On the Road (Post 3)

...........The best of Dean Moriarty came out when he drove. His life was about always traveling, always moving and even when the stops along the way didn't work out, the driving itself always did. I didn't really notice this until he got himself into what seemed like a no-win situation over a car. When he and Sal were hired to drive the Cadillac limousine to Chicago, the trip became the epitome of Dean driving.

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Especially page 237: "At a narrow bridge that crossed one of these lovely little rivers he shot precipitately into an almost impossible situation. Two slow cars ahead of us were bumping over the bridge; coming the other way was a huge truck-trailer with a driver who was making a close estimate of how long it would take the slow cars to negotiate the bridge, and his estimate was that by the time he got there they'd be over. There was absolutely no room on the bridge for the truck and any cars going the other direction. Behind the truck cars pulled out and peeked for a chance to get by it. In front of the slow cars other slow cars were pushing along. The road was crowded and everyone exploding to pass. Dean came down on all this at no miles an hour and never hesitated. He passed the slow cars, swerved, and almost hit the left rail of the bridge, went head-on into the shadow of the unslowing truck, cut right sharply, just missed the truck's left front wheel, almost hit the first slow car, pulled out to pass, and then had to cut back in line when another car came out from behind the truck to look, all in a matter of two seconds, flashing by and leaving nothing more than a cloud of dust instead of a horrible five-way crash with cars lurching in every direction and the great truck humping its back in the fatal red afternoon of Illinois with its dreaming fields. I couldn't get it out of my head" Neither could I.

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............When they got to Chicago the car was totally trashed and they returned it to a man who could barely recognize it and who had all their information I realized Dean had never really gotten into trouble before while driving. Surely this time he was in for it. But no. They got away with it--were never contacted, nothing. This just topped it off. There was something magical about his driving. Kerouac used this fact well. His Dean in real life was probably less extreme, but exaggerating only increased the trait's effective way of showing the appeal of an occasionally unappealing character. Just like the drive down into the San Joaquin Valley that I mentioned in a past post, all of Dean's drives held the qualities that Sal so admired: craziness, momentum, toeing-the-line. This may be why, at the end of the book, it is so heartbreaking when Sal has to refuse him a ride (page 306). He never ruined a car or car-ride so the refusal resonates as wrong in the reader's head.