Dreaming of Travel & Motion

Around 1980 I began the think seriously about the road. Like most high school sophomores, I was bored with school and life. Scanning a rack of books in the Haddonfield Memorial High School library one day, I noticed a tattered copy of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. I had heard some older students talk about the book with an excitement that intrigued me.

Haddonfield Memorial High School
Haddonfield, NJ

I devoured the book and, like decades of young people before me, it put something I had felt deep down into words; a nagging sense of wanting something more, something larger. It spoke of the desire to find a transformative process to put one's self through. I was at an age where I needed to find something to steer toward and Kerouac pointed the way for me. Dreams of travel came to occupy my mind. I wasn't a particularly rebellious kid, and I wasn't consumed with misplaced anger, but there was something to be learned from time on the road that I wanted.

I had a Rand McNally road atlas that I kept next to my bed through most of high school. Some evenings I would leaf through it and look at all the towns strung along the secondary highways and wonder about who lived there and what their lives were like. I would say their names to hear the sounds of far away and I compared their location to the little black dot the represented my little world and I marveled at the immensity of it all.