listening raptly to their mutually beloved Grateful Dead, to arrive at a hushed and holy Grand Canyon during the still-dark morning hours.

Then there was the drive from Utah to Arizona’s Monument Valley. In the area called Valley of the Gods, in late afternoon sweet light, I saw this: The soil all turned red, mountains rising and falling with their seams sometimes at cross-grain with the awesome spires, mesas, bluffs woven in among them; miles-stretching vistas across desert plains and down into valleys thousands of feet below covered with the faint green of sage and spindly juniper and other growths I knew not what they were, and that time of year often complemented by purple flowers—which I pray, since I so loved them in my minds’ eye when as a boy I rode with Zane Grey across the purple sagelands covered with them—were columbines.

Ruts on the Road

Not all was beatific; the search for it also highlights how often it is missing and how woven into all earthly life is so much that is wrong, as Kerouac also had to learn. There were also the ordinary boring times, too boring to report here. And perhaps particularly two almost clashing sets of experiences highlight the wrongness.

On the one hand, I nearly despair as I think back to some of the most amazing landscapes I’d guess this earth holds and remember how often at their edges and sometimes even creeping into their centers are deserts of commercial strips virtually the same across the entire country. These are the true barren deserts, in contrast to the God-shaped loveliness of the literal deserts Americans have so often treated as disposably barren.

On the other hand, I’ll not soon forget this: It’s evening. In a dust storm I drive as fast as I dare through the blinding brown wind in search of a motel before I am trapped for the night in what now seems fearsomely desolate—not beatific—wilderness.

Finally the outlines of the Anazasi Inn can be spied through the dust, but lo, every single person in the adjoining restaurant and check-in counter appears to be Native American. The clerk tells me there are no singles left. I can’t tell if that is true for everybody or just for palefaces.

So onward, onward, onward I am forced to race. The sun sets on mile after mile of wasteland, darkness grows, and this becomes unsettlingly clear: There are still large stretches of undeveloped land in America. No lights at all for miles! My car sputters a bit—a habit it seems to develop when in high country—and I wonder what the Native Americans will do if they find me stranded in the dark.

I say this not against Native Americans. It’s just that I’m now in their land, sort of, land my people took from them, then gave back to them in the form of what they deemed the worst of it (watch for the most barren Western lands and there you’ll see a reservation), and who knows if they would like to even the score with me late at night with my car sputtered to nothing, its engine choked with desert dust.

I do survive by arriving at last in Flagstaff. This time the neon glow seems a heavenly one indeed.

I felt that night, I think, the urge to impose order on a land and peoples the European settlers of the West considered too wild to be other than in need of taming. But if the urge is understandable, its consequences are only gathering force. What a terrible thing we did when we took the free peoples of the West (not to mention East), and tried to herd them into people zoos so they wouldn’t impede our craving to build the neon strips. What a terrible thing we do every day, as the moment the human herds discern the next beautiful spot in the West we all race to trample it down in our millions.

So I love the West, which lived up to my dreams and more. And I mourn the West, since we have already turned so much of it into nightmare.

But I know only to keep looking for the fizz and also for the bottle that will keep it bubbly in awareness that doing both at once will never be an easy task. I followed Kerouac onto the road in a car, seeking the open highway while also joining the hordes of us who take the open road away from each other by wanting it in such numbers we destroy what we ache for.

We need boundaries around the consumerist capitalism so quickly destroying the lilies, or around the dissolution that finally ruined Kerouac. Still I wouldn’t want not to have roamed the West for one glorious month, glimpsing enough to chew on for years to come of what life can be like on the road with both Jack Kerouac and Jesus Christ.

Home Again

My Honda did return me home, along with an odometer now reading 167, 950. Except for the motel in Ogden, Utah, where maybe I was nearly shot (a tale for another day), I had nary the narrowest of scrapes. I was literally scared of seeing my wife Joan and daughters again—would we even recognize each other’s changed selves? In the end we did. And soon many of the humdrum routines were back.

Still there is in me, and in various ways in all our family, some extra fizz. It’s a joy to be back safe within the boundaries of home and community, the walls of church and faith—but also to feel blood surging, as still I dream into the West but often as well find versions of its grapy dusks and grandest of lilies right here in old East.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine. He is not sure why he does not live in the West.