Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [57]
Dicky Hampshire’s eyes gleamed with excitement. It was the greatest sight we’d ever seen when we crossed the back Textile field and came to its high-end plateau over the dump and the deep canyoned river quarter mile wide to Little Canada, and saw all the way there the huge mountain of ugly sinister waters lunging around Lowell like a beast dragon– We saw a gigantic barn roof floating in mid stream, jiggling with the vibration of the roar in the hump there— “Wow!” Hungry, tremendously hungry as we got on this excitement we never went home to eat all day.
—”The strategy is to snare one of them barnyard roofs and make a gigantic raft,” said Dick, and was he ever right– We rushed towards the river across the dump. There, in brightest morning, where the great chimney loomed 200 feet high, orangebrick, overtopping the brick mass of Textile so nobly situated in height-vistas, there were our green lawn-slopes (the lawns of power houses neat and swardgreen) where we’d been playing King of the Hill for eternities, three years–there was the cinder path to Moody Street at the bridge (where cars were parked in this exciting morning, people were gathered, how many times I’ve dreamed of leaping over that fence at bridge end and in dream glooms rush down by the shadow of the iron underpinnings and the jutting rock of the shore, and bushes, and shadows, and Doctor Sax dreary ambiguities, something namelessly sad and dreamed and trampled over in the civil wars of the mind & memory– and further scene-dreams on the straw slopes cundrum-cluttered overlooking a little cliff drop to the waterside rocks)— We felt we’d grown up because these places and scenes were now more than child’s play, they were now abluted in pure day by the white snow mist of tragedy.
Tragedy roared ahead of us–all Lowell with bated breath was watching from a thousand parapets natural and otherwise in the Lowell valley. Our mothers had said “Be careful” and by noon they too, huddled in housewife coats, locked the door and suspended the ironing of the wash to come and peek at the river even though it entailed a long walk down Moody across Textile to the bridge-
Billy and I surveyed this remarkable sunny morning. The river came boiling in brown anger from the rivulets of the valley north, on the Boulevard cars were parked to see the river waving trees in its claw,—down at the Rosemont end of the dump a crowd was lined to face the Netherlandic havoc there, our little shitty beach in the reeds was now the bottom of the sea–I remembered all the boys who had drowned– “Tu connassa tu le petit bonhomme Roger qui etait parent avec les Voyers du store? ll’s a noyer hier—dans riviere–a Rosemont–ta beach que t’appele”—(Did you know the little boy Roger who was related to the Voyers of the store? He drowned yesterday–in the river– at Rosemont–your beach you call it.)— The River was Drowning Itself– It came over the Falls at the White Bridge not in its usual blue sheen and fall (among whitecaps snow) but sleered over in a brown and hungry slide sheen that only had to slip two feet and was in the foams of the bottom flood–the little children of the Orphanage on Pawtucket at the White Bridge were standing in watchful rows in the wire fences of the yard or down in the Grotto near the Cross, something huge and independent had come into their lives.
Dicky and I jumped down among the fenders and crap of the dumpslope, down to the water’s edge,