On borrowed ink

“You can’t live in this world, but there’s nowhere else to go.” – Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac completed his book “On the Road” in only three weeks, as if he penned it with his own blood. Technically, he just fed a continuous roll of teletype paper into his typewriter. Perhaps pausing to insert single sheets would have caused a pile-up on his imagination’s highway. The New York Times hailed it as “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation that Kerouac, himself, named years before as ‘beat’ and whose principle avatar he is.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti said Kerouac provided us with “a vision of America seen from a speeding car.”

I was just a tyke on a trike when Kerouac’s novel first appeared in 1957. The only “beats” I’d been forced to consider turned out to be yucky vegetables. Now that I’m down the road, so to speak – a retired schoolteacher living without a lesson plan – I realize Kerouac’s vision of living fast and dying young was never my choice and certainly not the road I want to see carved by corporate energy through our public lands. Perhaps it’s time for a new novel.

If Kerouac’s highway survives, we’ll need some sort of measuring stick to judge how far we’ve strayed from his vision of a more natural freedom. Not that romantic, century-old affair with the open road, but our commitment to trees and open land that resuscitates us by bringing oxygen into our lives.

My novel will be titled “On Borrowed Ink.” My main character’s mission will begin by trying to visit every designated wilderness on the East Coast. He’ll start out lucky, a solar-powered run-about will pick him up. He’ll take this free ride all the way to Kansas City, Mo., and find a mass transportation connection to begin his trek. All the while he’ll fiddle with his lifetime Senior Pass, promising himself that he’ll also visit every national park out West, on his way back home. Of course, many complications will appear in the novel – the biggest associated with getting him to these destinations, having lost his driver’s license, and maybe I’ll include a dust-storm gathering on the horizon.

That’s the spot where I always run out of literary gas. Surely, the disenfranchised, the down and out, the beat, will always be with us, reconstituted along the lines of Kerouac’s beatnik generation. My generation will likely end up chronicled as a culture of debtniks, maxed-out credit card consumers foreclosed out of their houses, living with their mothers in their childhood homes, just like Kerouac did as he chronicled his story.

Still, I’d start my novel by preaching the sermon of the wilderness, a beatific vision of our heritage still vibrant in a futuristic world. About 85 million acres of national park campgrounds and hiking trails in the United States will be the closest comparisons we can draw between Kerouac’s boxcars, beaches and open highways. “On Borrowed Ink” will speak for a constituency of backcountry dreamers, disengaged from the current obsession with off-road ATVs, side-by-sides, dirt bikes, rock crawlers, snowmobiles, monster pickups and jeeps. It will be a place where a pair of trail shoes can be passed around like a cheap bottle of wine.

Maybe Willie Nelson will be inspired to retitle and revise his popular song for my novel’s debut, “Off the road again.” Maybe in another half-century, Americans will become reacquainted with their feet, will choose to walk again, to find a trailhead and celebrate an absence of pavement. Maybe I’ll have my character backpacking bundles of flattened obsolete motel nightstands into the parks and lighting campfires fueled by recycled particle board. With more than half of the world’s population already living in cities, seeing actual starlight might be as mind-blowing as hearing Allen Ginsberg first read his poem “Howl” at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.

The natural world will play a big part in my version of America. We may be running out of fossil fuels, space, money and patience, but if we ever lose our public lands, we will be so much more impoverished.

As for my main character, whatever his name will be, he’ll be left with his impossible dream, much like Don Quixote. Every coal-fired smoke stack or nuclear plant’s cooling towers, every nest of power lines and every monster truck’s accelerator stomped to the floor – blowing out a black cloud of diesel smoke – will prompt him to reimagine the thermal power bubbling out of Yellowstone’s Old Faithful. Every high-rise will bring to mind the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde as he stares down into a steep arroyo. Every airliner leaving a vapor trail will nudge him to recall the outstretched wings of condors gliding majestically across the milky white cataracts of his skies.

– David Feela