Jack of all trades

One of my favorite writers was Jack Kerouac, who is always linked to the Beat writers of the 1950s and 60s, although he did not like being called a Beatnik.

Would you?

Kerouac (1922-1969) was unsettled all of his life, roaming from his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, and taking on more jobs than the usual amount for one man. He was a sportswriter for the Lowell Sun (a great high school and college athlete, he often found himself sidelined by injury and wrote about the games in which he would have played), he was in and out of the United States Merchant Marine  and the United States Navy (enlistment photo at left), and he worked other odd jobs along the way. He wrote a novel called "The Town And The City" in 1950 and was considered a likely success as a writer. But the book was not a success, and he wound up hitchhiking across the nation, finding himself working as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, Wyoming, in the summer of 1956.

He hoped that the isolation of being alone in a tall lookout tower in Mount Baker National Forest would provide him a chance to get away from alcohol, drugs, and his boisterous friends, so he could concentrate on his work. He reported for duty, received a week's worth of firefighting training, and packed $45 worth of groceries, but soon found that withdrawing from the world into an endless vista of forest was not the answer to his writer's block. That entire summer, he wrote exactly one letter to his mother, several haikus, and some journal entries. 

When his duty ended in September '56, he got back on the road, and not long after that his world changed from the total solitude of a 30' x 60' tower cab to a situation where he could not find a moment to be alone with his thoughts - which had been his only companion a year before.  

On September 5, 1957, New York Times book critic Gilbert Millstein gave a hearty review to “On the Road,” the book Jack wrote about cross-country travels and adventures. Fame came suddenly. “Jack went to bed obscure,” Kerouac’s girlfriend told a reporter, “and woke up famous.”

He had already written "On The Road" before he took the lookout job, and in just one year found himself on the cover of magazines and the talk of the publishing world. "On The Road" was his peak of both creativity and fame, and although he continued to write until his death in 1969, we can only wonder how that summer changed him. 

Being alone with one's thoughts is beneficial. The constant crush of humanity around us is not.