Growing up on Long Island, I had map fever. It was more than a compulsion to cover my walls; it was a need to possess the places those maps represented, to accumulate destinations…  Above my desk hung a map of the United States, stuck full of pins, heavy with the destination voodoo of the post-Kerouac generation. On the Road was practically mythology to me; I charted Sal Paradise’s route through bop America as a scholar of ancient Greek might try to trace Odysseus’s travels.

In 1974, after two years at a local college, I set off for the West Coast at last, attempting to duplicate Kerouac’s journey and follow that “one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles.” Needless to say, my path across the country took its own shape. It included some of the cities Sal Paradise visited, like Chicago and Denver, but for the most part I wound my way through territories unknown, an eager disciple of the Fates that steer young travelers into unexpected—but always strangely appropriate—encounters….

- from “On Maps,” Scratching the Surface

Don’t know why it took me so long, but it wasn’t until this November – after giving a talk at the 100th Anniversary celebration of Hostelling International in Boston – that I finally made the pilgrimage to Lowell, Massachusetts, to visit Jack Kerouac’s grave.

It wasn’t even my idea. The inspiration came from Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet, who was also speaking at the event. Along with travel writer Rolf Potts (and his Arlington-based friend Steve, who served as our own private Dean Moriarty) we left our hotel near the Boston Common and drove the 45 minutes out to the old milling town where America’s most poetic vagabond was born, schooled, and laid to rest.

There’s nothing much to say about the house Kerouac was born in, at 9 Lupine Road. It’s a brown shingle two story (his family lived in the top flat) with a porch filled with hanging plants and kids’ toys, a black SUV and a couple of bright red trash bins parked in front, the trees nearly empty now, it being Fall, and a melancholy pre-Thanksgiving light pervading the alley like the memory of hot cider on those short afternoons after football practice at Lowell High, itself as angular and sharply-lit as a canvas by Hopper, or de Chirico, near enough to the Mills so that the boys and girls could hear their mothers at work….

These days you can walk from the Boott Cotton Mill and Museum (now, strangely, a National Historic Park) to the Kerouac Memorial: a series of marble pillars arranged as a cross and a mandala, inscribed with passages from the Beat hero’s books and poems:

—When you’ve understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.

- The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, #45

Two miles south of Lowell along a road punctuated by Dunkin’ Donuts and freight car diners and gas stations without restrooms is the Edson Cemetery. We parked inside the wrought iron gate and crunched through vivid leaves, a jazzy honeyed medley of cinnamon red, candy corn yellow and burnt umber.

It was a big cemetery. There was no map. Finally – with the help of Steve’s iPhone, God bless ‘em – we found the flat stone. It was covered with a scattering of small offerings: dried flowers, cigarette packs, stones, candles, an American flag, a picture of Buddha, hand-written notes.

We stood there for a while and didn’t know what to say. Kerouac’s marker may be here — but for us his spirit still inhabits the road, anchored more in San Francisco or Denver or Mexico itself, though we know he loved his roots and family and was a popular kid in high school, athletic and smart. What I mean is that Lowell meant more to Kerouac than to us, and although his bones lay beneath our feet I realized that if I can say one thing about Jack Kerouac it is that he is not interred. He is what Melville called a “loose fish,” connected not so much to this place (or any place) but to the Sense of Place itself, having created and cultivated that beautiful abstract sensibility better than anyone: that sweet lonely balance of longing and belonging, abiding in the moment while utterly aware of mortality, sublimely grateful yet inconsolably sad.

Rolf left a dollar bill he’d been carrying for six years, since he got it as change at the Golden Gate Bridge tool booth in 2003. Tony left a $10 trillion note that he’d picked up in Zimbabwe.

I dropped three coins onto the stone. They fell heads, heads, tails. The I Ching value of eight: a broken highway line. “The dark, yielding, receptive power of yin.”

Thank you, Jack Kerouac, I whispered to the bare trees in the leaf-littered November Lowell cemetery. We’re here by your invitation.

I recently returned from a trip to Tasmania, my second visit to the Australian island state in 16 months. This is a funny thing about being a freelance journalist; one becomes semi-expert on subjects that, a week or a month or a year ago, one knew nothing about. Like the rest of the world (with the exception of a few people on the island itself), my entire idea of what a Tassie Devil looked like was based on the Looney Tunes character, Taz.

In reality, devils are snarling, toothy, adorable creatures about the size of big raccoons, with translucent pink ears and white bands across their chests. They feed mainly on carrion (i.e., road kill) and small mammals. And they are in serious trouble. A deadly and contagious (!) cancer called Devil Facial Tumor Disease is sweeping over the island, and has already wiped out about 2/3 of the devil population since it appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in 1996. Unless this mysterious disease is stopped, devils could be extinct by 2025.

A few days after I returned home to Oakland, I  took a walk in the Berkeley hills to enjoy the wildflowers. Along the trail I ran into my old friend Arlene Blum. Though Arlene is best known for her role on the 1984 all-women’s expedition to Mt. Annapurna (and as the author of Annapurna: A Woman’s Place), she’s also a PhD in chemistry. The minute I mentioned Tasmania, Arlene informed me about a recent study. Amazingly, autopsies on Tasmanian Devils are showing very high levels of chemical fire retardants called PBDEs: highly toxic chemicals commonly found in computers, carpets, and furniture. How did these chemicals get into the environment of this remote island, which is said to have the cleanest air is the world? And are these PBDEs — which affect the immune system, and “have been linked to reproductive problems and cancers in animals and human” ( The Australian, 2/22/2008) — the cause of Devil Facial Tumor Disease? If nothing else, these remarkable and alarming finds show that this planet’s biosphere is linked in ways we can barely perceive, with results we are only beginning to anticipate.

On a more playful note…

Is it wrong to blog about a blog about me? I think not. A few days ago, my Google ego-alert turned up a blog on DeepGlamour.net referencing a quotation from my 1999 book Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth. The ping was timely for two reasons. First, because the new Star Trek movie is scheduled to open on May 8th ( can you believe it’s actually called “Star Trek”?). Secondly, because I have come to realize that what most appeals to me about Barack Obama is his Spock-like quality.

Anyway, here is the blog from the erudite Virginia Postrel,entitled “The Glamour of Star Trek.”

Earthrise from Apollo 8

Whenever I see this photograph – taken on Christmas Eve, 1968,  by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders – I think about the now-classic sci-fi film Men in Black. Planet Earth, suspended in space, reminds me of “Orion’s bell:” the bauble around the neck of an alien’s cat, containing an entire miniature galaxy. There it is: the home planet, shrunk to the size of a Christmas ornament.

As many times as we’ve seen this iconic image, how often do we really get it? Do we understand, viscerally, that everything that has ever happened to humanity – to every living thing ever known – has occurred on that glossy blue-and-white marble?

In the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, much is made of a phenomenon called satori: the moment of illumination, or awakening, that makes the delusional nature of life melt away like a sno-cone in the Sahara. Satori can be evoked by a simple phrase, feeling, or gesture. The emaciated Buddha attained realization when served a bowl of rice milk; the teacher Byron Katie awoke in a halfway house to the sensation of a cockroach creeping across her foot. For others, illumination comes with the contemplation of a koan: a mystifying paradox which short-circuits our rational thought process.

It seems to me that this astonishing photo – disarmingly simple, yet impossible to fully comprehend – might serve as the collective koan for every human being alive on this world. It is a portrait in which we are invisible, yet fully contained;  a point of view that portrays reality in an absolutely unadorned, yet utterly radiant, state. It is a vision available to non-visionaries; a miracle that requires no faith.

It is a view of our dizzying isolation, and proof of our total interdependence. And whether our Earth is just one of a billion populated worlds in this spiral galaxy, or a trinket around the neck of some alien’s cat (or both), it’s pretty frakkin’ gorgeous.

Here’s wishing all of you a wonderful New Year - on a planet that seems just a little more wonderful than it did last year.

*  *  *

p.s. – A marvelous essay about this famous image, by Nature editor Oliver Morton, appeared 12/24/08 in the New York Times.