Kerouac is gone, and we can no longer hope to look down a bar and discover Jack seated there, waiting for us to blurt out, “I recognize you! You’re that guy!” But we can look at the traces he left across yellowing sheets, line after line in a single paragraph the length of a long touchdown pass, and we can imagine what those forty yards of words cost him. If we can no longer see the artist, perhaps we can see his labor and efforts at craftsmanship shaping inspiration: a vision like that, no perfectly printed book can ever quite reveal to us.
The other day I asked Q to hypothesize: In one room is a famous manuscript under glass; inside a transparent box in another room is the embalmed cadaver of its author, laid out like Lenin. Now, if a visitor can enter only one room, which would the majority choose? She took time to answer: “People deeply bookish or people afraid of the dead — which may work out to the same thing — they would choose the manuscript, and everybody else the cadaver.”
(In a few weeks, this sheet of paper before me at this moment and on which I’m setting down these words with a fountain pen — and their subsequent typed revisions — will all be inside a box in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection in Ellis Library at the University of Missouri. Perhaps someday you, a distant reader, might see this very manuscript page, and I’ll be honored by your curiosity. As for the hand, the arm, and other attached parts directing the pen, they will lie unboxed and nowhere other than wherever, as dust is wont to do. You see, for one who sets some store in immaterial over material traces, it can’t very well be elsewise.)
It is not so with Jean-Louis Kerouac, who rests in Lowell inside a couple of nesting boxes next to his third wife in Edson Cemetery in the part of town known as Spaghettiville. On the warm day Q and I went there, above a worn-down splotch of ground gritty with pebbles and shards of broken glass, was a small, flat, polished-granite marker. At the top was “TI JEAN” and below JOHN L. KEROUAC and the dates of his birth and death. Under that was HE HONORED LIFE. Atop the stone but not covering the inscriptions were a desiccated rose, an unsmoked cigarette, a dollar-twenty-three in coins, a sharpened pencil, and a folded sheet of paper with handwritten words: “Poem For Jack.” From the penmanship, I guessed the author was a young male. It was a heartfelt, artless ramble, and at the bottom of the page: “P.S. Please write back. I’ll leave you a paper and a pen — all a writer ever needs.”
When we stepped under the shade of a large sugar-maple to take it all in, a Lowell woman toward seventy years came along with a friend from New York, who wanted to see the grave. The woman watched quietly while her visiting companion slowly knelt and kissed the stone. The last time I saw a tomb kissed was in Jerusalem at the Holy Sepulcher. The woman of Lowell turned to me so her reverent friend could not hear and said, “I used to see him around. An alcoholic. His writing was gahbage.”
I said, Why are we here, then? But I should have said something about legacies and traces. I should have said something about the pentimento of a human life.
4
Ten M To B
THE NEXT THREE CHAPTERS are a story of a dedication become an obsession, a mania become mastery, an absorption promising to become a national contribution, a tale of a lifelong love almost surpassing understanding. It began some years ago in the Patapsco River Valley, ten miles west of downtown Baltimore, in Ellicott City, Maryland, where sits a small chunk of stone against an exterior wall of an eighteenth-century building at the foot of Main Street and beside the old Baltimore & Ohio Railroad bridge. The rock is knee-bone-high to a small woman, has a breadth nearly that of a man’s forearm, and a depth commensurate to his opened hand. The top is an arc, giving it the look of a squat tombstone, as some passersby have thought. The gray granite, now noticeably worn on the edges, has been there since about 1798; soon after, the old National Road, the first American through high-road with federal sanction, was laid out in front of it. I have no good figures, but I like to imagine the number of travelers who have passed the stone on foot or horseback, or in an oxcart, farm wagon, stagecoach, buggy, horsecar, automobile, bus, taxi, truck, trolley, or on motorcycles, bicycles, roller skates, skateboards, and all those seeing it when a B&O train crossed above it. The total might well match the current population of America.
The letters, simply incised, are still quite legible: 10 M TO B. The first time I read them years ago, they struck me as crypto-mystico-religico-philosophy: or perhaps a slightly scrambled, “O! I Am to Be!” Maybe, on what looked like a tombstone, they were an anagram of tomb. I, a ten-year-old, wanted to interpret them as code — covert marching orders to a place to be revealed later.
I wrote the inscription down and for years spoke of it to no one. In time, the stone proved to be something a little different: not only itself a quoz but, in its own way, a tablet of recondite directions to other quoz.
The Starrucca Viaduct at Lanesboro, Pennsylvania, circa 1880.
Because of that small monument, Frank Xavier Brusca and I became acquainted a few years ago. His initials could serve to identify a piece of a computer: “My god! My FXB port is on the fritz!” But any link between his initials and his work as an instructional technologist who teaches staff (in Brusca’s words) “effective and pedagogically sound use of computers” at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, a few miles north of Columbus, is coincidental as far as he can see. His father, in the early days of digitized information, did work on “a bizarre form of nonlinear analytic thinking,” but for his son’s name he had in mind not technology but theology. Yet that link too is peculiarly coincidental in that St. Francis Xavier, the Apostle to the Indies, was a roaming priest nonpareil. If Frank’s life is about anything beyond his family, it’s about traveling, as you’ll see. Transportation and transmission, things St. Francis knew well, are to Brusca as sails to a seaman, an airfoil to a pilot, yeast to a baker. They move him, carry him, let him rise to become something else.
The first time we met, at Antioch College in Ohio, Frank spoke of his interest in the old National Road which later became a long section of U.S. Highway 40, sometimes called the “Main Street of America.” I told him I’d grown up not far from 40 and U.S. 50, another transcontinental route, about where they crossed U.S. 71, a road running from Canada almost to the Gulf. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, I became navigator in my father’s tub of a car, a 1947 Pontiac Chieftain, a machine heavy enough to save his life when a drunk rammed him along U.S. 71. At the nose of the hood was a chromium visage of a Plains Indian I’d shine with my sleeve each morning on the road. For six consecutive Augusts, starting near the center of America at Kansas City, Missouri, my father would pack up the family and strike a course along a cardinal direction down one of those routes we’d follow to its terminus. After a half-dozen summers, those three highways had taken me coast-to-coast twice and to Canada and the Gulf once. By the time I was twelve — all six birthdays of those years celebrated on the road — in my mind was a paved grid of latitudes and longitudes, a geometry useful in visualizing a continent. It was a way to see the face of America. Among the myriad details hidden in that imagined countenance was the Ellicott City stone with its mysterious inscription.
As I told this to Frank, his expression became beatific, and I stopped and said it seemed I’d struck something, and he replied, “You’re talking about Number Ten, the milestone along Main Street. It was my first milestone too. I used to live not far away. I’d ride my bicycle fifteen miles down to see it.” Brusca also grew up as family navigator. The eldest of five children, he would gather road-maps filling stations once gave away, folding them to fit the top of the beverage cooler in front of him that served as his chart table; from it, he directed the passage, each year of travel giving him increased authority.
The fascination so many people have for maps and nautical charts may come from a deeply buried and often unrecognized sense that we are riding a planetary ship sailing the solar winds under the galactic clouds to who-can-say-where, with no landfall in sight, a voyage to outlast us, the entire way yielding
us no more certain idea of our cosmic position than a possum has of its hollow. A map gives comfort because it can say YOU ARE NOW HERE, and that surely is preferable to YOU ARE NO WHERE. Maps, by this line of thought, are ontological documents, because whereness can be central to who-ness and whatness. A ballplayer in center field is not the same who or what he’d be in a cotton field. For FXB and me, Route 40 embraced the plane of America as the equator does the sphere of Earth. From it we could calculate our positions. If he grew up near the eastern tip of the great belt of U.S. 40 and I at the buckle, the distance mattered little because the road bound us, and, to press the metaphor toward the absurd, that highway helped hold up our philosophical pants covering our less public spiritual Skivvies.
(Have I wandered again from the through route of a story?)
At its peak use, Highway 40 was slightly more than three-thousand miles long, running at one time from near the Boardwalk in Atlantic City to the Embarcadero in San Francisco, salt water to salt water. I told Frank, in all those miles, the Ellicott stone was a detail I especially cherished, although I wasn’t sure I understood its inscription, 10 M TO B, and he said, rupturing its mystery, “Ten miles to Baltimore. It wasn’t so useful if you were headed west.”
Except for my years in the Navy, my homes have never been more than a few miles from 40, which, unintendedly, straddles the fortieth parallel which, also unintendedly, is the halfway mark, a useful equatorial line, of the forty-eight states. Frank’s abodes throughout his life also have clung to the route like dungarees hanging from a clothesline: Baltimore; Denver; several returns to each; and Kettering, Yellow Springs, and Westerville in Ohio.
On those moves, for the most part, destiny has directed him, although when he was ten, he did his best to take a hand in it. After his family returned the first time from Denver to Baltimore (Randallstown, to be precise), young Frank longed for the Front Range and gave considerable thought to ways he might engineer a move back west. At last, he hoped he’d found a means when he happened upon a book in the public library, a single work that would come to shape his life as the Bible, or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or How to Win Friends and Influence People, have molded others. It was George Stewart’s U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America, a kind of road narrative in words and photographs compiled from two coast-to-coast trips, one in 1949 and the second in 1950 (the very years I was navigating that chromium chieftain’s head over the great highway).
Recognizing some of the images of 40 in both Maryland and Colorado, Frank fell under the spell of the photographs and then realized they might have the same power to create in his parents an irresistible urge to return to the mountains. He checked the book out and took it home to leave on the living room coffee-table, casually opened to a Colorado scene, and then waited for it to work its magic.
The magic failed. His parents didn’t catch the hint, but destiny did, and for reasons other than an opened book, the family moved back to Denver, only to return once more to Maryland a couple of years later. Frank assuaged his second loss of the Front Range by tirelessly checking out the library copy of U.S. 40, returning it when due, waiting the required hour while hoping no one would claim it, then checking it out again. He did that for eleven years, taking the book home week after week. Then the day came when the library put the worn thing into the sale box and sold it for a dime, and Frank had to soldier on without it for several years. Things ended happily: by midlife, through the Internet, he had found and bought fifteen copies, giving several away to people he met along 40. He knew the book as a priest does the Mass, or Satan and Santa Claus your transgressions. In quest of images and history, Brusca estimated since 1979 he had logged a hundred-thousand miles on that one highway, although he’d never done it coast-to-coast in a single trip, as Stewart did twice for his book.
If the photographs in U.S. 40 got FXB started, it was a 1973 article in the Baltimore Sun about a man, Ned Nye, who was photographing all the National Road milestones he could find, that put teenage Brusca in motion. Dropping the paper, he got onto his bicycle, pedaled to Ellicott City and, with new understanding, studied the incised granite of Number Ten as if it were a Rosetta stone or a tablet dropped by Moses on the way back down the mountain.
Six years later, Brusca began his own search for and recording of the National Road markers once numbering well more than five hundred between Baltimore and Vandalia, Illinois, 760 miles west. Of those hundreds of mileposts (some merely wooden fingers pointing the way), perhaps 350 originals or replicas remained (several no longer at their proper mile), virtually every one of them photographed and described by him.
After he was old enough to drive, using Number Ten as his establishing datum, he began cruising the route, his gaze moving from the side of the road to the odometer and back to the right-of-way; after a mile, if he hadn’t seen a marker, he’d stop and kick around in the brush for it. In places, the post was only obscured, but in others it had fallen or, worse, it was vandalized or had vanished entirely. Over the years, he found original markers in museums, reused in a rock fence, built into the foundation of a barn, and one set into the wall of a tavern. Nobody, not even Brusca, knows how many must have ended up in the bed of later pavement.
Between the National Road milestones and Stewart’s Highway 40 photographs, FXB’s project was born, and from those, if he himself was not quite reborn, he was surely reconfigured. After his family, the point of his days became the methodical documentation of a three-thousand-mile, three-century-old route over which his seven homes along seventeen-hundred miles of U.S. 40 have never been more than fifteen miles distant. When he began, he thought he could complete his documentary survey, his then-and-now pictures, on a single, two-month trip west. Thirty years later, he was still at it.
5
Building a Time Machine
FROM A SINGLE INSCRIBED ROCK that would almost fit into a toy chest and from an initial idea a child could understand, Frank Brusca’s project developed over three decades into a complex creation yet unseen in this country: a means of going back in time to travel along what is the most significantly historic cross-country route in America, one that encompasses an eighth of the circumference of the earth.
U.S. 40 comprises pieces of Indian paths, colonial post roads, Washington’s Road, Braddock’s Road, the Baltimore National Pike, the Frederick Turnpike, the Bank Road, Cumberland Road, National Road, Zane’s Trace, Boonslick Trail, Santa Fe Trail, Oregon-California Trail, Smoky Hill Trail, Berthoud’s Road, Hastings’ Cutoff, National Old Trail, Lincoln Highway, and the Victory Highway. The progenitor of most of Interstate 70 and portions of I-80 was once a central artery of eight major cities and the Main Street of a few hundred towns and villages. It intersects every major north-south U.S. highway and, in one form or another, has been moving freightage of merchandise, job lots of culture, passels of animals and people, diseases and medicines, food and mail, science and religion, for a third of a millennium. When the federal government began numbering highways, there was even talk of making an exception and marking the route as U.S. 1, although east-west roads were scheduled to have even numbers.
Were a traveler from Rome or London or Tokyo to ask where to see the most representative sweep of America — from ocean to ocean; from cornfields to oil fields to goldfields; through the Great Plains into four mountain ranges; from forests to prairies to deserts; from sea level to more than two miles into the sky and down again; where precipitation ranges from sixty inches to five; where lies military history, from the French and Indian War to the latest undeclared war in Whereisitstan (an early use was moving troops and matériel); where travelers can find a meal of blue crabs at one end and Dungeness crabs on the other, Chesapeake oysters or prairie oysters; can see barns, skyscrapers, the largest aboriginal earthwork in North America, the tallest arch in the world, tenements and mansions, neighborhoods of every major ethnicity; can cross four continental rivers (the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, and Colorado) or a dozen regional ones, from the Po
tomac to the Sacramento; can see three great bays (Delaware, Chesapeake, San Francisco); can find capitals of six states, and six former capitals, with another half dozen and the seat of federal power nearby; and can pass within an hour’s drive of (by my estimate) about a fifth of the nation — the answer would be U.S. 40. No other highway comes close in significance.
You can recite these facts to a foreign traveler, but just like us, few will undertake the route because not many of them come here to see the commonplace heart and soul of America. Even Europeans can’t resist a sham European castle, especially if it’s in a drained Florida swamp. When plastic and plaster simulations are easily at hand, who could want a thousand-year-old mound once the urban center of aboriginal America — after all, Cahokia is made of dirt. A number of people living along 40, antediluvians though we be, consider the desire for synthetic America a blessing, and we sleep in contentment knowing U.S. 40 lacks cachet and that it will become a destination for only a dedicatedly curious Parisian or Yokohaman — or a fellow Yank.
Rumors of a “Celebrate We Aren’t on Route 66” parade are ill-founded because heartlanders understand America needs a half-continental highway of concrete-teepee motels, fiberglass dinosaurs, cobra gardens, and sheet-metal whales. It’s been some years since I heard anyone complain that 40 has never had a hit song (unless you consider the country-western “Idaho Red” one), or that it has no Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, or a classic movie, or a television series, or that it’s never been called the “Mother Road” (although it clearly is) by a renowned writer better at fiction than history. The Ur-Mother of American transcontinental highways remains within her limitations, without hype, able to show only history. Forty is to Route 66 as Beethoven to the Beatles, Beowulf to Babar, sponge cake to corn pone. It’s true, staid U.S. 40 may be short of goosey merriments, and, as even Brusca will admit, it’s a highway requiring a little effort and perhaps some knowledge in order to get your kicks on it.