The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [244]
By 1959 Kerouac had become a hero of the nonconformists. Groups like the Barefooters were an early version of the hippies who hitchhiked to Alaska throughout the 1960s, searching for revelations in nameless woods. Feeling blessed, they wanted to escape the confines of the Lower Forty-Eight. Kerouac spoke to later young people disenchanted with postwar abundance, thirsting for a deeper truth than air-conditioning and missile technology. The neoconservative critic Norman Podhoretz, in the Partisan Review, dismissed On the Road as anti-American, and as promoting drug use, free sex, and joblessness over the Protestant work ethic.27 What Podhoretz didn’t say was that the “know-nothing” beats, as he called them, were bravely asking questions about an accident at a nuclear power plant in Windscale, England—and about Minamata disease, a neurological syndrome caused by poisonous mercury in waters.
In The Dharma Bums, the poet Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder) represented the open road: a lineage that could be traced through American literature from Thoreau to Whitman to Muir. Despite all the commentary about the novel’s overt sexuality (“yabyum”—two men with one woman—adds spice to the story), The Dharma Bums was, in truth, an intersection of Christianity and Buddhism. Kerouac’s overriding message was, “Charity shall cover the multitude of sins.” His mountaintop exhortations represented a great original American artist at his absolute prime; the descriptive writing equals the best of Thomas Wolfe and John Muir. “I’ll tramp with a rucksack,” Kerouac wrote, “and make it the pure way.”28
Perhaps more than any other novel, The Dharma Bums conveyed the value of wilderness to young audiences in the 1960s. Kerouac’s words pulled readers toward a craving for outdoors experiences, for almost mystical reasons. “Logs and snags came floating down at twenty-five miles an hour,” Kerouac wrote. “I figured if I should try to swim across the narrow river I’d be a half-mile downstream before I kicked to the other shore. It was a river wonderland, the emptiness of the golden eternity, odors of moss and bark and twigs and mud, all ululating mysterious visionstuff before my eyes, tranquil and everlasting nevertheless, the hillhairing trees, the dancing sunlight. As I looked up the clouds assumed, as I assumed, faces of hermits.”29
Understandably, Kerouac deeply resented any belittling of his romantic yearnings for Walt Whitman, Huck Finn, and Herman Melville. Combining Bob Marshall’s wilderness philosophy with Gary Snyder’s belief in nature as a healer of the soul, Kerouac defended the hobo tradition in a torrent of heartfelt, first-rate prose. Writing from a cabin at Big Sur, where the rugged Santa Lucia mountains dropped straight into the Pacific Ocean and huge waves slapped in rhythmic fury against towering sea rocks, Kerouac lamented the mainstream culture and its need to commodify everything, even its national parks. In Big Sur Kerouac, with a charitable heart, objected to the end of “barefoot kids” with “a string of fish,” warming themselves by wood fires while camping out in secret coves along the Pacific coast. The Barefooters were doing that in Homer, but most American families were now driving station wagons into sacred landscapes like the Painted Desert or Mount McKinley, “sneering” over a “printed blue-lined roadmap” and worried silly about getting “the car washed before the return trip.”30 Or, perhaps, these families headed to Alaska on a cruise ship, listening to music and eating buffets of chemically enriched foods five times a day.
Lonesome Traveler was filled with impressionistic prose riffs; its central premise was the enduring virtues of hoboing in the wilderness. In the