The rain picks up in a cacophony of splash slick slide – falling in sheets onto the steaming street. The wind sneaks in and onto the tired timber porch like a sleek thief, and builds and climbs and carries in the now-cool rain. Lightning glows the Thursday clouds clear bright and almost immediately the hungry thunder follows up – flash boom. And then more, and the rain grows strong and cold and windy splattered onto the porch, onto me. Rain doesn’t even seem to fall now, it just is, filling the air cold and harsh whilst the swinging sprinkler next door struggles to keep up.

The front yard quickly floods, dirt floating off down a little course to resettle someotherplace. The road seems to uplift and float downhill away, until a car comes pushing along and rapidly turns it water white. And it’s all strong and full and the noise of it bounces around the porch and out across College Park. 

Now the lightning and thunder glow and roar everywhere and are the same flabloomsh, beating as one giant front line launching sonic weapons into the falling Orlando day. And I can hear Gomez’s sound of sounds in lightning as it all turns on, dancing and playing its way over me and the house, rattling and shaking and shining it allatonce. Booflashoom.

But what does the big old teary oak care in all this sound mad fury. It’s seen it all before, and does nothing more than swing a few smaller limbs to allow the storm to blow on through. It’ll continue to stand and bow as it has for days a million, and it’ll see the storm lighten as it does now, and yawn its same old daytime stretch as it all rages somewhere on. 

In the tree I see one perfect circular branch frame, with a streetlight behind turning the now-lighter rain a delicate orange as it tumbles to the street below. And here I sit on Kerouac’s porch, contemplating his giant oak, surveying his front yard, just breathing in the simple spring delight of it. 

The lighting flashes away now, the thunder taking a while to shoot its cue. The rain slows its desperate fall, the wind sinks back off the porch, and the water on the road slips quietly away. Out on the coast they’re trying to launch a shuttle up into all of this, but methinks not tonight anyway.

And it all soothes out now, gradually slowing and easing into quiet night. The rain stops, and the air is still. The lightning and thunder move further away, and my traveling show leaves me to myself. I get up to go back inside, and I turn to take a last look towards the storm’s tail. And I see a shadowy cat walking silently out onto the street. It sits by a long midroad puddle, looks down into it, surveying it closely and deliberately, before it drops its front legs, lowers its mouth and drinks thirstily from its centre.

Our gentle waitress, Tammy, brings us endless Coke (the drink) and Sprite and water and coffees and it’s all so unconquerable but we give a damn fine all-you-can-eat shot at it. We sit and lean back quietly and think about the quick-fire last few days, and I know there’ll be more time to think about it when we’re not living it, and we can finally sit in tranquil surrounds as Wordsworth did.

We tip Tammy good and go back to our rooms to pack up and say goodbye to it, then we’re down in the car park waiting for the Escilade and we kick the football across the Bellagio driveway as we wait. The valet guys smile at the silly out-of-the-ordinariness of us and I know they secretly want to join in too if their boss wasn’t looking, but really he wants to have a kick as well. So whilst they all hold themselves smiling back for now, we kick the Sherran as the fountains strike up a flurious shoot and the music booms out of the speakers and it all looks different down here amongst it where we know the show will forever roll along.

Eventually the Caddy arrives and we say goodbye to George the nicest man you could hope to find anyplace and his loving gal and we close the doors on it and Heath whips us down to the Greyhound station in the sad used-up back blocks of Vegas. And there’s the Golden Nugget casino and guys asking for dollars on the street and we all pause a while before we even think about opening the doors. But eventually we do and Heath lets us out into it, and in a brief nanosecond we thank him for everything as we hug and unload all our stuff onto the other-end sidewalk, saying goodbye to a bright star in our universe — shining for us like he shines for the whole world too.

We all promise to keep in touch and get together again soon, but things always draw out long on the no-time line of forever. We say goodbye to Mel, and give her a kiss, the strange, warm girl who lived a lot with us, and with that Heath is gone in a horn honking V8 get-out back to beating LA and we’re left with all our piled gear in the downtown back-area of America — everyone sad and gone with their tired old hands pushed out.

Slowly and quietly we move inside and get our tickets and wait in the middle of the shiny cold plastic floor whilst everyone sits dejected and empty and waiting around the edges under the fluoro lights, and it hits us in an instant that our world has fallen away and a different reality now slaps our faces. But I’m not ready to deal with it right here just yet and I need to get out of this and have a piss or something, so I go on over to the Golden Nugget and the people there are all spent. Absolutely the loneliest place in the USA right there with the saddest oldest housewives and divorced husbands slotting their money away whilst the stained carpet and cracked mirrors look coldly on and the toilets are rusted an orange streak and I get out of their quick before I lose my way and grow old with all these poor souls.

I get back and our bus is loading to Grand Junction, Colorado, and we line up with everyone else, heads bowed and push through to the ticket-checker who just needs to be somewhere else, on the road or something, and so we get up to him and he says, ‘Grand Junkyard, hey — enjoy your trip’. And this is a harsh hard reality to switch to, and we find four spots on the bus and sink into them heavy and tender.

‘Islands,’ Beno says. I lean over him a little and get a better angle on the world. And the fullness of the ocean is mirrored in the lush green of the scattered islands below — one big one especially, where trails snake around its rim and through the guts and on the shore side there’s a harbour with boats glistening white in Saturday play.

Soon, like so much else, it’s behind us and there’s more islands and they slide green on by, and water and water and wabam! US fucken A. Water beach land and we slide in through one little pocket of all this going Californian coast and we’re in, above it, and in. The houses and buildings start and blow out and don’t end and by Christ I thought Sydney was big, but this is topless stopless. From the coast right on through, and maybe LA has grown huge and bulging all the way over to the east coast so big and heavy and totally unlike anything coastal Western Australia. Buildings and roads and free ways, way-o-ways, all the ways to skyscrapers, and hills and more roofs. Roofs of horses hoofs pounding on to heartland America driving and grinding it out and out as it goes a ridin’ on.

I grab the waitress and ask if we can sneek in a coupla cheeky ones and I look out again to see the land roll and dip with the buildings going with it perfectly, flawlessly, roof-fully, dutifully. And I look down at one house in a gaziiiilion and I wonder what’s going on there. What’s happening? What do they do and who are they? Where do they find their getgo? What’s their story?

Soon, they’re gone too, but our champagne is here, and we raise it to the window’s golden rushby USA land. To all that life and energy beating a breaking rhythm in this timeless Saturday song.

‘Welcome to America,’ says Beno. And I smile as we clink our glasses to the sound of the wheels reaching out for it. Stretching and feeling for their spot in all of this massive swinging country.

And where do you even begin to look into this hollowness which is all yours with the constant river running through its guts at the essential base of it? How can you even begin to understand when its very beginnings are so unknown and its ends so far off? I guess all you can try to do is gather your wits and your bits from the spot you get to stand on – the spot there for you – and breathe in your part of the whole. One little metonymic part of the canyon existing in you, with one part of you in the forever-reaching canyon.

We pay a quarter and go up a nearby tower and have a look from higher up and the view hardly changes at all and how could it ever when the very canyon is so endless? What does it matter how far we go or to what distances we look? The only way we’ll ever really gain a different perspective of the whole big universe of it is if we change the way we look – if we change ourselves – which begins a whole other universe of timeless looking.

There’s an open deck on one level of the tower with little slots you can look into and see the canyon reflected upside down. And even from this flipside view the enormity of it is unfathomable with the only real difference being that you now also notice the never-ending blueness of the sky.

Well, it fucken ain’t. We gotta turn them all off. Move out of empty ABC news and empty our selves. Become empty then fill up on what’s real and essential and delicate rosy soft petal white. This is the story. Smell it, hear it, taste it, live it. Wake the fuck up. We’re going quietly, and steadily without a fight into never-ending dreamy days of hungover night. We gotta cut the cables, throw the modems out the windows, quit our jobs, burn our uniforms, call a bank on our cell-phones and then leave them turned on in the middle of Walmart, scratch questions onto McDonald’s restaurant tables, never ‘Yield’, unplug the air-conditioning, kill the cruise control, cos it ain’t OK. We’re fading from the inside out and that’s where it starts and blows rippling out into pointless arguments, assaults, melees, border disputes, fallen twins, Operation Enduring Freedom collector cards, refugees eating grass to stay alive whilst countries are unwilling to help.

But.but only if we could wake and see everything for what it is. The alarm clock’s ringing fucking loud. These are the two biggest roads diverging in the yellow wood of history. And only when we stop hitting ‘snooze’ will we be able to take the road less traveled by, take the one that makes all the difference, and wake the fuck up. We have to dance on our own, smell the rose, taste the apple, feel the silk, be with our loves, hear the guitars, shout the truth, see the sky – all that never-ending bottomless Saturday morning vanilla blue. We need to notice we’re breathing.

Dick takes the wheel and straight away we get rising mountains and sleet snow and this is all gonna come on tired and hard with eyes narrowed and feet edgy. Sometime way later we’ll cross into Utah and then Colorado and all the while pushing, pushing. But sometimes, like now, it’s hard to see the goal and the point in everything when it’s all so dark. What does Boulder matter to all this thick black desert snowy night? What does Pat’s job, my job, Dick’s job, your job really matter now, in a place like this? There’s maybe a zillion of these kinda roads the world over. Maybe you’re heading down your own right now. And maybe you’re like us, far from home, if you even have an idea of what that might be, disappearing into the desert with no other cars or life or anything else out there – nothing but the black cold of night and its falling sleet. And if you’ve ever traveled a road like this, maybe you’ve done it with people like Dick and Pat – guys who’d never back off an inch, either way, for you and wherever it is you’re headed.

All of this plays over in my head with ‘Free to Run’ on the stereo and I think back over it – everything before I came and everything after. And I close my eyes and it comes at me like a lit-up firework of images and sounds and laughter and pain, but in the end all of it explodes into the most beautiful chrysanthemum firework I’ve ever seen – my whole world exploding at me, shooting through the falling white of blackness Nevada and I feel myself begin to break up with all that falling snow – all those rushing-down tiny flakes, none of which are similar to any other, and I feel my body, my mind, my everything break up and scatter and I’m happy to see it all go and it’s so much clearer now, with each part of me floating off into the snow and the night, each piece blowing up in its own firework across the sky. And I see it all so simple and bright and all my bits keep exploding and lighting up the dark until my whole world turns white with its passing through time eternal, through me, though you, through everything always.Boom

***

You know he was here. You know what he created. You might even think you know him a little better through being here. But what you really come to know are his works, his words, and that they are exactly the same as yours – born from the same place within you and within a zillion others who share this starry world.

Above all, you come to know that you too can rise to meet your own essential destinations on this diamond-studded universal road.

***

Some guests may never feel a tangible sense of Kerouac’s spirit within the house. Some may. But existing within all guests, however, in some night-time corner of who they are, there breathes the thought that Kerouac lived here. The simple thought that he created here. Connected with his magic and gave it to the world from here. From this small, ordinary, Orlando home.

And when place and space play such an important role in the creative process for human beings the world over, a more welcoming thought I could not hope to find. Because, after all, we all want to be inspired. We all want to be moved.