ON THE ROAD

A few years ago, when Willie Nelson sang a song that kept repeating itself, like a hiccup--”On the road again . . . on the road again”--it was in a movie highly qualified to be forgotten. Nelson’s echo of Jack Kerouac’s novelistic confession of the ‘50s, “On the Road,” was chanted from within a country-and-Western star’s mobile home, equipped with what looked like carpets, a TV and a full kitchen--everything but a sauna and a Ping-Pong table--as it barreled down the great American all-purpose movie highway.

That is not what being on the road meant for the countless adventurers through history who have taken off with staffs and sandals, or with backpacks, thumbs extended and little machinery except the devices of hope, desire and expectation of adventure. Those wanderers down the roads of the past make a motley collection: St. Augustine, Goethe, Wordsworth, Diogenes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and millions more.

And me.

Going on the road has almost always been a part of the process of growing up--of leaving family, leaving home, exploring the limits, doubting and questing, searching for the Grail or the lost princess or buried treasure or the Truth or simply the Unknown. Some wanderers sought things as practical as better food, more fertile soil, a friendlier climate. Some sought visions.

Even today’s organized cruises and guaranteed hotel tours hark back to the old impulse. Its shadow lives in the pickup truck with a shingled mini-cottage stapled onto the flatbed, a single person or a couple seeking to pull off the highway in a different place every night.

When I ran away from home at 17--to go on the road--I didn’t think of it as running from but as running toward. My friends had finished high school and were either getting jobs or going to college; those were the expected options for a kid from suburban Cleveland. But I wanted to find the meaning of life, and I was pretty sure that it didn’t lie along Clifton Boulevard in Lakewood, Ohio.

I said goodby to my parents. My mother shed an angry tear or two; my father looked bewildered and morose. I promised to send post cards. I walked awhile with my paper suitcase and then stood at a street corner, hoping to find a ride toward the distant, pinnacled city of Pittsburgh. I got there, found a 50-cents-a-night hotel and began to sense the contours of The Road: loneliness, fantasy, dreaminess, laziness, a little fear, a little hope, a lot of expectations of miracles on the morrow.

A day or two in Pittsburgh persuaded me to move on to Manhattan, where Real Life was even more real for an adolescent: jobs as dishwasher and messenger boy, hours with hands cupped around giant chipped mugs of Bowery coffee and doughnuts. That was before the hippies, even before the time of the beatniks; I was in a tradition that combined the runaway child and the more elevated Wanderjahr (year of wandering) of Germans, French, English and Italians hiking over the landscape of Europe to discover forests and sun, love and poetry, the Self.

I wanted a piece of Strange, and I was finding Depressed and Sordid, but I loved it because it was strange. I was getting into myself by getting out of myself. Perhaps, sometimes, I mumbled, because for days I might have been the only person I talked to. Yet, I wasn’t crazed: I wrote in my journal; I wrote those post cards home; I planned to go to college when my year was up. Surely I was a little pretentious, a little young . As a father myself now, I can see it was an agony to my parents.

After a few weeks in the stony winter of Manhattan, as a veteran dishwasher in a Lower East Side restaurant and as a Mercury messenger boy who couldn’t find his way around Midtown despite the wings on his uniform, I fled the weather, hitchhiking south. Oh, that first palm tree, past Jacksonville on Route 1!

Off Key Largo, on a tumble of rocks called Pelican’s Roost, a kindly gangster offered me a job in his gambling shack. I was discovering my ability to take risks, peek around the rules, be alone and survive. I was surely a peculiar, pale, four-eyed kid, scribbling in a spiral notebook. What I found in it later was poetry, worries about my next bed and meal and solutions to all the issues of life. Despite this foolishness I also began to discover-- on the road --who I was.

That’s what the Wanderjahr is about. And the history of being on the road continues, sometimes with tamer variations: the junior year abroad, the post-retirement cruise, the domestic ruckus (I’m-going-for-a-trip, won’t-tell-you-where, wish-me-luck). Jack Kerouac, discovering the pleasures of California Zen and cooking Jell-O over an open fire with his buddies, made on the road popular and led thousands of young to follow him. For me, a herd of independent minds led by a pied piper is not exactly what the impulse should be.

“Follow my flag and be original” is not the proper slogan. Yet, even in their conformity, the beatniks and the hippies were part of a grand tradition of side-stepping normal life. Rousseau’s books about the noble savage, the natural man, came of his hiking and his loneliness; so did Thoreau’s great work of poetic meditation and civil criticism, and Walt Whitman’s cries of joy, which hid pain--pain that disguised his joy of being on the road. These men were peculiar, a little mad--and important. The great Irish storyteller, Frank O’Connor, said the writer must be a “mirror on the roadway,” reflecting what he sees, choosing to hold the mirror this way and that.

Pilgrimages, crusades and explorations have traditionally lured away crowds, not just artists and the young, from the plain pleasures and boredoms of domesticity. We all crave risks, challenges and a view of the larger world. To wander is to be human: A living thing that never moves causes us to yawn after a while. And when we speak of quest, a quality truly human, we mean going in search.

The flight of the flower kids of the ‘60s to Haight-Ashbury, to the mountains, to the East Village, to the desert, to someplace or anyplace else, was called the Children’s Crusade. It required breaking the patterns of parents and taking up the risk of the quest. An unacknowledged risk was that the quest became pure style, the chic conformity of youthquake.

What had been an occasional episode for students and other young misfits became an epidemic during each Summer of Love of the ‘60s. The loose young of America were shaken up and sent rock ‘n’ rolling off to the other side of the tracks, the kindergarten dropout quarters of every American city, to Katmandu or to the var- ious points between. Now the lemming rush of on-the-roadness has diminished (harder times and new priorities make a difference), but the world of backpacks has not disappeared. There is a generational urge to get into the woods and up the mount- ains--the trek form of getting on the road . The long, stone park in front of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris is still covered with bodies and sleeping bags, guitarists singing Joan Baez and Bob Dylan songs in Danish or Italian, earnest consultations about the meaning of life. When I strolled among them last summer, I saw myself at age 17, although with a significant difference: I had no backpack--only a paper suitcase; I was alone as they were not. They seemed to have each other to explain their loneliness to.

Montaigne, a great rambler and chewer of his cud, noted that he would not like the pleasure of traveling to interfere with the pleasure of repose. In other words, roving was not to be a chore. God gave us noses so that we could follow them. Ease and browsing and finding the byways do not require precise intention. We’re not running away; we’re not always even running toward. We are like animals loping for the pleasure of our freedom. There can also be the factor of living off the land. The beggar-scholar or rabbi went from door to door, providing a service to the spiritually needy. When Diogenes was asked what kind of wine he pre- ferred, he answered: “Other people’s.”

William James said war is brutal and destructive, impossible, uncivilized; yet we need its moral equivalent--risk, danger, sacrifice, adventure. For many, a period of facing the self in the world of the endless road is a moral equivalent of war. Loneliness and the discovery of strangers are part of how we define soul, that unearthing of the secret self. Even Willie Nelson, singing and bouncing in his bullet-shaped trailer, rounding the bend to the next destination, seems to embody a bit of the idea.

Traveling--normal tourist traveling as we know it, with matching luggage--is a formal recreation or re-creation that probably echoes some genetic and instinctive need. In ancient times, we wandered in search of food and in search of mates. We needed others. We needed out of the family. The traditional nomad, the rogue, the wandering scholar or teacher or adventurer, the one who drops away from the herd--all those feed our impulse to seek either comfort or discomfort elsewhere. “The territory ahead” was Mark Twain’s phrase for it; Huck Finn wanted to light out for the territory ahead. In another great 19th-Century America novel, Ahab and his crew wandered the sea in search of something unlikely--a great white whale.

A great freedom and a great responsibility were a part of that quest. And the territory ahead still tempts the adventurous and the discontented. When we take on our nomadic garb (perhaps even our Banana Republic safari clothes with all the winsome epaulets and zippers) and go wandering in search of chance meetings and discoveries, we feel a little like the ronin , the rogue samurai warrior who hikes over strange countrysides to see what he can find. Although I hitchhiked thousands of miles during my days on the road, I don’t want my children to hitchhike. But I also hope they find some way to get on the road. My four-eyed and uneasy-skinned 17-year-old self was surely not Everyman on his journey, which was how Dante saw the trip into the underworld and the other life and lives in his “Divine Comedy.” Everyman Traveler should be an adventurer who sees into the hearts of others, not merely his own. With all the egotism that the on-the-road sensibility implies, there is something generous, too, or at least interested . Who are those strangers out there? Can I get near them? Can I learn from them?

Astonishingly, I can not only learn but also be touched by them. The ladies of the night and the nothing-doing shills of Pelican’s Roost are old parties by now, if they’re still alive. Yet, I am grateful for their kindness to a foolish kid who became a tiny bit less foolish in his heart because of them--those whose names I do not recall, strangers who teased me and gave me a job, let me sleep in a corner, pulled me out of the way of the cruising barracudas--those strangers with whom I became intimate on the road long ago.