The Dharma Bums, 1st edition bookjacket, 1958. Larger.
At the northern edge of Yosemite National Park, Matterhorn Peak rises more than 12,000 feet above sea level—just out of reach for one not-quite fearless climber.
In Dharma Bums, Beat writer Jack Kerouac's alter-ego Ray Smith tells a fictionalized account of his climb on Matterhorn Peak with good buddy, Gary Snyder, or in this version, Japhy Ryder, whose joyfull descent from the top of the peak inspires a tired and terrified Ray to turn around and follow.
Then suddenly everything was just like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bouncing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the sides of the world and in that flash I realized it's impossible to fall off mountains you fool and with a yodel of my own I suddenly got up and began running down the mountain after him doing exactly the same huge leaps, the same fantastic runs and jumps, and in the space of about five minutes I'd guess Japhy Ryder and I . . . leaping and yelling like mountain goats or I'd say like Chinese lunatics of a thousand years ago. . . . In fact with one of my greatest leaps and loudest screams of joy I came flying right down to the edge of the lake and dug my sneakered heels into the mud and just fell sitting there, glad. Japhy was already taking his shoes off and pouring sand and pebbles out. It was great. I took off my sneakers and poured out a couple of buckets of lava dust and said "Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can't fall off a mountain."
"Jack Kerouac," photographed by Tom Palumbo, c.1956. Larger.
California's rugged and beautiful central coast boasts countless unforgettable features, but perhaps one of its most appealing is its isolation.
Jack Kerouac deeply felt that isolation and captured it in Big Sur, here in a passage that turns solitude into a meditation on the joys of the here and now.
There's the present moment fraught with tangled woods—There's the bird suddenly quiet on his branch while his wife glances at him—There's the grace of an axe handle as good as an Eglevsky ballet—There's "Mien Mo Mountain" in the fog illumined August moon mist among other heights gorgeous and misty rising in dimmer tiers somehow rosy in the night like the classic silk paintings of China and Japan—. . . There's the laughter of the loon in the shadow of the moon—There's an owl hooting in the weird Bodhidharma trees—There's flowers and redwood logs—There's the simple woodfire and the careful yet absent-minded feeding of it which is an activity that like all activities is no activity . . . yet it is a meditation in itself especially because all woodfires, like snowflakes, are different every time . . .
Jack Kerouac's Big Sur appeared in 1962, a chapter, wrote Kerouac, of one vast book he thought of as "The Duluoz Legend."
Southern Pacific engines at the Bay Shore yards roundhouse, 1958. Larger.
Since the days of the Central Pacific, Californians have always had a love-hate relationship with the railroads. So did beat writer Jack Kerouac. In 1952 he made his living as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific, but something about those "merciless wheels" telegraphed dread to Kerouac's inner ear.
Terrified of injury on the job, Kerouac sought escape working on his "spontaneous prose," including a piece called "October in the Railroad Earth," a prose poem of his working life that duplicated railroad rhythms.
So it's peaceful Sunday morning in California and off we go, tack-a-tick, lao-tichi-couch, out of the Bay Shore yards, pause momentarily at the main line for the green, ole 71 or ole whatever been by and now we get out and go swamming up the tree valleys and town vale hollows and main street crossing parking-lot last-night attendant plots and Stanford lots of the world-to our destination in the Poo which I can see, and, so to while the time I'm up in the cupolo and with my newspaper dig the latest news on the front page and also consider and make notations of the money I spent already for this day Sunday absolutely not jot spent a nothing--California rushes by and with sad eyes we watch it reel the whole bay and the discourse falling off to gradual gils that ease and graduate to Santa Clara Valley then and the fig and behind is the fog immemoriates while the mist closes and we come running out to the bright sun of the Sabbath Californiay. . . .
Jack Kerouac captured the restlessness and alienation many of his generation felt in post-war America. Books like On the Road and Dharma Bums continue to appeal to readers who share those feelings in our own time.
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