On Sunday evening we pulled into town after four nights on the road. Four nights of snow and rain and eighteen-wheelers sucking us right off the highway every time they passed, and now here we were in Selkirk, Manitoba, with that big fish leering down at us.
It is morning. The woman on the radio said Hurricane Rita passed through in the middle of the night, but it probably does not feel that way to Boogie Augustine, who is drinking Bud Light in his white pickup truck near a gas station off the Interstate. The rain is sheeting sideways and the wind is gusting so hard that it rocks the truck. If you get out of the truck, you can lean into the wind and not fall over when you should, and the rain hurts when it pricks your skin.
His hair is red and shaggy and longish, and he’s pale and slim and six feet tall. Music is everything to him, which makes sense because he’s fifteen. I was twenty-two when he was born. I’d never had brothers or any other close male relatives and I’d always dreamed of having a brother or a son. The idea of it was strange and exotic, and when he was born, it was as if I had given birth to a llama or something.
The Road travelled by Jack London (Rutgers) is quite a different one. The first in Rutgers’ Subterranean Lives: Chronicles of Alternative America series, London’s Road contains all of the stories that he wrote about his hobo days at the turn of the nineteenth century, riding the rails with tramps who sported “monicas” like New York Tommy, Pacific Slim and Syracuse Shine. In “Hoboes That Pass in the Night,” London tells how he tramped “clear across Canada over three thousand miles of railroad” in 1894, following close on the heels of a hobo named Skysail Jack.
As Kerouac later described it, the letter was “a work of literary genius. Neal, he was just telling me what happened one time in Denver, and he had every detail. It was just like Dostoevsky. And I realized that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it!” That 1950 letter—at least the 5,100-word portion that remains—is included in Cassady’s Collected Letters, 1944-1967 (Penguin), as are more than 200 other letters written to Kerouac, Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes and others, including a large selection of letters to Cassady’s second wife, Carolyn.
I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation that culminated in his shouting that the friend I was visiting in Boston could not be American if she had a Hispanic name.
When the celebrated English poet Rupert Brooke came to Canada on the train from New York in 1913, he had been warned that he would find “a country without a soul.” The gloomy streets of Montreal, overshadowed by churches and banks and heavy telephone wires, reminded him of the equally gloomy streets of Glasgow and Birmingham.
Despite an icy northeast wind huffing across the bay I sneak out after dark, after my mother falls asleep clutching her leather Bible, and I hike up the rutted road to the frosted meadow to stand in mist with my shoes in muck, and toss my echo against the moss-covered fieldstone corners of the burned-out church where Sunday nights in summer for years Father Thomas
