Hi Al,

I was going to comment on your post recommending “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac, less known but, in my opinion, more powerful than his other works.

I clicked on your link of book recommendations, though, and saw that you had already written about it. That book has been defining for me, and I hope that my later actions in life reflect that.

You posted the excerpt from On the Road so I thought it would be apt for me to post my favorite bit from Dharma Bums that I really feels exhibits the sense of adventure that so many of us strive for:

“Suddenly I felt so free I began to walk on the wrong side of the road and sticking out my thumb from that side, hiking like a Chinese Saint to Nowhere for no reason, going to my mountain to rejoice. Poor little angel world! I suddenly didn’t care any more, I’d walk all the way. But just because I was dancing along on the wrong side of the road and I didn’t care, anybody began to pick me up immediately, a goldminer with a small caterpillar up front being hauled by his son, and we had a long talk about the woods, the Siskiyou Mountains ) through which we were driving, toward Grants Pass Oregon), and how to make good baked fish, he said, just by lighting a fire in the clean yellow sand by a creek and then burying the fish in the hot sand after you’ve scraped away the fire and just leaving it in there a few hours then taking it out and cleaning it of sand. He was very interested in my rucksack and my plans.”

I just think that is beautiful. In doing something so spontaneous, so sudden, for the sole purpose of “for no reason”, a true adventure is had. Talking about cooking fish in sand isn’t important, they could have been talking about the latest football match or how the weather’s been shaping up. What is important is the true passion, the true sense of adventure, that I think we all should try to emulate.

I’d have to agree with those above saying that ‘Dharma Bums’ is a much better book to appeal to the travelling nomad. The long section during the trip to the mountains was one of the best bits of travel writing I’ve ever read (although semi-fictional I believe).