On The Road

So Adam, a friend of mine who is in fact absolutely evil in every way, shape and form, suggests to me, months ago, that I need to read Jack Kerouac's classic book about seeing America. He says it'll make me want to pack up everything and throw it on a train or something and just go, go, wherever it happens to take me, as long as I'm out and traveling. He knows this, because at some point familiarity becomes indistinguishable from mind-reading, and he is fully aware that if I had my way I would do that anyway.
In fact, it's my opinion that people are naturally nomadic, and that settling down in one place takes an act of sheer will because we're supposed to be up and seeing and moving and doing and experiencing.
At any rate, I go out and buy On The Road, but I wait to read it. This was a big, big mistake, because I waited until the middle of the Iowa winter, when my natural wanderlust is already at a yearly high. Fair warning to anyone who has the same inclinations as me; DO NOT READ "ON THE ROAD". It will take your desire to hit the road, and ratchet it up to 1,000.
Of course, this is all somewhat of an exercise in nostalgia. The road Kerouac describes takes you through an America that is long gone. The year is 1947, I think, and the post-war U.S. is filled with opportunities to hitchhike, and places a resourceful person can find to stay, so that when Sal (Jack's proxy) reaches California, he has spent less than a hundred bucks. Today, provided you manage to find anyone willing to pick up hitchhikers on the interstate, you're still going to run a very different road.
Connections are a wonderful thing, and thanks to cell phones, the interstate and the internet, more people are connected to more places. But the price of that is Kerouac's America, because division creates difference, and when the division disappears so, slowly, do the differences. The onset of suburbia has made most places the same as the last place. There are small towns that don't fit the idea of suburbia, sure, and for my money those are the places worth visiting. But even in 1947 America was still discovering itself. Now that it has found more or less an answer and settled down, it's a much more cohesive place, but one with a lot less going on for someone who wants to hit the road.
What Kerouac's book still gives us is nonetheless more powerful than nostalgia. He doesn't paint America in wonderful rainbow colors all of the time; we get to see first hand what a type of life lived by so many (and glorified in a lot of works) was like while actually being lived. Even if we can't live it any longer, it is still a valuable service.