Can You Channel Kerouac in an Electric Car?
Henry Mance plugged in, turned on, and hit Route 80 to find out
By Henry Mance
“Where we going, man?” asks the narrator, Sal Paradise, in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
“I don’t know but we gotta go,” replies his friend Dean Moriarty.
The first rule of American road trips is to be bored with wherever you come from. Everything else is up for grabs.
You can have testosterone-fuelled road trips (On the Road) or feminist ones (Thelma & Louise). You can forget the family (Hunter S Thompson), or take them with you (Little Miss Sunshine).
You can escape corporate America (Easy Rider), or try to redeem it (Mark Zuckerberg’s 2017 apology tour). You can praise Iowa (Kerouac: “the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines”) or be honest (Bill Bryson: “I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to”).
Everything can happen on the road — because, as Kerouac wrote, the road is life. Over the past century, the road has been carved into American life through literature, politics and geography.
In October, it’ll be 50 years since Kerouac died, alcoholic and miserable, but his legacy remains the romantic vision of endless driving. There is, however, a complication. The…
