Big Sur

by Jack Kerouac

  I fix up my sleepingbag on the porch of the cabin but at 2 A.M. the fog starts dripping all wet so I have to go indoors with wet sleepingbag and make new arrangements but who cant sleep like a log in a solitary cabin in the woods, you wake up in the late morning so refreshed and realizing the universe namelessly: the universe is an Angel—But easy enough to say when you’ve had your escape from the gooky city turn into a success—And it’s finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for “cities” at last, you dream of long gray journeys to cities where soft evenings’ll unfold like Paris but never seeing how sickening it will be because of the primordial innocence of health and stillness in the wilds—So I tell myself “Be Wise.”

  6

  THOUGH THERE ARE FAULTS TO MONSANTO’S CABIN like no screened windows to keep the flies out in the daytime just big board windows, so that also on foggy days when it’s damp if you leave them open it’s too cold, if you leave them closed you cant see anything and have to light the lamp at noon—And but for that no other faults—It’s all marvelous—And at first it’s so amazing to be able to enjoy dreamy afternoon meadows of heather up the other end of the canyon and just by walking less than a halfmile you can suddenly also enjoy wild gloomy sea coast, or if you’re sick of either of these just sit by the creek in a gladey spot and dream over snags—So easy in the woods to daydream and pray to the local spirits and say “Allow me to stay here, I only want peace” and those foggy peaks answer back mutely Yes—And to say to yourself (if you’re like me with theological preoccupations) (at least at that time, before I went mad I still had such preoccupations) “God who is everything possesses the eye of awakening, like dreaming a long dream of an impossible task and you wake up in a flash, oops, No Task, it’s done and gone”—And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I’ll do in three weeks only) “no more dissipation, it’s time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that’s it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only, in fact, in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters, walk around, no more self imposed agony . . . it’s time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time . . . Yay, for this, more aloneness”—“Go back to childhood, just eat apples and read your Cathechism—sit on curbstones, the hell with the hot lights of Hollywood” (remembering that awful time only a year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hot lights of the Steve Allen Show in the Burbank studio, one hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Allen watching me expectant as he plunks the piano, I sit there on the dunce’s stool and refuse to read a word or open my mouth, “I dont have to REHEARSE for God’s sake Steve!”—“But go ahead, we just wanta get the tone of your voice, just this last time, I’ll let you off the dress rehearsal” and I sit there sweating not saying a word for a whole minute as everybody watches, finally I say “No I cant do it” and I go across the street to get drunk) (but surprising everybody the night of the show by doing my job of reading just fine, which surprises the producers and so they take me out with a Hollywood starlet who turns out to be a big bore trying to read me her poetry and wont talk love because in Hollywood man love is for sale)—So even that marvelous, long remembrances of life all the time in the world to just sit there or lie there or walk about slowly remembering all the details of life which now because a million lightyears away have taken on the aspect (as they must’ve for Proust in his sealed room) of pleasant mental movies brought up at will and projected for further study—And pleasure—As I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which is us.

  Even when one night I’m so happy sighin to turn over to resume my sleep but a rat suddenly runs over my head, it’s marvelous because I then take the folding cot and put a big wide board on it that covers both sides, so I wont sink into the canvas confines there, and place two old sleepingbags over the board, then my own on top, I have the most marvelous and rat free and in fact healthy-for-the-back bed in the world.

  I also take long curious hikes to see what’s what in the other direction inland, going up a few miles along the dirt road that leads to isolated ranches and logging camps—I come to giant sad quiet valleys where you see 150 foot tall redwood trees with sometimes one little bird right on the topmost peaktwig sticking straight up—The bird balances up there surveying the fog and the great trees—You see one single flower nodding on a cliff side far across the canyon, or a huge knot in a redwood tree looking like Zeus’ face, or some of God’s little crazy creations goofing around in creek pools (zigzag bugs), or a sign on a lonely fence saying “M.P.Passey, No Trespassing,” or terraces of fern in the dripping redwood shade, and you think “A long way from the beat generation, in this rain forest”—So I angle back down to the home canyon and down the path past the cabin and out to the sea where the mule is on the sea shore, nibbling under that one thousand foot bridge or sometimes just standing staring at me with big brown Garden of Eden eyes—The mule being a pet of one of the families who have a cabin in the canyon and it, as I say Alf by name, just wanders from one end of the canyon where the corral fence stops him, to the wild seashore where the sea stops him but a strange Gauguinesque mule when you first see him, leaving his black dung on the perfect white sand, an immortal and primordial mule owning a whole valley—I even finally later find out where Alf sleeps which is like a sacred grove of trees in that dreaming meadow of heather—So I feed Alf the last of my apples which he receives with big faroff teeth inside his soft hairy muzzle, never biting, just muffing up my apple from my outstretched palm, and chomping away sadly, turning to scratch his behind against a tree with a big erotic motion that gets worse and worse till finally he’s standing there with erectile dong that would scare the Whore of Babylon let alone me.

  All kinds of strange and marvelous things like the weird Ripley situation of a huge tree that’s fallen across a creek maybe 500 years ago and’s made a bridge thereby, the other end of its trunk is now buried in ten feet of silt and foliage, strange enough but out of the middle trunk over the water rises straight another redwood tree looking like it’s been plated in the treetrunk, or stuck down into it by a God hand, I cant figure it out and stare at this chewing furiously on big choking handfulls of peanuts like a college boy—(and only weeks before falling on my head in the Bowery)—Even when a rancher car goes by I day-dream mad ideas like, here comes Farmer Jones and his two daughters and here I am with a 60-foot redwood tree under my arm walking slowly pulling it along, they are amazed and scared, “Are we dreaming? can anybody be that strong?” they even ask me and my big Zen answer is “You only think I’m strong” and I go on down the road carrying my tree—This has me laughing in clover fields for hours—I pass a cow which turns to look at me as it takes a big dreamy crap—Back in the cabin I light the fire and sit sighing and there are leaves skittering on the tin roof, it’s August in Big Sur—I fall asleep in the chair and when I wake up I’m facing the thick little tangled woods outside the door and I suddenly remember them from long ago, even to the particular clumpness of the thickets, stem by stem, the twist of them, like an old home place, but just as I’m wondering what all this mess is, bang, the wind closes the cabin door on my sight of it!—So I conclude “I see as much as doors’ll allow, open or shut”—Adding, as I get up, in a loud English Lord voice nobody can hear anyway, “An issue broached is an issue smote, Sire,” pronouncing “issue” like “iss-yew”—And this has me laughing all through supper—Which is potatoes wrapped in foil and thrown on the fire, and coffee, and hunks of Spam roasted on a spit, and applesauce and cheese—And when I light the lamp of aftersupper reading, here comes the nightly moth to his nightly death a
t my lamp—After I put out the lamp temporarily, there’s the moth sleeping on the wall not realizing I’ve put it on again.

  Meanwhile by the way and however, every day is cold and cloudy, or damp, not cold in the eastern sense, and every night is absolutely fog: no stars whatever to be seen—But this too turns out to be a marvelous circumstance as I find out later, it’s the “damp season” and the other dwellers (weekenders) of the canyon dont come out on weekends, I’m absolutely alone for weeks on end (because later in August when the sun conquered the fog suddenly I was amazed to hear laughing and scratching all up and down the valley which had been mine only mine, and when I tried to go to the beach to squat and write there were whole families having outings, some of them younger people who’d simply parked their cars up on the high bridge bluff and climbed down) (some of them in fact gangs of yelling hoodlums)—So the rainforest summer fog was grand and besides when the sun prevailed in August a horrible development took place, huge blasts of frightening gale like wind came pouring into the canyon making all the trees roar with a really frightening intensity that sometimes built up to a booming war of trees that shook the cabin and woke you up—And was in fact one of the things that contributed to my mad fit.

  But the most marvelous day of all when I completely forgot who I was where I was or the time a day just with my pants rolled up above my knees wading in the creek rearranging the rocks and some of the snags so that the water where I stooped (near the sandy shore) to get jugfuls would, instead of just sluggishly passing by shallow over mud, with bugs in it, now come rushing in a pure gurgly clear stream and deep too—I dug into the white sand and arranged underground rocks so now I could stick a jug in there and tilt the opening to the stream and it would fill up instantly with clear rushing unstagnated bugless drinking water—Making a mill race, is what it’s called—And because now the water rushed so fast and deep right by the sandy stooping place I had to build a kind of seawall of rocks against that rush so that the shore would not be silted away by the race—Doing that, fortifying the outside of the seawall with smaller rocks and finally at sundown with bent head over my sniffling endeavors (the way a kid sniffles when he’s been playing all day) I start inserting tiny pebbles in the spaces between the stones so that no water can sneak over to wash away the shore, even down to the tiniest sand, a perfect sea wall, which I top with a wood plank for everybody to kneel on when they come there to fetch their holy water—Looking up from this work of an entire day, from noon till sundown, amazed to see where I was, who I was, what I’d done—The absolute innocence like of Indian fashioning a canoe all alone in the woods—And as I say only weeks earlier I’d fallen flat on my head in the Bowery and everybody thought I’d hurt myself—So I make supper with a happy song and go out in the foggy moonlight (the moon sent its white luminescence through) and marveled to watch the new swift gurgling clear water run with its pretty flashes of light—“And when the fog’s over and the stars and the moon come out at night it’ll be a beautiful sight.”

  And such things—A whole mess of little joys like that amazing me when I came back in the horror of later to see how they’d all changed and become sinister, even my poor little wood platform and mill race when my eyes and my stomach nauseous and my soul screaming a thousand babbling words, oh—It’s hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.

  7

  BECAUSE ON THE FOURTH DAY I BEGAN TO GET BORED and noted it in my diary with amazement, “Already bored?”—Even tho the handsome words of Emerson would shake me out of that where he says (in one of those little redleather books, in the essay on “Self Reliance” a man “is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best”) (applicable both to building simple silly little millraces and writing big stupid stories like this)—Words from that trumpet of the morning in America, Emerson, he who announced Whitman and also said “Infancy conforms to nobody”—The infancy of the simplicity of just being happy in the woods, conforming to nobody’s idea about what to do, what should be done—“Life is not an apology”—And when a vain and malicious philanthropic abolitionist accused him of being blind to the issues of slavery he said “Thy love afar is spite at home” (maybe the philanthropist had Negro help anyway)—So once I again I’m Ti Jean the Child, playing, sewing patches, cooking suppers, washing dishes (always kept the kettle boiling on the fire and anytime dishes need to be washed I just pour hot hot water into pan with Tide soap and soak them good and then wipe them clean after scouring with little 5-&-10 wire scourer)—Long nights simply thinking about the usefulness of that little wire scourer, those little yellow copper things you buy in supermarkets for 10 cents, all to me infinitely more interesting than the stupid and senseless “Steppenwolf” novel in the shack which I read with a shrug, this old fart reflecting the “conformity” of today and all the while he thought he was a big Nietzsche, old imitator of Dostoevsky 50 years too late (he feels tormented in a “personal hell” he calls it because he doesnt like what other people like!)—Better at noon to watch the orange and black Princeton colors on the wings of a butterfly—Best to go hear the sound of the sea at night on the shore.

  Maybe I shouldna gone out and scared or bored or belabored myself so much, tho, on that beach at night which would scare any ordinary mortal—Every night around eight after supper I’d put on my big fisherman coat and take the notebook, pencil and lamp and start down the trail (sometimes passing ghostly Alf on the way) and go under that frightful high bridge and see through the dark fog ahead the white mouths of ocean coming high at me—But knowing the terrain I’d walk right on, jump the beach creek, and go to my corner by the cliff not far from one of the caves and sit there like an idiot in the dark writing down the sound of the waves in the notebook page (secretarial notebook) which I could see white in the darkness and therefore without benefit of lamp scrawl on—I was afraid to light my lamp for fear I’d scare the people way up there on the cliff eating their nightly tender supper—(later found out there was nobody up there eating tender suppers, they were overtime carpenters finishing the place in bright lights)—And I’d get scared of the rising tide with its 15 foot waves yet sit there hoping in faith that Hawaii warnt sending no tidal wave I might miss seeing in the dark coming from miles away high as Groomus—One night I got scared anyway so sat on top of 10 foot cliff at the foot of the big cliff and the waves are going “Rare, he rammed the gate rare”—“Raw roo roar”—“Crowsh”—the way waves sound especially at night—The sea not speaking in sentences so much as in short lines: “Which one? . . . the one ploshed?. . . . the same, ah Boom” . . . Writing down these fantastic inanities actually but yet I felt I had to do it because James Joyce wasnt about to do it now he was dead (and figuring “Next year I’ll write the different sound of the Atlantic crashing say on the night shores of Cornwall, or the soft sound of the Indian Ocean crashing at the mouth of the Ganges maybe”)—And I just sit there listening to the waves talk all up and down the sand in different tones of voice “Ka bloom, kerplosh, ah ropey otter barnacled be, crowsh, are rope the angels in all the sea?” and such1—Looking up occasionally to see rare cars crossing the high bridge and wondering what they’d see on this drear foggy night if they knew a madman was down there a thousand feet below in all that windy fury sitting in the dark writing in the dark—Some sort of sea beatnik, tho anybody wants to call me a beatnik for THIS better try it if they dare—The huge black rocks seem to move—The bleak awful roaring isolateness, no ordinary man could do it I’m telling you—I am a Breton! I cry and the blackness speaks back “Les poissons de la mer parlent Breton” (the fishes of the sea speak Breton)—Nevertheless I go there every night even tho I dont feel like it, it’s my duty (and probably drove me mad), and write these sea sounds, and all the whole insane poem “Sea.”

  Always so wonderful in fact to get away from that and back to the more human woods and come to the cabin where the fire’s still red and you can see the Bodhisattva’s lamp, the glass of ferns on the
table, the box of Jasmine tea nearby, all so gentle and human after that rocky deluge out there—So I make an excellent pan of muffins and tell myself “Blessed is the man can make his own bread”—Like that, the whole three weeks, happiness—And I’m rolling my own cigarettes, too—And as I say sometimes I meditate how wonderful the fantastic use I’ve gotten out of cheap little articles like the scourer, but in this instance I think of the marvelous belongings in my rucksack like my 25 cent plastic shaker with which I’ve just made the muffin batter but also I’ve used it in the past to drink hot tea, wine, coffee, whisky and even stored clean handkerchiefs in it when I traveled—The top part of the shaker, my holy cup, and had it for five years now—And other belongings so valuable compared to the worthlessness of expensive things I’d bought and never used—Like my black soft sleeping sweater also five years which I was now wearing in the damp Sur summer night and day, over a flannel shirt in the cold, and just the sweater for the night’s sleep in the bag—Endless use and virtue of it!—And because the expensive things were of ill use, like the fancy pants I’d bought for recent recording dates in New York and other television appearances and never even wore again, useless things like a $40 raincoat I never wore because it didnt even have slits in the side pockets (you pay for the label and the so called “tailoring”)—Also an expensive tweed jacket bought for TV and never worn again—Two silly sports shirts bought for Hollywood never worn again and were 9 bucks each!—And it’s almost tearful to realize and remember the old green T-shirt I’d found, mind you, eight years ago, mind you, on the DUMP in Watsonville California mind you, and got fantastic use and comfort from it—Like working to fix that new stream in the creek to flow through the convenient deep new waterhole near the wood platform on the bank, and losing myself in this like a kid playing, it’s the little things that count (clichés are truisms and all truisms are true)—On my deathbed I could be remembering that creek day and forgetting the day MGM bought my book, I could be remembering the old lost green dump T-shirt and forgetting the sapphired robes—Mebbe the best way to get into Heaven.