how kerouac saved our lifes or don't go chasing in the casi

Creative Forums Creative Writing
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Got this from the boat adventures which I didn’t intend to preempt, and using that as a visual prmis/aide recall a time when the kids were little. That’s before the casinos came along.

There were boats too, just an ordinary little tug about with a yamaha out board, and the little motel on the lake was formerly a floating dorm where the loggers got free stay while they cut the trees to be shipped down the river.

We got there late and the lake was a mirror to reflect the snow capped cascades,and we all went there looking for kerouc’s place when he was a lookout staying up on Desolation Peak one summer I think it may have been 1955 or something like that.

All the kids came along by then and they were about 8 to 10 or so two boys and one girl, and we waited for the raft to come to pick us up to go to the other side where the camp was.

Next day we had a late start and the guy asked us if we knew about extended hikes off beaten pathes and he seemed too casual when as we nodded.

The climb through Swiss like meadows flowered with snow flowers and violets appeared half wayup, the first half a sheltering maze of sweet pine, gloomingly reminiscent of all the lost time. Interposed was white patches of snow gleaming a phosporescence of diamond like brilliance allowing the effect of the busy bees surging among the flowers.

Down below the lake seemed to get smaller, until only a visage of remnant of the gleam remained.

We got to the top by 3 or for, and I was going there to communion with Jack Kerouac, and use my magical powers to reverse time and bring back some of the feel of the place and merge it with the myriad descriptions he gave in Dharma Bums.

I was also a bum. I am still am… My heart ached even then on the slightest whim, a whim of a guilty backward glance, that only the guilt of essential food money wasted in forlorn casinos can alleviate.and the only remedy. It’s a worthwhile guilt, a form of necessary rationalisation. Well spent to recapture a bit of the soul.

As we ascended, the air became crisp and the sights became more and more other worldly.

By the time we came to the tippy top, the height was incredibly stultified, there was * 360 degree horizon to be looked at, and of course the famous little pagoda, where He used to live and work. I felt his schizophrenic like aloneness, his dread, and the total solemnity of the place.

To be continued

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It was getting chilly and our kids were happily prancing around until the sun began to sink below the gorges and crevices. Hey look, there is Canada she pointed to the north. And it was then that she said I am cold. She was a little thing really, at that time, long before the bad diets of too many happy meals resulted in a drastic weight gain, and she said I am cold. The sun was going down, and suddenly the thought occurred to me that we have to go back right of way. There was talk of a park ranger falling down suddenly when she lost her footings on one of the trails, off the ill marked trails, and fell two thousand feet where they found her the next day.

And she said I have to sit down on this cold earth, and I told her not to, in any event keep walking about the cold patch before the little observatory.
She didn’t come equipped, she had boots on and the children huddled around her in a symbolic gesture, trying to keep her warm. My heart was thumping as I tried to think, I went around and around the structure, testing the chains of arms’s thickness coiled and locked around the door and all the window shutters. Tested the chain from every angle, it seemed resilient, and the thought occurred to me that we are all going to die up here, thanks to my utter stupidity of ill planning.

 Panic set in, as I felt a strange sense of faintness mixed with an oncoming resignation where my thought was, god, let me go first, then I won't have to experience the others' travails, my own children succumbing to the worsening conditions of the elements.

 I was still going around, and lo and behold I couldn't believe it, at one point, one of the links of the chain gave way.  To this day I believe that this was no mere coincidence.  I felt his presence. The chain broke next to a window which I subsequently was able to force open.

There we could light a fire, there was emergency food, and soon we all fell asleep, I in keroac’s cot, clutching the head frame. The significance of this event forever changed me, and reinforced my next psychic event which occurred exactly one year following, when we visited his grave in Lowell, and upon entering the church where he served as an altar boy, I kneeled in prayer to than what happened last summer, and then we hear the organ play a few cords, and looking back upwards where the sound seemed to enimate from saw the truth.

There was no one up there, and had I been alone, I would have thought of myself as needing a good reality check, but my wife concurred, she heard it also.

My life, was so much like his, my thoughts so comfortingly , assuredly brotherly, that I would have like to think at that time, that I was his lost brother, and he mine, a brother I never had. My road ahead as crazy hermetic mystic saved me from real loneliness for ever.

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Jack was so far ahead of his time that we still haven’t caught up. There is no past, no future, there is only NOW. Dammit! it went…