Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (45 page)

And what do you make of it belonging to a man, owner of a professional football team, who paid more than two-million dollars for it? At about twenty dollars a word, that’s rather more than you made off all your eighteen books published in your lifetime. Or what about a first edition of
On the Road
selling fifty years later for a thousand times more than its original price of a couple of bucks?

The value of the scroll — logging in several thousand miles a year on its well-received tours and traveling farther than did its author — undoubtedly has increased with its own time on the road. But, beyond the monetary, a deeper worth must lie elsewhere — perhaps in its being a unique icon and exotic artifact. Such an interpretation suggests similarity to a grand-master painting, but I believe that would be misleading. Each of those 120,000 typed words has been precisely recorded, beginning with the error in the opening sentence:

I first met met Neal not long after my father died.

down to the final period. (And, yes, the scroll
is
punctuated.) We know today how it differs from the published novel, and we realize it really isn’t like a master painting, with layers of pigment some advanced technology may one day examine to reveal new understandings of how the artist conceived and executed the work. Beneath the carbon of the letters Kerouac struck is no pentimento of earlier tries. It seems heretical to say it, but in practical terms, we no longer really need the scroll itself.

But in other ways, ways more profound, we very much
do
need it. If you’ve ever waited in line outside the National Archives in Washington to climb the steps to get a brief look at one of the handwritten versions of the Declaration of Independence, that one behind bulletproof glass, you know the answer. In an alert human, there can rise from somewhere deeply within, from beyond facile apprehension, a desire to encounter not simply the authentic but
the original,
to stand close to a first thing that counts for something. Is there not a craving in us to witness inceptive force?

Kerouac is gone, and we can no longer hope to look down a bar and discover Jack seated there, waiting for us to blurt out, “I recognize you! You’re that guy!” But we can look at the traces he left across yellowing sheets, line after line in a single paragraph the length of a long touchdown pass, and we can imagine what those forty yards of words cost him. If we can no longer see the artist, perhaps we can see his labor and efforts at craftsmanship shaping inspiration: a vision like that, no perfectly printed book can ever quite reveal to us.

The other day I asked Q to hypothesize: In one room is a famous manuscript under glass; inside a transparent box in another room is the embalmed cadaver of its author, laid out like Lenin. Now, if a visitor can enter only one room, which would the majority choose? She took time to answer: “People deeply bookish or people afraid of the dead — which may work out to the same thing — they would choose the manuscript, and everybody else the cadaver.”

(In a few weeks, this sheet of paper before me at this moment and on which I’m setting down these words with a fountain pen — and their subsequent typed revisions — will all be inside a box in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection in Ellis Library at the University of Missouri. Perhaps someday you, a distant reader, might see this very manuscript page, and I’ll be honored by your curiosity. As for the hand, the arm, and other attached parts directing the pen, they will lie unboxed and nowhere other than wherever, as dust is wont to do. You see, for one who sets some store in immaterial over material traces, it can’t very well be elsewise.)

It is not so with Jean-Louis Kerouac, who rests in Lowell inside a couple of nesting boxes next to his third wife in Edson Cemetery in the part of town known as Spaghettiville. On the warm day Q and I went there, above a worn-down splotch of ground gritty with pebbles and shards of broken glass, was a small, flat, polished-granite marker. At the top was
“TI JEAN”
and below
JOHN L. KEROUAC
and the dates of his birth and death. Under that was
HE HONORED LIFE.
Atop the stone but not covering the inscriptions were a desiccated rose, an unsmoked cigarette, a dollar-twenty-three in coins, a sharpened pencil, and a folded sheet of paper with handwritten words: “Poem For Jack.” From the penmanship, I guessed the author was a young male. It was a heartfelt, artless ramble, and at the bottom of the page: “P.S. Please write back. I’ll leave you a paper and a pen — all a writer ever needs.”

When we stepped under the shade of a large sugar-maple to take it all in, a Lowell woman toward seventy years came along with a friend from New York, who wanted to see the grave. The woman watched quietly while her visiting companion slowly knelt and kissed the stone. The last time I saw a tomb kissed was in Jerusalem at the Holy Sepulcher. The woman of Lowell turned to me so her reverent friend could not hear and said, “I used to see him around. An alcoholic. His writing was gahbage.”

I said, Why are we here, then? But I should have said something about legacies and traces. I should have said something about the pentimento of a human life.

4

Ten M To B

T
HE NEXT THREE CHAPTERS
are a story of a dedication become an obsession, a mania become mastery, an absorption promising to become a national contribution, a tale of a lifelong love almost surpassing understanding. It began some years ago in the Patapsco River Valley, ten miles west of downtown Baltimore, in Ellicott City, Maryland, where sits a small chunk of stone against an exterior wall of an eighteenth-century building at the foot of Main Street and beside the old Baltimore & Ohio Railroad bridge. The rock is knee-bone-high to a small woman, has a breadth nearly that of a man’s forearm, and a depth commensurate to his opened hand. The top is an arc, giving it the look of a squat tombstone, as some passersby have thought. The gray granite, now noticeably worn on the edges, has been there since about 1798; soon after, the old National Road, the first American
through
high-road with federal sanction, was laid out in front of it. I have no good figures, but I like to imagine the number of travelers who have passed the stone on foot or horseback, or in an oxcart, farm wagon, stagecoach, buggy, horsecar, automobile, bus, taxi, truck, trolley, or on motorcycles, bicycles, roller skates, skateboards, and all those seeing it when a B&O train crossed above it. The total might well match the current population of America.

The letters, simply incised, are still quite legible:
10 M TO B
. The first time I read them years ago, they struck me as crypto-mystico-religico-philosophy: or perhaps a slightly scrambled, “O! I Am to Be!” Maybe, on what looked like a tombstone, they were an anagram of
tomb.
I, a ten-year-old, wanted to interpret them as code — covert marching orders to a place to be revealed later.

I wrote the inscription down and for years spoke of it to no one. In time, the stone proved to be something a little different: not only itself a quoz but, in its own way, a tablet of recondite directions to other quoz.

The Starrucca Viaduct at Lanesboro, Pennsylvania, circa 1880.

Because of that small monument, Frank Xavier Brusca and I became acquainted a few years ago. His initials could serve to identify a piece of a computer: “My god! My FXB port is on the fritz!” But any link between his initials and his work as an instructional technologist who teaches staff (in Brusca’s words) “effective and pedagogically sound use of computers” at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, a few miles north of Columbus, is coincidental as far as he can see. His father, in the early days of digitized information, did work on “a bizarre form of nonlinear analytic thinking,” but for his son’s name he had in mind not technology but theology. Yet that link too is peculiarly coincidental in that St. Francis Xavier, the Apostle to the Indies, was a roaming priest nonpareil. If Frank’s life is about anything beyond his family, it’s about traveling, as you’ll see. Transportation and transmission, things St. Francis knew well, are to Brusca as sails to a seaman, an airfoil to a pilot, yeast to a baker. They move him, carry him, let him rise to become something else.

The first time we met, at Antioch College in Ohio, Frank spoke of his interest in the old National Road which later became a long section of U.S. Highway 40, sometimes called the “Main Street of America.” I told him I’d grown up not far from 40 and U.S. 50, another transcontinental route, about where they crossed U.S. 71, a road running from Canada almost to the Gulf. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, I became navigator in my father’s tub of a car, a 1947 Pontiac Chieftain, a machine heavy enough to save his life when a drunk rammed him along U.S. 71. At the nose of the hood was a chromium visage of a Plains Indian I’d shine with my sleeve each morning on the road. For six consecutive Augusts, starting near the center of America at Kansas City, Missouri, my father would pack up the family and strike a course along a cardinal direction down one of those routes we’d follow to its terminus. After a half-dozen summers, those three highways had taken me coast-to-coast twice and to Canada and the Gulf once. By the time I was twelve — all six birthdays of those years celebrated on the road — in my mind was a paved grid of latitudes and longitudes, a geometry useful in visualizing a continent. It was a way to see the face of America. Among the myriad details hidden in that imagined countenance was the Ellicott City stone with its mysterious inscription.

As I told this to Frank, his expression became beatific, and I stopped and said it seemed I’d struck something, and he replied, “You’re talking about Number Ten, the milestone along Main Street. It was my first milestone too. I used to live not far away. I’d ride my bicycle fifteen miles down to see it.” Brusca also grew up as family navigator. The eldest of five children, he would gather road-maps filling stations once gave away, folding them to fit the top of the beverage cooler in front of him that served as his chart table; from it, he directed the passage, each year of travel giving him increased authority.

The fascination so many people have for maps and nautical charts may come from a deeply buried and often unrecognized sense that we are riding a planetary ship sailing the solar winds under the galactic clouds to who-can-say-where, with no landfall in sight, a voyage to outlast us, the entire way yielding us no more certain idea of our cosmic position than a possum has of its hollow. A map gives comfort because it can say
YOU ARE NOW HERE,
and that surely is preferable to
YOU ARE NO WHERE.
Maps, by this line of thought, are ontological documents, because whereness can be central to who-ness and whatness. A ballplayer in center field is not the same
who
or
what
he’d be in a cotton field. For FXB and me, Route 40 embraced the plane of America as the equator does the sphere of Earth. From it we could calculate our positions. If he grew up near the eastern tip of the great belt of U.S. 40 and I at the buckle, the distance mattered little because the road bound us, and, to press the metaphor toward the absurd, that highway helped hold up our philosophical pants covering our less public spiritual Skivvies.

(Have I wandered again from the through route of a story?)

At its peak use, Highway 40 was slightly more than three-thousand miles long, running at one time from near the Boardwalk in Atlantic City to the Embarcadero in San Francisco, salt water to salt water. I told Frank, in all those miles, the Ellicott stone was a detail I especially cherished, although I wasn’t sure I understood its inscription,
10 M TO B
, and he said, rupturing its mystery, “Ten miles to Baltimore. It wasn’t so useful if you were headed west.”

Except for my years in the Navy, my homes have never been more than a few miles from 40, which, unintendedly, straddles the fortieth parallel which, also unintendedly, is the halfway mark, a useful equatorial line, of the forty-eight states. Frank’s abodes throughout his life also have clung to the route like dungarees hanging from a clothesline: Baltimore; Denver; several returns to each; and Kettering, Yellow Springs, and Westerville in Ohio.

On those moves, for the most part, destiny has directed him, although when he was ten, he did his best to take a hand in it. After his family returned the first time from Denver to Baltimore (Randallstown, to be precise), young Frank longed for the Front Range and gave considerable thought to ways he might engineer a move back west. At last, he hoped he’d found a means when he happened upon a book in the public library, a single work that would come to shape his life as the Bible, or
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
or
How to Win Friends and Influence People,
have molded others. It was George Stewart’s
U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America,
a kind of road narrative in words and photographs compiled from two coast-to-coast trips, one in 1949 and the second in 1950 (the very years I was navigating that chromium chieftain’s head over the great highway).