Romanticizing the road

Route 6 MapJack Kerouac’s On the Road romanticizes the semi-nomadic lifestyle of cross-country trekking like no other book I have read. He makes a conscious choice to withhold the less glamorous aspects of hitchhiking and makes it sound as if anyone could undertake what he did. While there are moments of despair, such as his initial attempt at leaving New York for Denver in which he finds himself at Route 6 without any way of proceeding forward and ends up in tears having to return to his starting point, the vast majority of the novel focuses on all the good parts of traveling across the country with little means. He stresses the incredible conversations with various truck drivers rather than the lack of sleep that those conversations produced. The same is true of his time on the flat bed truck. They have to lie on a hard truck bed yet rather than talking about that and the biting wind he talks about the people with which he shares the experience. Drinking whiskey and huddling together under a tarp they offset these effects without really mentioning them. Even in his time working in Mexico he does not stress his hardships but the wealth of experience he is accumulating. I really enjoy this focus on the characters throughout the novel. No matter where he is along his journey, his discourse focuses on the people more so than the places themselves. I think this is very apt in terms of travel in general. I find when traveling that the times you spend talking with natives and other travelers are far more enlightening with regards to the place and its culture than time spent seeing various attractions themselves. I suppose it harks back to our persistent theme of the traveler versus the tourist. While a touristic narrative would have focused on the places he saw, Kerouac takes much more of a traveler’s perspective. In general, he focuses on the journey to his destinations, spending many more pages regarding getting to the destinations than what actually happens when he arrives.
The novel left me feeling a bit nostalgic though for the time when travelling across the country by hitchhiking or other such means of travel was possible. Now, though truckers will still pick up an odd hitchhiker (see Riding with Strangers: A Hitchhiker's Journey by Elijah Wald), people are far less trusting of roadside vagabonds than they used to be. The book really gives off that classic American feeling of frontiersmen, manifest destiny, even though the vast majority of the protagonist’s destinations are heavily civilized.