Big Sur

by Jack Kerouac

THE CHURCH IS BLOWING a sad windblown “Kathleen” on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone and goopy, groaning from another drinking bout and groaning most of all because I’d ruined my “secret return” to San Francisco by getting silly drunk while hiding in the alleys with bums and then marching forth into North Beach to see everybody altho Lorenz Monsanto and I’d exchanged huge letters outlining how I would sneak in quietly, call him on the phone using a code name like Adam Yulch or Lalagy Pulvertaft (also writers) and then he would secretly drive me to his cabin in the Big Sur woods where I would be alone and undisturbed for six weeks just chopping wood, drawing water, writing, sleeping, hiking, etc. etc.—But

It’s the first trip I’ve taken away from home (my mother’s house) since the publication of “Road” the book that “made me famous” and in fact so much so I’ve been driven mad for three years by endless telegrams, phonecalls, requests, mail, visitors, reporters, snoopers (a big voice saying in my basement window as I prepare to write a story:—ARE YOU BUSY?)

“It’s the first trip I’ve taken away from home (my mother’s house) since the publication of “Road” the book that “made me famous” and in fact so much so I’ve been driven mad for three years by endless telegrams, phonecalls, requests, mail, visitors, reporters, snoopers (a big voice saying in my basement window as I prepare to write a story:—ARE YOU BUSY?) or the time the reporter ran upstairs to my bedroom as I sat there in my pajamas trying to write down a dream—Teenagers jumping the six-foot fence I’d had built around my yard for privacy—Parties with bottles yelling at my study window “Come on out and get drunk, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!”—A woman coming to my door and saying “I’m not going to ask you if you’re Jack Duluoz because I know he wears a beard, can you tell me where I can find him, I want a real beatnik at my annual Shindig party”—Drunken visitors puking in my study, stealing books and even pencils—Uninvited acquaintances staying for days because of the clean beds and good food my mother provided—Me drunk practically all the time to put on a jovial cap to keep up with all this but finally realizing I was surrounded and outnumbered and had to get away to solitude again or die . . . “

So Lorenzo Monsanto wrote and said “Come to my cabin, no one’ll know,”

(all over America highschool and college kids thinking “Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on the road all the time hitch hiking” while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded in a roomette bunk crashin across that Salt Flat)—But

“One fast move or I’m gone,” I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you cant learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with—That

Enough! “One fast move or I’m gone” so I jump up, do my headstand first to pump blood back into the hairy brain, take a shower in the hall, new T-shirt and socks and underwear, pack vigorously, hoist the rucksack and run out throwing the key on the desk and hit the cold street

“The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression of unbearable anguish so hagged and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything: it’s like William Seward Burroughs’ “Stranger” suddenly appearing in your place in the mirror—Enough! “One fast move or I’m gone” so I jump up, do my headstand first to pump blood back into the hairy brain, take a shower in the hall, new T-shirt and socks and underwear, pack vigorously, hoist the rucksack and run out throwing the key on the desk and hit the cold street and walk fast to the nearest little grocery store to buy two days of food, stick it in the rucksack, hike thru lost alleys of Russian sorrow where bums sit head on knees in foggy doorways in the goopy eerie city night I’ve got to escape or die, and into the bus station—In a half hour into a bus seat, the bus says “Monterey” and off we go down the clean neon hiway and I sleep all the way, waking up amazed and well again smelling sea air the bus driver shaking me “End of the line, Monterey.”—And by God it is Monterey, I stand sleepy in the 2 A.M. seeing vague little fishing masts across the street from the bus driveway. Now all I’ve got to do to complete my escape is get 14 miles down the coast to the Raton Canyon bridge and hike in.”

“ONE FAST MOVE OR I’M GONE” so I blow $8 on a cab to drive me down that coast, it’s a foggy night tho sometimes you can see stars in the sky to the right where the sea is, tho you cant see the sea you can only hear about it from the cabdriver—“What kinda country is it around here? I’ve never seen it.”

So I start my trudge, pack aback, just head down following my lamp spot, head down but eyes suspiciously peering a little up, like a man in the presence of a dangerous idiot he doesnt want to annoy—The dirt road starts up a little, curves to the right, starts down a little, then suddenly up again, and up—By now the sea roar is further back and at one point I even stop and look back to see nothing—“I’m gonna put out my light and see what I can see” I say rooted to my feet where they’re rooted to that road—Fat lotta good, when I put out the light I see nothing but the dim sand at my feet.

I can almost feel the sea pulling at that racket in the trees but there’s my spotlamp so all I gotta do is follow the lovely sand road which dips and dips in rising carnage and suddenly a flattening, a sight of bridge logs, there’s the bridge rail, there’s the creek just four feet below, cross the bridge you woken bum and see what’s on the other shore.

And now before me is a dreamy meadowland with a good old corral gate and a barbed wire fence the road running right on left but this where I get off at last. Then I crawl thru the barbed wire and find myself trudging a sweet little sand road winding right thru fragrant dry heathers as tho I’d just popped thru from hell into familiar old Heaven on Earth, yair and Thank God

And worst of all is the bridge!

“And worst of all is the bridge! I go ambling seaward along the path by the creek and see this awful thin white line of bridge a thousand unbridgeable sighs of height above the little woods I’m walking in, you just cant believe it, and to make things heart-thumpingly horrible you come to a little bend in what is now just a trail and there’s the booming surf coming at you whitecapped crashing down on sand as tho it was higher than where you stand, like a sudden tidal wave world enough to make you step back or run back to the hills—And not only that, the blue sea behind the crashing high waves is full of huge black rocks rising like old ogresome castles dripping wet slime, a billion years of woe right there, the moogrus big clunk of it right there with its slaverous lips of foam at the base—So that you emerge from pleasant little wood paths with a stem of grass in your teeth and drop it to see doom—And you look up at that unbelievably high bridge and feel death and for a good reason: because underneath the bridge, in the sand right beside the sea cliff, hump, your heart sinks to see it: the automobile that crashed thru the bridge rail a decade ago and fell 1000 feet straight down and landed upsidedown, is still there now, an upsidedown chassis of rust in a strewn skitter of sea-eaten tires, old spokes, old car seats sprung with straw, one sad fuel pump and no more people—“

So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.

“But you look up into the sky, bend way back, my God you’re standing directly under that aerial bridge with its thin white line running from rock to rock and witless cars racing across it like dreams! From rock to rock! All the way down the raging coast! So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.”

But the fire crackles, the patch gets sewn, the creek gurgles and thumps outside—A creek having so many voices it’s amazing, from the kettledrum basin deep bumpbumps to the little gurgly feminine crickles over shallow rocks, sudden choruses of other singers and voices from the log dam,

“But the fire crackles, the patch gets sewn, the creek gurgles and thumps outside—A creek having so many voices it’s amazing, from the kettledrum basin deep bumpbumps to the little gurgly feminine crickles over shallow rocks, sudden choruses of other singers and voices from the log dam, dibble dabble all night long and all day long the voices of the creek amusing me so much at first but in the later horror of that madness night becoming the babble and rave of evil angels in my head—So not minding the bat or the rip finally, ending up cant sleep because too awake now and it’s 3 A.M. so the fire I stoke and I settle down and read the entire Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde novel in the wonderful little handsized leather book left there by smart Monsanto who also must’ve read it with wide eyes on a night like that—Ending the last elegant sentences at dawn, time to get up and fetch water from gurgly creek and start breakfast of pancakes and syrup—And saying to myself “So why fret when something goes wrong like your sleepingbag breaking in the night, use self reliance”—“ Screw the bats” I add.”

Who would build a cabin up there but some bored but hoary old adventurous architect maybe got sick of running for congress and one of these days a big Orson Welles tragedy with screaming ghosts a woman in a white nightgown’ll go flying down that sheer cliff—But

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

“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 . . . “

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.

And when I light the lamp of aftersupper reading, here comes the nightly moth to his nightly death at 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.

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.

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

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

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

No bluejays yakking for me to wake up any more, no gurgling creek, I’m back in the grooky city and I’m trapped.

“So we drive back to town and go to the mad boarding-house to drink some more and I pass out dead drunk on the floor as usual in that house, waking up in the morning groaning far from my clean cot on the porch in Big Sur—No bluejays yakking for me to wake up any more, no gurgling creek, I’m back in the grooky city and I’m trapped.”