On the Road

I read Jack Kerouak’s 1957 novel “On the Road” in the late 60’s. Like many young men I felt a kinship with the central character, Sal Paradise and envied his adventurous roaming of America with free-spirited Dean Moriarty. I was one of many who felt summoned to hit the road like Sal and Dean. But my motivation was nostalgia not curiosity, for in the same year that Kerouak published his account of their odyssey, I was caught up in a transcontinental adventure of my own that rivaled theirs.

In the summer of 1957 my uncle, Travis, and I traveled from Virginia to California and back. I was a twelve years old student on summer vacation. Travis was a 23-year-old Air Force veteran. My grandfather sent him cross-country to return with a homemade camping trailer, built by another uncle who lived on the West Coast. I never knew just why I was invited to accompany my uncle on this trip. The reason given to me was that it would be an adventure and a rare opportunity for a young boy to see America. Looking back, I suspect the real reason was that my grandfather wanted someone to travel with Travis so he would act responsibly. Travis was an unpredictable free spirit like Dean Moriarty. I learned he also was a bipolar alcoholic with a death wish. Our two-week trip lasted all summer, and to call it an adventure would be an understatement.

Uncle Travis picked me up in his battle-ship gray 1946 Plymouth sedan. It was a land yacht, a rolling parlor with room for everything and a backseat as big as a bed. I loaded my bags in the trunk and climbed in front. My mother waved and shouted, “Be careful!” repeatedly as we pulled away. I was a chatterbox for the first fifty miles, going on and on about how excited I was to be traveling to California, to be seeing deserts and the Pacific Ocean, the Rocky Mountains and real Indians. Travis just nodded. When I was talked out we rode in silence for an hour until he turned to me suddenly and spoke.

“Let’s get some things straight between us, OK?”
“OK,” I answered.
“I didn’t want you on this trip but here you are so that’s that.”
“…OK.” My excitement turned to fear. I didn’t know what to expect next.
“I’m in charge so your job is to do what I tell you, got it?”
“OK.” I wondered, was it too late to turn around?
“Do you have any money?”
“Mom gave me fifty dollars.”
“Good, you can buy the things you need with that.”
“What kind of things will I need?” I asked.
“Food, soda, stuff like that.”
“I have to buy my own food?”
“Why should I buy what you eat?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’m just a kid.” Would I starve when my money ran out?
“Hey look,” his voice softened, “your Granddad gave me only enough money to drive to California and back. What I don’t spend I get to keep. I need that money. So, we’ll save all we can, OK? We’ll sleep in the car; make sandwiches. It’ll be fun, you’ll see.”
“OK” I replied. But it did not sound like fun or feel like fun as we rode in silence.

“You want a Coke? I’m buying.”
“Sure,” I answered at the unexpected kindness.
“Good, I need some beer.” Travis signaled a turn and pulled into a gravel parking lot.


In the following days we settled into a absurd routine and the trip became an adventure. Travis chain smoked cigarettes, sipped beer and told stories about his tour of duty in the Air Force. Ours was a military family but he bristled at the attempts by his superiors to impose their discipline. He and the Air Force suffered irreconcilable differences of opinion and both parties became eager to end the disagreeable relationship. The result was a General Discharge. Travis got busy developing new career plans, schemes really. One was to buy five tractor-trailer rigs, fill them with medical supplies, drive them to South America via the Pan American Highway and sell them at great profit in frontier towns along the route. Some of his other projects were equally ambitious.

We got to know each other over the next few days and traveling together became almost fun. Although, Travis was anything but fun when he drank too much. He was an unpredictable, nasty drunk. We slept in the car (I was smaller so I got the front seat), ate doughnuts and bologna sandwiches and refilled canteens with water instead of buying soft drinks. Travis talked a lot about women, especially about how to talk them into doing whatever he wanted them to do. These were things my father should have taught me, he said. I doubted that. His instructions were really lessons in how not to treat people. Travis was a user and a manipulator. He played loosely with the truth and sought to gain an advantage in every encounter.

We enjoyed some side excursions to interesting places. My favorite was to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. This is one of the largest and most beautiful cave systems in the world. After parking Travis and I stood to the side at the ticket gate and waited, I didn’t know why. Suddenly he steered me into the middle of a line of people as he engaged a stranger in conversation. We had slipped into a group of church members who arrived together by bus. Once inside the gate we disengaged and mingled with a different group. There we waited for the park ranger to lead us down into the cave entrance. I wondered if two disappointed members were sent back to wait on the bus because their leader had miscalculated the size of the group.

Some days later we reached the Mojave Desert, a vast expanse of white sand that looked like an Arabian movie set. We bought a canvas water bag and hung it from the front bumper, following the example of the more experienced desert crossers around us. It would be needed if the radiator boiled over, a real danger. Halfway through the crossing we stopped at a roadside oasis, actually just a parking lot with palm trees and a water spigot. A fellow traveler told us that the original road was just beyond the great sand dune that paralleled the concrete highway we were following. Travis wanted to see it and immediately set off to climb the dune. I followed.

It was amazing. The original road stretched from horizon to horizon, covered here and there by drifting dunes. It was constructed entirely of wood, like a giant boardwalk crossing the world’s largest beach. The wooden planks were bleached nearly white, like bones, and there was an occasional gap where a board had been pried loose and carried away. The roadway was no more than twelve feet wide. When approaching cars met, one must have yielded and driven into the sand.

We continued on, finally arriving in Oceanside, California. There we stayed with my aunt, Travis’ sister, and her husband, Paul. Uncle Paul was a Marine, a drill instructor at Camp Pendleton. He drank even more beer than Travis. They enjoyed each other’s company immensely. Travis and I stayed in the camper set up in the back yard. Paul had designed and built it himself, attaching the top-half of a surplus military tent to the camper body constructed of varnished marine plywood. The tent was erected with a single tall center pole, like a miniature circus tent. It was unique, a well-crafted precursor of the pop-up camping trailer.

Our planned one-week visit grew into months. Travis often spent the day, and many nights, driving up and down the coast. I stayed at home with my aunt. I asked to go exploring with him but he warned me that the places he visited were not suitable for a boy like me. “Hell, I probably shouldn’t go into half of them myself,” he joked. Some nights he came home bloodied. Other nights he didn’t come home at all.

Travis had promised me a trip to Disneyland for weeks. At last, one day he said, “Let’s go visit the mouse.” We drove for an hour to Anaheim and pulled into a giant parking lot; Cinderella’s Castle was clearly visible beyond the gates. I was filled with excitement. Travis opened a beer. After twenty minutes I finally asked, “Aren’t we going inside?” He laughed, “Hell, if I had money to go inside we would have come here a month ago.” That episode may still be the single biggest disappointment of my life.

In August Travis began talking about returning to Virginia. I couldn’t wait. After several false starts we finally welded a hitch to the back of the Plymouth, hooked up the trailer and set off into the sunrise. The trip back was no less eventful than the trip out. We were caught in a hailstorm, suffered a fire in the electrical system, visited a prostitute (I waited in the car); there were adventures I never shared with my friends back home. They would not have believed me. In one incident Travis left me on the side of the road in a barren scrub desert to guard the trailer while he rode in the tow truck that pulled the car forty miles to a garage for service. I had to sit atop the trailer tongue until he returned, counterbalancing the tail-heavy trailer, which was parked on a grade, its wheels chocked with rocks. He didn’t return for fourteen hours. I had to urinate in the dust while seated, unable even to stand for fear that without my weight holding the trailer in place it would tip over and roll down the highway into oncoming traffic.

I was crying when he finally returned, “Where have you been, I was worried?”
“Oh, I wasn’t worried at all,” he said, tugging on a beer, “I knew you could take care of yourself.”

“How was your trip, did you have a good time?” Mom asked when we finally arrived home.
“Yeah, it was OK.”
“Well tell me, what did you do?” she asked.
“Oh, all kinds of things.” I never got much more specific than that. She asked me once if Uncle Travis took me to see Disneyland.
“Yes,” I answered.

The time I spent with Uncle Travis that summer was certainly an adventure, but nothing like the adventure the rest of his life turned out to be. Just the highlights read like the outline of a novel. Travis was injured severely in a car accident and woke up in a rural hospital lying on a cold steel table being washed off in preparation for transport to a mortuary. He spent the next ten months in a full body cast as his multiple fractures mended. He won a lawsuit against the hospital and married the nurse who had cared for him during his recovery. They had four children and eventually moved to Alaska, traveling in a motor home built from the front-end and chassis of an old Cadillac limousine. After settling on a homestead he abandoned his family and returned to California, where he died on a sidewalk one evening under mysterious circumstances.

Travis’ widow married a native Eskimo and stayed with the children in Alaska. I began corresponding with them nearly twenty years later but stopped when one of his daughters asked me what I could tell her about the father she had hardly known. I didn’t know how to answer her.

Kerouak’s novel of life on the road reminded me of my odyssey with Uncle Travis that summer in 1957. I felt an urge to strike out again, to invite a friend to leave our comfortable routines behind, point the hood ornament toward the setting sun and drive until we had exhausted the pavement beneath our wheels. I knew it could be done; I had done it.