by Jack Kerouac
I go back to the beach in the daytime to write my “Sea,” I stand there barefoot by the sea stopping to scratch one ankle with one toe, I hear the rhythm of those waves, and they’re saying suddenly “Is Virgin you trying to fathom me”—I go back to make a pot of tea.
Summer afternoon—
Impatiently chewing
The Jasmine leaf
At high noon the sun always coming out at last, strong, beating down on my nice high porch where I sit with books and coffee and the noon I thought about the ancient Indians who must have inhabited this canyon for thousands of years, how even as far back at the 10th Century this valley must have looked the same, just different trees: these ancient Indians simply the ancestors of the Indians of only recently say 1860—How they’ve all died and quietly buried their grievances and excitements—How the creek may have been an inch deeper since logging operations of the last 60 years have removed some of the watershed in the hills back there—How the women pounded the local acorns, acorns or shmacorns, I finally found the natural nuts of the valley and they were sweet tasting—And men hunted deer—In fact God knows what they did because I wasnt here—But the same valley, a thousand years of dust more or less over their footsteps of 960 A.D.—And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words—We will pass just as quietly through life (passing through, passing through) as the 10th century people of this valley only with a little more noise and a few bridges and dams and bombs that wont even last a million years—The world being just what it is, moving and passing through, actually alright in the long view and nothing to complain about—Even the rocks of the valley had earlier rock ancestors, a billion billion years ago, have left no howl of complaint—Neither the bee, or the first sea urchins, or the clam, or the severed paw—All sad So-Is sight of the world, right there in front of my nose as I look,—And looking at that valley in fact I also realize I have to make lunch and it wont be any different than the lunch of those olden men and besides it’ll taste good—Everything is the same, the fog says “We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,” and the leaves say “We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that’s all, we come and go, grow and fall”—Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say “We are man-transformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we’ll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season”—The tree stumps say “We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth”—Men say “We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realize everything is the same”—While the sand says “We are sand, we already know,” and the sea says “We are always come and go, fall and plosh”—The empty blue sky of space says “All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I dont care, it still belongs to me”—The blue sky adds “Dont call me eternity, call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise: the leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the paper bag is paradise, the man is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise”—Can you imagine a man with marvelous insights like these can go mad within a month? (because you must admit all those talking paper bags and sands were telling the truth)—But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of “Oh my God, we’re all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do”—And a bird who was on a crooked branch is suddenly gone without my even hearing him.
8
BUT THERE’S MOONLIT FOGNIGHT, the blossoms of the fire flames in the stove—There’s giving an apple to the mule, the big lips taking hold—There’s the bluejay drinking my canned milk by throwing his head back with a miffle of milk on his beak—There’s the scratching of the raccoon or of the rat out there, at night—There’s the poor little mouse eating her nightly supper in the humble corner where I’ve put out a little delight-plate full of cheese and chocolate candy (for my days of killing mice are over)—There’s the raccoon in his fog, there the man to his fireside, and both are lonesome for God—There’s me coming back from seaside nightsittings like a muttering old Bhikku stumbling down the path—There’s me throwing my spotlight on a sudden raccoon who clambers up a tree his little heart beating with fear but I yell in French “Hello there little man” (allo ti bonhomme)—There’s the bottle of olives, 49¢, imported, pimentos, I eat them one by one wondering about the late afternoon hillsides of Greece—And there’s my spaghetti with tomato sauce and my oil and vinegar salad and my applesauce relishe my dear and my black coffee and Roquefort cheese and afterdinner nuts, my dear, all in the woods—(Ten delicate olives slowly chewed at midnight is something no one’s ever done in luxurious restaurants)—There’s the present moment fraught with tangled woods—There’s the bird suddenly quiet on his branch while his wife glances at him—There’s the grace of an axe handle as good as an Eglevsky ballet—There’s “Mien Mo Mountain” in the fog illumined August moon mist among other heights gorgeous and misty rising in dimmer tiers somehow rosy in the night like the classic silk paintings of China and Japan—There’s a bug, a helpless little wingless crawler, drowning in a water can, I get it out and it wanders and goofs on the porch till I get sick of watching—There’s the spider in the outhouse minding his own business—There’s my side of bacon hanging from a hook on the ceiling of the shack—There’s the laughter of the loon in the shadow of the moon—There’s an owl hooting in weird Bodhidharma trees—There’s flowers and redwood logs—There’s the simple woodfire and the careful yet absentminded feeding of it which is an activity that like all activities is no-activity (Wu Wei) yet it is a meditation in itself especially because all woodfires, like snowflakes, are different every time—Yes, there’s the resinous purge of a flame-enveloped redwood log—Yes the cross-sawed redwood log turns into a coal and looks like a City of the Gandharvas or like a western butte at sunset—There’s the bhikku’s broom, the kettle—There’s the laced soft fud over the sand, the sea—There’s all these avid preparations for decent sleep like the night I’m looking for my sleeping socks (so’s not to dirty the sleepingbag inside) and find myself singing “A donde es me sockiboos?”—Yes, and down in the valley there’s my burro, Alf, the only living being in sight—There’s in mid of sleep the moon appearing—There’s universal substance which is divine substance because where else can it be?—There’s the family of deer on the dirt road at dusk—There’s the creek coughing down the glade—There’s the fly on my thumb rubbing its nose then stepping to the page of my book—There’s the hummingbird swinging his head from side to side like a hoodlum—There’s all that, and all my fine thoughts, even unto my ditty written to the sea “I took a pee, into the sea, acid to acid, and me to ye” yet I went crazy inside three weeks.
For who could go crazy that could be so relaxed as that: but wait: there are the signposts of something wrong.
9
THE FIRST SIGNPOST came after that marvelous day I went hiking up the canyon road again to the highway at the bridge where there was a rancher mailbox where I could dump mail (a letter to my mother and saying in it give a kiss to Tyke, my cat, and a letter to old buddy Julien addressed to Coaly Rustnut from Runty Onenut) and as I walked way up there I could see the peaceful roof of my cabin way below and half mile away in the old trees, could see the porch, the cot where I slept, and my red handkerchief on the bench beside the cot (a simple little sight: of my handkerchief a half mile away making me unaccountably happy)—And on the way back pausing to meditate in the grove of trees where Alf the Sacred Burro slept and seeing the roses of the unborn in my closed eyelids just as clearly as I had seen the red handkerchief and also my own footsteps in the seaside sand from way up on the br
idge, saw, or heard, the words “Roses of the Unborn” as I sat crosslegged in soft meadow sand, heard that awful stillness at the heart of life, but felt strangely low, as tho premonition of the next day—When I went to the sea in the afternoon and suddenly took a huge deep Yogic breath to get all that good sea air in me but somehow just got an overdose of iodine, or of evil, maybe the sea caves, maybe the seaweed cities, something, my heart suddenly beating—Thinking I’m gonna get the local vibrations instead here I am almost fainting only it isnt an ecstatic swoon by St. Francis, it comes over me in the form of horror of an eternal condition of sick mortality in me—In me and in everyone—I felt completely nude of all poor protective devices like thoughts about life or meditations under trees and the “ultimate” and all that shit, in fact the other pitiful devices of making supper or saying “What I do now next? chop wood?”—I see myself as just doomed, pitiful—An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I’m just a sick clown and so is everybody else—All all of it, pitiful as it is, not even really any kind of commonsense animate effort to ease the soul in this horrible sinister condition (of mortal hopelessness) so I’m left sitting there in the sand after having almost fainted and stare at the waves which suddenly are not waves at all, with I guess what must have been the goopiest downtrodden expression God if He exists must’ve ever seen in His movie career—Éh vache, I hate to write—All my tricks laid bare, even the realization that they’re laid bare itself laid bare as a lotta bunk—The sea seems to yell to me GO TO YOUR DESIRE DONT HANG AROUND HERE—For after all the sea must be like God, God isnt asking us to mope and suffer and sit by the sea in the cold at midnight for the sake of writing down useless sounds, he gave us the tools of self reliance after all to make it straight thru bad life mortality towards Paradise maybe I hope—But some miserables like me dont even know it, when it comes to us we’re amazed—Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH . . . but I ran away from that seashore and never came back again without that secret knowledge: that it didnt want me there, that I was a fool to sit there in the first place, the sea has its waves, the man has his fireside, period.
That being the first indication of my later flip—But also on the day of leaving the cabin to hitch hike back to Frisco and see everybody and by now I’m tired of my food (forgot to bring jello, you need jello after all that bacon fat and cornmeal in the woods, every woodsman needs jello) (or cokes) (or something)—But it’s time to leave, I’m now so scared by that iodine blast by the sea and by the boredom of the cabin I take 20 dollars worth of perishable food left and spread it out on a big board below the cabin porch for the bluejays and the raccoon and the mouse and the whole lot, pack up, and go—But before I go I realize this isnt my own cabin (here’s the second signpost of my madness), I have no right to hide Monsanto’s rat poison, as I’ve been doing, feeding the mouse instead, as I said—So like a dutiful guest in another man’s cabin I take the cover off the rat poison but compromise by simply leaving the box on the top shelf, so nobody can complain—And go off like that—But during my absence, but—You’ll see.
10
WITH MY MIND EVEN AND UPRIGHT and abiding nowhere, as Hui Neng would say, I go dancing off like a fool from my sweet retreat, rucksack on back, after only three weeks and really after only 3 or 4 days of boredom, and go hankering back for the city—“You go out in joy and in sadness you return,” says Thomas à Kempis talking about all the fools who go forth for pleasure like high school boys on Saturday night hurrying clacking down the sidewalk to the car adjusting their ties and rubbing their hands with anticipatory zeal, only to end up Sunday morning groaning in bleary beds that Mother has to make anyway—It’s a beautiful day as I come out of that ghostly canyon road and step out on the coast highway, just this side of Raton Canyon bridge, and there they are, thousands and thousands of tourists driving by slowly on the high curves all oo ing and aa ing at all that vast blue panorama of seas washing and raiding at the coast of California—I figure I’ll get a ride into Monterey real easy and take the bus there and be in Frisco by nightfall for a big ball of wino yelling with the gang, I feel in fact Dave Wain oughta be back by now, or Cody will be ready for a ball, and there’ll be girls, and such and such, forgetting entirely that only three weeks previous I’d been sent fleeing from that gooky city by the horrors—But hadnt the sea told me to flee back to my own reality?
But it is beautiful especially to see up ahead north a vast expanse of curving seacoast with inland mountains dreaming under slow clouds, like a scene of ancient Spain, or properly really like a scene of the real essentially Spanish California, the old Monterey pirate coast right there, you can see what the Spaniards must’ve thought when they came around the bend in their magnificent sloopies and saw all that dreaming fatland beyond the seashore whitecap doormat—Like the land of gold—The old Monterey and Big Sur and Santa Cruz magic—So I confidently adjust my pack straps and start trudging down the road looking back over my shoulder to thumb.
This is the first time I’ve hitch hiked in years and I soon begin to see that things have changed in America, you cant get a ride any more (but of course especially on a strictly tourist road like this coast highway with no trucks or business)—Sleek long stationwagon after wagon comes sleering by smoothly, all colors of the rainbow and pastel at that, pink, blue, white, the husband is in the driver’s seat with a long ridiculous vacationist hat with a long baseball visor making him look witless and idiot—Beside him sits wifey, the boss of America, wearing dark glasses and sneering, even if he wanted to pick me up or anybody up she wouldn’t let him—But in the two deep backseats are children, children, millions of children, all ages, they’re fighting and screaming over ice cream, they’re spilling vanilla all over the Tartan seatcovers—There’s no room anymore anyway for a hitch hiker, tho conceivably the poor bastard might be allowed to ride like a meek gunman or silent murderer in the very back platform of the wagon, but here no, alas! here is ten thousand racks of drycleaned and perfectly pressed suits and dresses of all sizes for the family to look like millionaires every time they stop at a roadside dive for bacon and eggs—Every time the old man’s trousers start to get creased a little in the front he’s made to take down a fresh pair of slacks from the back rack and go on, like that, bleakly, tho he might have secretly wished just a good oldtime fishing trip alone or with his buddies for this year’s vacation—But the P.T.A. has prevailed over every one of his desires by now, 1960’s, it’s no time for him to yearn for Big Two Hearted River and the old sloppy pants and the string of fish in the tent, or the woodfire with Bourbon at night—It’s time for motels, roadside driveins, bringing napkins to the gang in the car, having the car washed before the return trip—And if he thinks he wants to explore any of the silent secret roads of America it’s no go, the lady in the sneering dark glasses has now become the navigator and sits there sneering over her previously printed blue-lined roadmap distributed by happy executives in neckties to the vacationists of America who would also wear neckties (after having come along so far) but the vacation fashion is sports shirts, long visored hats, dark glasses, pressed slacks and baby’s first shoes dipped in gold oil dangling from the dashboard—So here I am standing in that road with that big woeful rucksack but also probably with that expression of horror on my face after all those nights sitting in the seashore under giant black cliffs, they see in me the very apotheosical opposite of their every vacation dream and of course drive on—That afternoon I say about 5 thousand cars or probably 3 thousand passed me not one of them ever dreamed of stopping—Which didnt bother me anyway because at first seeing that gorgeous long coast up to Monterey I thought “Well I’ll just hike right in, it’s only 14 miles, I oughta do that easy”—And on the way there’s all kindsa interesting things to see anyway like the seals barking on rocks below,
or quiet old farms made of logs on the hills across the highway, or sudden upstretches that go along dreamy seaside meadows where cows grace and graze in full sight of endless blue Pacific—But because I’m wearing desert boots with their fairly thin soles, and the sun is beating hot on the tar road, the heat finally gets through the soles and I begin to deliver heat blisters in my sockiboos—I’m limping along wondering what’s the matter with me when I realize I’ve got blisters—I sit by the side of the road and look—I take out my first aid kit from the pack and apply unguents and put on cornpads and carry on—But the combination of the heavy pack and the heat of the road increases the pain of the blisters until finally I realize I’ve got to hitch hike a ride or never make it to Monterey at all.
But the tourists bless their hearts after all, they couldnt know, only think I’m having a big happy hike with my rucksack and they drive on, even tho I stick out my thumb—I’m in despair because I’m really stranded now, and by the time I’ve walked seven miles I still have seven to go but I cant go on another step—I’m also thirsty and there are absolutely no filling stations or anything along the way—My feet are ruined and burned, it develops now into a day of complete torture, from nine o’clock in the morning till four in the afternoon I negotiate those nine or so miles when I finally have to stop and sit down and wipe the blood off my feet—And then when I fix the feet and put the shoes on again, to hike on, I can only do it mincingly with little twinkletoe steps like Babe Ruth, twisting footsteps every way I can think of not to press too hard on any particular blister—So that the tourists (lessening now as the sun starts to go down) can now plainly see that there’s a man on the highway limping under a huge pack and asking for a ride, but still they’re afraid he may be the Hollywood hitch hiker with the hidden gun and besides he’s got a rucksack on his back as tho he’d just escaped from the war in Cuba—Or’s got dismembered bodies in the bag anyway—But as I say I dont blame them.