Back With Jack Beginning

Jack Kerouac was twenty-five in 1947 when he left New York City for his first trip west - the trip that ten years later, when On The Road was published, started the book. The book I read as a teenager. And re-read. All that love for America’s vastness. All that frantic commitment to just MOVING. For a high school class I wrote what I considered the first biography of Jack’s muse, master-driver and charismatic con Neal Cassady. How cool I thought, not to worry about jobs or money. How cool to focus on whoever was out there wondering and wandering that road with you. The dust of Woody Guthrie’s hobos coated Jack’s plaid lumberjack shirts. So as a girl I hitchhiked around town. In high school I started emulating Jack and Neal’s hard-drinking lifestyle. And I always meant to take that trip back then. I didn’t. Too many creepy experiences hitchin’ at home maybe? And the drinkin’ kept me planted close to the bars.

So now On The Road is turning fifty and so am I.. And I’m going on that trip. Yes – it’s “just” me, Megan doing it. It isn’t Jack’s trip. I’m not swallowing cotton from Benzedrine inhalers so I can hurtle across the country in a few days. But I’m reading on Jack – learning his hurtin’ bio. I’m wandering to some of the places he hit in his frenetic passages. And I’m going back to the many places I lived as a kid. To see where my ghosts meet his.

It will be two months on the road going Back With Jack.

My friend Mare calls these things “blobs.” So I’ll be throwing some text on this one as I go. Hopefully almost every day. I have a week’s worth of adventures to get caught up on!