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jargon of Broadway theater, Kerouac “believed his own show”: spontaneous prose enriched by Buddhist philosophy, transcendental yearnings, and American outdoors romanticism. When Grove Press published his essays, Sputnik had been launched, Americans were worried about a supposed “missile gap” relative to the Soviet Union, and NASA’s space programs were headline news, so Kerouac’s meditations about the open road seemed antiquated. But the essays took on relevance when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission drew up plans to test nuclear weapons on the Aleutians. “The Jet Age is crucifying the hobo,” Kerouac wrote, “because how can he hop a freight jet?”31

Kerouac was concerned that in mature America “camping” was deemed a “healthy sport” for the Boy Scouts but “a crime for nature men who have made it their vocation.” With a rucksack on his back, Kerouac had wandered through America from 1948 to 1956. But he abruptly halted his hitchhiking because of ugly television news stories about the “abominableness of strangers with packs passing through by themselves independently” in frightened suburbia. Beatniks were considered dangerous perverts to be avoided at all costs. To Kerouac, untrammeled places like the North Cascades, the Brooks Range, and the Kenai Peninsula offered the last best hope for disappearing into the wilderness to find oneself, as Rockwell Kent had done at Fox Island in 1920. In Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac noted the great hoboes in American history, from Ben Franklin to William O. Douglas. Lovingly he declared John Muir a hobo who “went off into the mountains with a pocketful of dried bread, which he soaked in creeks.” To Kerouac the great Teddy Roosevelt was a “political hobo” of the first order. Hadn’t the poet Vachel Lindsay enriched America by his “troubadour” hobo wanderings, giving farmers verses in exchange for homemade pies?

Kerouac was frustrated that the open road was under assault by a police state mentality. Douglas had complained about railroad cops beating hoboes outside Chicago during the Great Depression; now, Kerouac voiced a similar complaint in Lonesome Traveler about “great sinister tax-paid police cars (1960 models with humorless searchlights)” bearing down on The Wilderness Society types who were only looking for “hills of holy silence and holy privacy.” To Kerouac, the celestial seeker, there was “nothing nobler” than to “put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom.”32 Kerouac was insisting, in 1960, that vagrancy wasn’t merely legal; it was part of the patriotic Thoreauvian tradition that made America unique. To Kerouac, Johnny Appleseed (whose real name was John Chapman), the Swedenborgian orchidist who dropped seeds of fruit-bearing trees from the Berkshires to the Ohio Valley chanting “the Lord is good to me,” a wanderer who was even kind to skunks, should be celebrated as an American counterpart of Saint Francis of Assisi. Nothing was more liberating to Kerouac than to live in a wilderness where, overnight, you could be reborn, choosing your own new name and identity: Aurora Borealis, Brother Asaiah, Sedna, Japhy Ryder, or Johnny Appleseed.

But the Anchorage Museum of History and Art circa 2010—funded in part by BP and Shell—doesn’t consider beats, Buddhists, or Barefooters* a part of state history worth remembering. Instead it prominently displays under glass the bronze boots worn by William G. Bishop when he ordered the Richfield Oil crews to drill the discovery well for the Swanson River oil field on the Kenai Peninsula in 1957. This was a gift from the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, which was promoting the slogan “Drill today, drill tomorrow.” Down south in Homer, however, every summer a “Howl” camp was held, at which naturalist instructors took children backpacking, rock climbing, and bird-watching.

Chapter Twenty-One - Sea Otter Jones and Musk-Ox Matthiessen

I

If contestants on a quiz show were asked to identify the most valuable market fur in the world, “sea otter” would be the right answer. Sea otters have a close-packed dark