On the Road

I finished On the Road recently and did not much like it. There are plenty of people who adore the best known Kerouac, praise it as defining a generation, as one of the great works of travel literature. I found it empty, really.

Part of it was the style of writing: lengthy and wordy, coming from someone who often talked badly about Hemingway. There was a strange overuse of the word mad, and dig, and other words I relate heavily with hipsters on fixed gear bikes in Los Angeles, Austin, or Melbourne.

Part of it was the characters too -- not the fact that they had faults, but that the book seemed to idolize their mediocrity. Dean Moriarty bums around the country, frolicking, chasing, abandoning responsibility and commitment without any explanation other than that he is mad, and somehow we are supposed to make him the hero of our tale like he is of the narrator. He is the kind of guy I would hate in a bar and as I discovered, would hate to read about just as much.

There is something deeper there too, embedded within the story itself. The characters move along an ambiguous road that could be any road in a type of travel I do not really consider travel: going without any money and trying to survive by penny-pinching, stealing, and relying on stranger's hospitality for as long as you possibly can; in a hurry to do everything and arrive everywhere at the same time. You can be physically moving on a road and see nothing, and I get the feeling that through the drunken gaze of real-life Kerouac and real-life Cassidy, New York to Los Angeles and back went something like this.

Whenever your favorite part of a book is its introduction, it is not the story that gets you. This particular introduction explains the Beat Generation, and what drove Kerouac to that three week typing rampage that became a published work. I have romantic notions of this: locking myself in a dark room with beer and scotch and cigarettes at a typewriter and seeing what happens. Something about that thrills me, and I hope if I do the same thing one day I get a result more suited to me.

I love the concept of a good road. I like straight, perfect roads in suburbs and cobblestone roads in Spain and dirt mountain roads in Guatemala and red roads in the Outback. I love discovering slowly where they lead and sometimes pulling off a road I know and taking one I do not. I really love when they are open and without traffic and you can put a car in cruise control and go until you need to fill up with gas and then fill up and go further. Being on the road means so many things and can lead so many places and it is really a shame such a good metaphor can be taken to such low and vacuous places.

I Woke Up This Morning

I woke up this morning to a medium-sized wolf spider – completely harmless but ugly as hell – as he sat sunning himself in the sun that comes through my transparent aluminium roof. Perhaps a few weeks ago I would have jumped up and swooped in for a kill and let my mind wonder what else could be around, nesting under my covers or in my rafters. Here I just sat entranced, watching him for I do not know how long. He crawled up to a crevice where wall became ceiling and I had this distinct moment where I knew I would not be able to get him in a few moments more and I was just okay with it all. I drifted off to sleep, waking some time later, the spider gone.

I am not sure if this constitutes giving up or acceptance, though perhaps those are the same thing after a few weeks in Guatemala. Insects are not preferable, but they are part of the natural order of things. They outnumber us, are older than us, and more often than not are harmless to us. My thoughts might change if I wake up one night in excruciating pain from a scorpion sting; statistically speaking this will not happen. Though when speaking of statistics, it is almost certain a small millipede, spider, or beetle has wandered astray in the night, crawling onto my arm, then crawling off, without any climax, all while I slept unknowingly. Maybe this morning I realized it is time I guide my fears to more deserving things. The bugs would much prefer a tree outside swaying in the wind, as we would prefer them there.

For a long time I avoided my room and stayed in the large, sprawling common area that includes couches and hammocks that look out on the volcanoes. Part of this was the feeling I was sharing my room with unwanted visitors, but also that people and action and energy lay upstairs. Common areas are where we are supposed to go and supposed to talk and supposed to do a lot of things; it is the same way this lodge is a place you are supposed to love to be and want to work and live. “You have a dream situation up here,” I have been told more times than I can remember.

It is a beautiful view really -- one of my favorites. The lights from Antigua twinkle at night and during the day you periodically watch a volcano spew steam that blends into the nearby clouds. The travellers are mostly wonderful and the owners are beautiful people. The concept is visionary and refreshing --one of true philanthropic action and change -- amidst a lot of idealistic jargon that never gets done. But it is funny how these things go. There have been many dream moments in life where I would not be anywhere other than where I was, but they are hard to predict in advance, and what should be it often is not it at all.

My morning with a little wolf spider was not radical, or beautiful even, but I felt awfully content tucked away with no one around -- more content than I have felt in recent weeks on chairs that point outwards at a considerable view. I will be living in Antigua soon and the moments there will be simple with lots of typing and text and isolation, and I do not know how long it will last, but frankly, I am excited as hell to get off this mountain that seems to be some hazy and heavenly dream to everyone who finds their way here in the afternoon and leaves the next morning.

El Hato from a Distance

There is a wonderful set of indigenous Guatemalan girls that live in the small mountain town of el Hato that cook and clean at the lodge I reside. They smile and giggle at everything that anyone does and they just seem happy for no other reason than life swarming around them. I heard recently about a documentary that creates a formula; once a certain level of basic needs are fulfilled, everyone has the same actual quantity of happiness. I found it to be a lovely thought because it says what we already know -- a mansion does not make us happier than a hut if the right person is inside of it and you are warm together by the fire.

I asked one of the girls today while she swept if she had ever been outside of Antigua and she said she had not, but only 20 minutes down the road to sell things at the market. She had not been the capital 45 minutes away by bus, and certainly not outside Guatemala. I asked her if she wanted to go and she said yes, someday, when she has more money.

I thought about it then and again later and again tonight more and I wonder how someone even begins to conceptualize a world that is six square miles. I suppose the answer to that is that it is easy to conceptualize a world so small. You probably know all the details and the hidden paths and the best places to escape the noise and find some quiet, but what happens when someone describes an airplane that takes off from a runway and goes over a large ocean for hours and then lands on some set of land where they speak different languages? How does that enter your brain and make the slightest bit of sense.

This though isn't a new thought or an old one really. The world was bigger for people before Columbus's time and it was also just as small. But part of me wants to buy them all a two-way bus ticket on their day off and all of us go into the capital together. We won't leave the car really because it is dangerous as hell, but we will just look out the windows and watch the people and slowly make our way back to the hills around Antigua. I'm not sure what would happen. Probably nothing. Though I can bet there would be more smiles and laughs and then things would carry on like they always have.