Roads

What were we doing from April 2 to April 22, 1951?

I don't know. Memory doesn't work that way. There's no book that you can go to and open to 4/2/1951, to find out. You have to think of something close to it and then construct the memory with help from external signposts, like calendars. I remember that 1951 was the year of the Great Blizzard in Nashville. Betty remembers that she was in sixth grade when the blizzard hit. So, from April 2 to April 22, 1951, we were in sixth grade.

In New York City, during those same three weeks, Jack Kerouac, working like a crazy man, wrote out a whole novel that he had been thinking about for years. He got a lot of paper and taped the sheets together, end to end, so he could type without stopping to put new pages in. He typed it out in one long paragraph. When he got through, he wrote his friend, Neal, in San Francisco, and said: "I've telled all the road, now." He said the paper it was written on looked like a road, stretching out from his typewriter. He called his book "On the Road." It was about getting out and going somewhere - anywhere - without turning around or stopping.

We didn't know anything about that. But the idea of getting out and going somewhere caught people's fancies. It seemed a particularly American way of thinking in the fifties. You didn't have to be a beatnik to want to do it. Ran Pickell and Wally Wolfe got out one summer and biked across the country and got their pictures in the National Geographic. They were probably influenced more by Open Road for Boys than "On the Road."

Once, in the summer of our Junior year, my mother was driving down Hillsboro Road, near the Presbyterian Church, and I was in the car. At the corner of Hillsboro Road and Stokes Lane, she stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. It was Roy Ackland.

My mother asked him what he was going to do with his life. He said he was going to go to Hollywood and be a stuntman.