One The Road: Excerpts 1

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.” (Chapter 3, page 13)

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I’m currently on the third chapter of the book, and so far, it has been nothing but accounts of hitchhiking and how Sal got from one part of America to another. The excerpt above, however, caught my attention and empathy because I feel like I’ve had my share of that strange red afternoon awakening, too. I like how Jack accurately puts into words the thoughts of someone who is reading the book two generations later from its writing. Words and its effect are universal.