The Bigger Picture

Castelhanos, Brasil

When I first read On The Road, it was in its original scroll form. I devoured it, quickly loving every word, and put it into the context of my own life without quite taking enough time to savor and reflect. Among quite a few other influences, On The Road was probably a catalyst for some of my big adventures: leaving college, and the country, etc. As Bob Dylan said, "It changed my life like it changed everyone else's."

I remember driving away from everything I was supposed to be doing, entering random towns in Delaware and North Carolina that I'd never been to before, and feeling infinite. My friends became Kerouac's friends (some of them really are very similar), and I suppose I thought of myself as Sal: searching for something beyond a prescription, out of the white-collar Christian Ivy League lobster roll resumé expectancies placed on me. The wind blew through my hair on the highway, and we couldn't speed fast enough (in the car we had stolen, while my partner had a warrant out for his arrest...) It felt good to be bad, but we didn't do it intentionally to be bad, or because we thought we were bad: how natural our rebellion was made it authentic, and the adventure really has great stories. The experiences I had hiking in Brazil and staying in shacks on small beaches with no electricity, wild hogs running past at night, nothing but a very dirty mattress on the floor, smeared with calamine - it was all a search for the authentic, and I believe I found it, but was I missing something more?

It wasn't until I began to think back to On The Road that I reflected a bit more on my own journey. There's something to be said in the difference between Sal (Kerouac) and Dean (Neal Cassidy), and when I realized I might have been acting more like Dean than Sal, I re-applied to college. Whereas Dean just takes off, creating and abandoning, I thought I'd slow down, write about my travels, and find ways in which I can help influence, change the world: help the impoverished people I had stayed with, rather than photograph them. Like in the novel, when everything is going so fast, it's impossible not to feel whole; like you've found the part of you you lacked before... something along those lines. Like Kerouac, I acted semi-authentically, semi-voyeuristically, peering into my own life and those of the people I encountered and wanted to know, and loved. But in Brazil, I was just as much an outsider as I was trying to be from the society I rejected in the States.

What Kerouac did was transfer his experiences into art. He had to distance himself from them to make them universal and relevant to the lives of others. Steve Wilson, in his essay "Buddha Writing: The Author and the Search for Authenticity in Jack Kerouac's On The Road and The Subterraneans," describes Kerouac as a Boddhisatva, one who cannot reach full enlightenment, but can guide others toward it. I can look back at the rupture between Dean and Sal and reflect with my decision to go the path of Kerouac: continue to search, but pay more attention to the bigger picture, think outside oneself; there, one finds wholeness. In this light, I still celebrate and thank Kerouac for his work, his honesty, and his spirit. I'd never change or take back anything I did; I've just learned how to do it again, but better.