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Back On The Road
by Lou Mindar
We were heading west from Illinois into Missouri when it finally sunk in that we were really going to hit the road for the summer. We had just graduated from college, the Class of ’83, and we were anxious for an adventure.
The trip had started out as a lark, just a random comment in an American Lit class that we all had together. In the class, we read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The book spawned the idea of the three of us recreating the main character’s journey out west. We hashed out the idea over beers a few nights later and our plans were set.
Now, we were five days into our adventure. We were putting the Rocky Mountains in our rearview mirror and we were heading to California. Had we been true to the book, we would have gone to San Francisco. That was where Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, and the rest of Kerouac’s characters had gone. But Kyle had an old friend near Los Angeles that he wanted to see, so we went to LA first. San Francisco would have to wait.
In the end, nothing we were doing was really a re-creation of Kerouac’s Beat Generation classic. In the book, Sal started out hitchhiking from New York to San Francisco. We were driving from Illinois to Los Angeles. We were going to hit San Francisco too, but when that was done, we were thinking about heading south to Texas, something Sal and his gang had never done.
