On a July-through-October-1947 hitchhiking trip, which looped through Salt Lake City on his way west to San Francisco and Los Angeles and then back to New York via a more southern route, Jack Kerouac, as had Dominguez and Escalante in 1776, opted to bypass Heber City. Go figure.
Not to say that Continental Divide issues weren’t at play, but he did have every opportunity to take Highway 40 west out of Denver and add a notch for Hebertown on his road belt. Something about the old Lincoln Highway had a hold on him, however, so once he hit Cheyenne, he just round-tripped it south into Denver and back and, once again, lit out west.
He “needed” Denver! That was a given. As he would later put it, “I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was ‘Wow!”‘
Many of Kerouac’s exploits hitchin’ across the country made it into his famed novel, “On the Road,” which will be celebrating its 50th anniversary on September 5, and I’m just thinkin’ that, the way Heber greeted hitchhikers in the ’60s, his scruffy arrival in town during the ’40s would have been epic.
Think of the character-rich road tramps he could have settled in with as cellmates in the old Heber hoosegow — and how well the local truck-stop maidens would have tickled his fancy as they brought him one coffee refill after another to wash down a gargantuan Wasatch County omelet and a couple of biscuits.
Yup, it was his loss. And the American reading public’s, for that matter. Heber and Park City would have gobbled up their share of that now-legendary stream-of-consciousness bop-prosody wordplay that made “On the Road” what it is.
But no, he traded us in — along with Steamboat Springs and the Uinta Basin — for Laramie and the southern Wyoming towns that sprang up along the Union Pacific rail lines.
Maybe it was the fact that “Pete’s Roc N Rye” was up and runnin’ and serving beverages that knocked back trail dust on the outskirts of Evanston that drew him thataway.
When he did finally get back off his trip into the heart of America, which also included forays into Mexico and junkets to New Orleans, he began to somewhat formally structure his novel, which, in the form of “Dean Moriarty,” would introduce readers to his muse and road compadre Neal Cassady.
1951 he began pounding out the first draft. So as to not interrupt his creative flow, Kerouac fabricated a 120-foot-long scroll by taping together large sheets of tracing paper that had been modified to fit a typewriter and began his assault. As anyone knows, replacing page after page of typing paper into a machine can be soooo tedious.
In a mere three weeks and, according to after-the-fact interviews, fueled by coffee alone, the punctuated-but-unparagraphed spontaneous literary combustion had run its course. With the quietness of his tone italicizing the malice of his reply, Truman Capote would later observe, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.”
The biggest differences between the “scroll” version and the published novel are that the former is substantially nonfiction, uses real names, and is less self-conscious as literature. For popular consumption, it just wouldn’t do.
Viking, the publisher, demanded broad editing of both sexual exploits and much of the “riffing” and “wailing” and “swooping” free-form narrative. What makes this 50th anniversary brouhaha so compelling is that the scroll, unadulterated in its raw power, is the version that is being republished.
Although the original novel proved exactly what the doctor ordered for the youth of the day when it was finally published in 1957, the scroll, with the improvisational language of Cassady’s vocal eruptions, is much more apropos to our time. In its birthday suit, without editing, the joy of Neal’s jazz is back.
“Jack when I was working for the New Era Laundry in Los Angeles 1945 I made a trip to Indianapolis Indiana for the express purpose of seeing the Memorial Day races hitch hiking by day and stealing cars by night to make time. I was coming thru one of these towns we passed with a set of license plates under my shirt when a sheriff picked me up on suspicion.” Go, Neal, Go!
And just imagine Neal Cassady in Heber. How “holy” it would have been if “The Grill” had been in place back then, and it probably was, and “Sarge” had strolled out to the counter from the kitchen with his wrinkled smile and humorous “asides” after the Greyhound bus passengers had up and left and Neal had the joint to himself.
Seldom the self-conscious type, he would have drank-in Heber with long gulps much more so than Jack. In his hands, fidgeting with cigarette or toothpick became ballet. Sarge did the same with a spatula. Minds would have met and been blown as a matter of course.
It has been said that Cassady could have stepped right out of western lore. That he compulsively stole cars instead of guiding wagon trains and achieved enlightenment in bebop clubs rather than medicine lodges was merely a function of history.
To have Jack and Neal live on in the “Cinéma Vérité” style of the republished scroll version of “On the Road” will be a proper testament to a couple of hungry hearts somewhat tarnished by hype and myth. At least, although they never tasted Heber, they got that going for them.