Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [62]
I wished the river would dry up and become the swimming hole of summer for the heroes of Pawtucketville again, right now it was only fit for the heroes of Punic War II—But it kept roaring and rising, the whole town was wet. Gigantic diving barn roofs suddenly submerging and rising again huge and dripping elicited “Ooohs & Aaahs” from watchers on the shore– March raged to her fury. The mad moon, a crescent hint, sliced thinly through the rayward crowds of cloud that boosted themselves in an east wind across the skies of disaster. I saw a lonely telephone pole standing eight feet deep, in thin rain.
On the porch of my house I knew in meditative revery that the roar I heard in the valley was a catastrophic roar —the big tree across the street added his multiform Voice of leafy to the general sigh sad of March–
The rain fell in the night. The Castle was dark. The knotty limbs and roots of a great tree growing out the side of a pavement near the ironpickets of old downtown Lowell churches made a faint glimmer in the streetlamps.— Looking at the clock you could envision the river behind its illuminated disk of time, its fury rush over shores and people–time and the river were out of joint. Hastily, at night, at the little green desk in my room, I wrote in my diary: “Flood going full force, big brown mountain of water rushing by. Won $3.50 today Pimlico show bet.” (I also kept my bets going in the imaginary bankroll that lasted years—) There was something wet and gloomy in the green of my desk (as brown darkness flared in the window where my mudblack apple tree branches reached in to touch my sleep), something hopeless, gray, dreary, nineteen-thirtyish, lostish, broken not in the wind a cry but a big dull blurt hanging dumbly in a gray brown mass of semi late-afternoon cloudy darkness and pebble grit Void of sweaty sticky clothes and dawg despair–something that can’t possibly come back again in America and history, the gloom of the unaccomplished mudheap civilization when it gets caught with its pants down from a source it long lost contact with–City Hall golf politicians and clerks who also played golf complained that the river had drowned all the fairways and tees, these knickers types were disgruntled by natural phenomena.
By Friday the crest had been passed through town and the river starts going down.
“But the damage has been done.”
BOOK SIX
The Castle
1
A STRANGE LULL took place–after the Flood and Before the Mysteries–the Universe was suspending itself for a moment of quiet–like a drop of dew on the beak of a Bird– at Dawn.
By Saturday the river is gone way down and you see all the raw marks of the flood on wall and shore, the whole town is soaked, muddy and tired– By Saturday morning the sun is shining, the sky is piercingly heartbreakingly blue, and my sister and I are dancing over the Moody Street Bridge to get out Saturday morning Library books. All the night before I’ve been dreaming of books–Im standing in the children’s library in the basement, rows of glazed brown books are in front of me, I reach out and open one–my soul thrills to touch the soft used meaty pages covered with avidities of reading–at last, at last, I’m opening the magic brown book–I see the great curlicued print, the immense candelabra firstletters at the beginnings of chapters–and Ah!—picture of rosy