Your California Legacy

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Segment Title: Kerouac | Train

From October in the Railroad Earth, 1952
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

Since the days of the Central Pacific, Californians have always had a love-hate relationship with the railroads. So did beat writer Jack Kerouac. In 1952 he made his living as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific, but something about those "merciless wheels" telegraphed dread to Kerouac's inner ear.

Terrified of injury on the job, Kerouac sought escape working on his "spontaneous prose," including a piece called October in the Railroad Earth, a prose poem of his working life that duplicated the rhythms of "a steam engine pulling a 100-car freight with a talky caboose at one end."

So it's peaceful Sunday morning in California and off we go, tack-a-tick, lao-tichi-couch, out of the Bay Shore yards, pause momentarily at the main line for the green, ole 71 or ole whatever been by and now we get out and go swamming up the tree valleys and town vale hollows and main street crossing parking-lot last-night attendant plots and Stanford lots of the world-to our destination in the Poo which I can see, and, so to while the time I'm up in the cupolo and with my newspaper dig the latest news on the front page and also consider and make notations of the money I spent already for this day Sunday absolutely not jot spent a nothing--California rushes by and with sad eyes we watch it reel the whole bay and the discourse falling off to gradual gils that ease and graduate to Santa Clara Valley then and the fig and behind is the fog immemoriates while the mist closes and we come running out to the bright sun of the Sabbath Californiay-

Jack Kerouac captured the restlessness and alienation many of his generation felt in post-war America. Books like On the Road and Dharma Bums continue to appeal to readers who share those feelings in our own time.

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