‘The road is life,’ wrote Jack Kerouac. For many, myself among them, the American road came to life through the force of Kerouac’s jazz-driven prose. What had been mundane and functional, a penance on the way somewhere, became radiant with the offer of freedom, possibility, the unexpected and the ever-changing – the better of the American myths.
I left America when I was 22 and lived in Europe for 30 years. In that time I missed certain foods and sports. I missed people I’d known and the way we talked. But after reading Kerouac’s book, America had come to be about the road to me, and when I thought of America it was the road I yearned for. I’d see it running out ahead of me like a body uncoiling from sleep, an open sky, the car windows open and the music high, a neon-lit bar beside it at the end of the day. The road is a great seduction.
The land I imagined passing through was almost always that of the West – red mesa deserts, geyser basins, mountain peaks, virgin forests. It is a place of strange and colossal shapes and an otherworldly emptiness. Some of the wildest people in America once entered it in search of refuge or fortune – and still do. Thirty years after having left it I got back on to the American road for a 15,000-mile, 35-state, three-month-long journey by car from New York to San Francisco through the north, and from San Francisco to New York through the south, the record of which became a book called Divine Magnetic Lands
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That evening, midway across Arizona, I climbed into the largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest in America and stopped in Flagstaff, where Pluto was discovered in the Lowell Observatory and where 100 trains a day pass through, blowing their mournful whistles.
I checked into the Monte Vista Hotel, built in 1926, and then walked the corridors reading the names on the door plaques – Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Jane Russell, Freddie Mercury, Bon Jovi, Siouxsie Sioux of the Banshees. The hotel seemed to have leapt from Golden Age Hollywood to 1980s rock without an intervening or post-period. A scene from Casablanca was shot in one of the rooms. Two spectral prostitutes who were murdered are said to haunt the corridors benignly.
Out in the streets music spilled from the bars. In one of them a young man with a miniature ski slope of a beard told me that I had the fortune to be in one of the three best towns in America, the others being Asheville, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas. To my left another young man, his hair too a kind of topiary, was mixing Red Bull with rum and liqueur in a pint glass, his eyes out of focus.
