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copyright by Dory Adams, all rights reservedIn case you’ve been wondering, I haven’t gone missing. I’ve been on the road, traveling with my favorite photographer, Kevin Scanlon (who also happens to be my husband). Kevin shows me the world in ways that I would otherwise miss. All I have to do is hang out with him and watch him work to see things in new ways. Believe me, it’s not just with anyone that I would venture out early enough to watch dawn break over the city on a cold morning. Writer Jack Kerouac, who was a friend of photographer Robert Frank (Kerouac wrote the introduction to Frank’s book The Americans), once said that a good lesson for any writer is to pay attention to how a photographer works and to look at what he shoots. I say, Amen.
There’s an excellent interview with Kevin at “Wedge of Smoke” by Chris Crook, which reveals insight to his creative process and the evolution of his subject matter. Click here to read the interview and see some of Kevin’s photographs.
Road trips make great stories, summer the perfect setting. This summer brings back two famous journeys, one by Jack Kerouac and one by Ken Kesey, in new formats – a book app for On The Road, and the documentary “Magic Trip” using restored film footage of Kesey’s 1964 cross-country trip with the Merry Pranksters. The beat and hippie generations, two eras colliding for Kesey, and with Neal Cassady serving as the legendary wheel man in both stories. Born too close to the end of the baby boomer generation, I missed out on much of the great stuff – at least that’s the way it always seemed growing up. But, I was just old enough to fully embrace the ‘70s with my art school friends, and we have a few road stories of our own. The picture above was snapped by Kevin as he was about to set off on a cross-country trip with his best buddy KT in the summer of 1978. KT is the shadowy figure in the driver’s seat. Shortly after Kevin took this photo, the two departed Pittsburgh for what was to be a summer’s long road trip to British Columbia and then down the west coast. Riding along in spirit were friends who’d painted their names on the blue VW beast, and that big thing on the passenger’s door was supposed to be a hawk (KT was a big fan of The Band, known early on as The Hawks when they were the backup band for Ronnie Hawkins). I’d moved to Los Angeles a month or so earlier, and one of those boxes on the roof rack contained some of my favorite books which they were kindly transporting west for me.Kevin and KT made it as far as the Ohio border before the blue beast developed serious engine trouble. They sputtered back to Pittsburgh, managed to borrow a car from KT’s dad, transferred their gear and my books to the loaner car (a Pinto, Ford’s legendary fiery deathtrap of a ride), and set out on the road again later that same day. 
The year before graduation and this road trip west, Kevin and I both happened to be reading On The Road for the first time – the 25th anniversary paperback edition, the one with the bright orange sunset on the cover. That book brought us together, connected us. Most couples have a song they call theirs, we have our book. We return to it again and again. I’ve reread it many times over the years, and Kevin keeps adding new editions of it to our bookshelves, the latest being a new hardback version he came home with a few weeks ago, this one with a new version of the yellow and orange sun on the jacket. It’s likely that my first copy of On The Road was in that box strapped to the roof rack.It’s also likely that my copy of Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest hitched a ride to Los Angeles with Kevin and KT. Last Wednesday I happened to catch Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s “Magic Trip” on cable. It must’ve been a preview prior to its official release last Friday in theaters and on pay-per-view. You can read a review by Charles McGrath for The NY Times here. Filmmakers Gibney and Ellwood managed to salvage forty hours of footage shot by Ken Kesey and the Pranksters during their 1964 cross-country trip in the psychedelic bus, Further (and the New York City World’s Fair) their destination. My favorite scenes included glimpses of novelists Larry McMurtry and Robert Stone, and of Kerouac, who seemed to be having no fun at a prankster party. Kesey, who’d already published Sometimes A Great Notion and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, appears incredibly young in the film. Just as with all good stories, there were complications and unexpected twists in Kevin and KT’s road trip of ’78. KT ended up having to drive all the way back across the country alone for the final leg of his journey. Kevin decided to stay in California and start a different journey, and convinced me to join him in San Francisco. I’m a sucker for happy endings. KT remains Kevin’s best buddy after all these years. And after all this distance, all this way further along the road, it turns out the road trip of ’78 was really just the beginning.
I’d traveled by train from Chicago to Boston to visit friends. Amtrak was having some sort of special fare. I don’t remember the details of the deal except that it allowed me to make several stopovers along the route so that I could also visit friends in Buffalo for a few days. It was a good enough bargain that I was able to afford a sleeper car roomette, a welcome luxury since most of the trip between Chicago and Buffalo was at night.
Cozy in my roomette, I watched out the window until dusk turned to darkness, amazed at how different the towns looked from my vantage point aboard the train – inside the lowered crossing gates with bells clanging and lights flashing where the tracks crossed streets and roadways. I had a new paperback with me, Joan Didion’s The White Album, and after it got too dark to enjoy the scenery I lost myself in those pages – reading about the power of water in her essays “Holy Water” and “At the Dam” while my train rolled along dark rails at the southern edge of Lake Erie. The tracks ran closer to the lake at industrial areas, where mills still operated at nearly full blast, although the Manufacturing Belt was already corroding into what would become the Rust Belt. Despite my cozy nest in the roomette, I don’t think I slept much that night. I was homesick for California, and reading Didion’s essays for the first time. She had me hooked from the very first sentence of the first essay: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” She was writing about the end of an era, the end of the 1960s. It was the beginning of the 1980s then, and I was somehow saying goodbye to the 1970s on this journey as I headed further east, saying goodbye to California even though I’d left it behind the year before with the move to Chicago.
In Boston, I visited longtime friends Sherry and Jeff, who’d also lived in California for a few years after we’d all graduated from art school in Pittsburgh half a decade earlier. I’d been having a difficult time adjusting to the flatness of the Illinois landscape and needed a change of scenery. Needed to travel for a while. Needed hills and mountains. Needed to be near water that moved with oceanic tides. Chicago and Lake Michigan made me feel oddly claustrophobic, and I needed to escape the prairie land of the far southern suburbs where we lived.
Sherry and Jeff wanted to show me as much of New England as we could squeeze into a weekend drive, and we managed to see parts of New Hampshire and Maine. I saw the Atlantic Ocean for the first time on that trip. It’s ironic that I would see the Pacific Ocean first, after having grown up living much closer to the Atlantic. Looking at maps during our drive back to Boston, I spotted Lowell and requested that we go there to see the town where Jack Kerouac had grown up as a boy. It was where he was buried, and I wanted to try to find his grave.
Lowell looked exactly as I’d expected it to look, with brick mills along the Merrimac River. Despite there being many cemeteries in Lowell, Jeff instinctively turned the car into the correct one. We found a caretaker who asked, “Who yer lookin’ fer?” When I said Kerouac’s name, he went inside his gardener’s shed and brought out a mimeographed sheet of paper with directions to Kerouac’s tombstone. It pleased me that enough fans came seeking his gravesite that they’d printed directions.
There may be a different marker there now, but the small flat stone in the photograph above marked his grave then. We stayed only a few minutes. I no doubt would’ve lingered longer had I been alone. But, it was getting late in the day and we still had to drive back to Boston. It was just one stop on our journey, a side trip really, before getting back on the road again.
Leaving Boston by train, I thought about Kerouac. I’d read most of Kerouac’s work while living in California. One of my favorite pieces was “The Railroad Earth” in Lonesome Traveler, about working as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad while he lived in San Francisco. In the essay, Kerouac reminisces about Lowell while he’s working in the rail yards and riding the trains between San Francisco and San Jose. There’s something about traveling that makes us think about other places we’ve been and about the people we were with there. I was missing my husband whose job had kept him in Chicago while I was on this trip. In New York City I would change trains and then travel west to Pittsburgh for another stopover before returning to Chicago – toward what was our home for a brief while.
When I was younger I mostly measured time by weeks and months; only long chunks of time such as school grades and birthdays were measured in years. Now, I measure time in decades. I was barely out of my first decade when Kerouac died. As we quickly approach the end of our first decade in the 21st century, I’m already in my fifth decade, having surpassed the length of Kerouac’s short life. Rest in peace, Ti Jean. Your words live on as I continue speeding through my own lifetime.
News and Updates:
• Photojournalist Clyde Hare died last week. Hare came to Pittsburgh to work with Roy Stryker on the Pittsburgh Photographic Library Project and then made Pittsburgh his home for the next fifty years. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette news obituary includes several of his images of Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Hare’s photographs are included in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art and at George Eastman House, among others.
• Congratulations to Jayne Anne Phillips whose latest novel Lark & Termite is a finalist for the National Book Award.
• Carnegie Mellon University Press has announced the release of a new edition of Chuck Kinder’s The Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale as part of their Classic Contemporaries list. The new edition includes additional chapters and lost love letters which were not included in the original edition, as well as an introduction by Jay McInerney. Even though I have a signed first edition on my bookshelves, you can bet I’ll be buying and reading the new edition as soon as I can get my hands on it.
Photo Credit:
Jack Kerouac’s gravestone, copyright © 1983 by Dory Adams.
Even though Pittsburgh has been my home for a longer period of time than any other place I’ve lived, I still say I’m going home when I return to visit the area where I grew up. Jacks Mountain spans four counties in central Pennsylvania, but the part I call home is the ridge that separates Huntingdon and Mifflin counties. I make the journey only two or three times a year now, and as I begin each trip I wonder what will be different and what will remain unchanged.
Going home is one of the oldest stories in literature. It’s said that all stories come down to just a few basic plots, and it has even been argued that all stories can be boiled down to a single plot: a stranger comes to town. I sometimes feel like that stranger when I go home and see how things have changed with time.
The road home has always been Route 22, although it is no longer the two-lane highway winding through small towns that I once traveled. Instead, it’s now a four-lane divided highway bypassing most towns along a straighter route past Wal-Mart superstores and identical looking shopping centers. There are still a few diners along the way and a few curves left here and there, but the diner atop the ridge in the photograph above is gone. The two-lane stretch of the road that goes past the house where I grew up, however, remains much the same with the biggest difference being that there are more houses along it in what used to be fields and woods.
None of my family remains on our old home place, a small house on two acres of land near Atkinson’s Mills. It was sold when it became too much for my mother to manage after my dad died. Mom lives in town now, as do my brothers and their families. It’s not a town I’ve ever lived in, and not the town where I went to school – so going home isn’t, well, quite home anymore. Except that it’s still on Jacks Mountain.
The mountain was named for Captain Jack Armstrong who was a fur trader there in the mid-1700s. I’m not sure why the mountain name lacks a possessive apostrophe, which always makes me think there were multiple Jacks for whom the mountain was named (not to mention how much it pains me to omit that punctuation). But there it is on the maps – Jacks Mountain, my plural home.
There are several versions of the Captain Jack story. Legend is that his ghost roams the mountain and that the glow of his lantern can still be seen at Jacks Narrows near the Thousand Steps. The version I grew up hearing was that he was searching for his dead wife and children who’d been murdered by Indians. Another version is that he was murdered along with his two Indian guides in some sort of disagreement. Our school was named Captain Jack at one time, but by the time I reached high school it had been renamed for the town where it is located, Mount Union. I preferred the more poetic, slightly roughish name.
Peduzzi’s, was the favored after-school hangout for its tall wooden booths in the back where multiple generations of names were carved. The phone booth, also wooden and located in the back, was a place where a dime could connect you with your sweetheart for unlimited minutes – or at least until the call was interrupted by someone’s impatient pounding on the door. Peduzzi’s as my generation knew it is a thing of the past, although the building still stands and the sign remains.
I’m almost always up for a road trip, even if it’s just a short one, and especially if I’m with my husband, Kevin, who is my favorite traveling companion. He knows all the interesting routes, and I swear he’s driven just as many blue highways across the country as the fictional Dean Moriarity. In fact, one of the reasons I got to know Kevin years ago when we were students was because we both happened to be reading Kerouac’s On The Road at the same time. That book opened up many conversations between us, one of them about Route 22 which Kevin deemed as the kind of route Kerouac would’ve chosen. It’s been a while since I’ve read On The Road, but I seem to remember a scene where Sal Paradise was walking along the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg at night. Perhaps I’m mixing it up with another story. Or, maybe I’d just like him to be one of the Jacks connected to Jacks Mountain. It may be time to revisit the book. To see what I remember and what I’ve forgotten – the same as with going home.
Photo credits
Top Photo: Jerry’s Diner, Route 22 near Huntingdon, PA (1981). Copyright © by Dory Adams
Bottom Photo: Peduzzi’s, Mount Union, PA (1981). Copyright© by Dory Adams
Kevin Scanlon Photographing at Dawn 
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