Kerouac 5

Then came the Gloucester episode. Pulling out of Lowell before noon, I thought I'd drive east to the old seaport made famous in the literary world by Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems (although Olson, as much as I admire what I understand of his poetic, isn't on my "literary hero" team). Nothing worked. Couldn't find Olson's grave, couldn't find the bookstore that supposedly kept stacks of rare Olson upstairs somewhere (then did find it, but nothing that interesting in its stacks), found the place a tad resorty, couldn't stomach the turkey wrap, etc.

By 1:30 I was booting it back north, the Impala cruising easy in the bright sun and nonstop satellite radio jazz. By 6 I was handing over the keys to Louis, the Budget guy at Dorval, and shuttling over the Best Western for a burger and a ballgame and these blog entries.

While not actually a balling-the-jack kind of trip that Dean and Sal repeat in On the Road, I did cover 1250 km in 24 hours, half of it in the darkness of last night or early this morning, and much of it tightroping through the freeway maze of the Lowell-Gloucester axis just north of Boston or rush hour in Montreal.

It was a gas. Once I got the idea, I had to do it.