Kerouac's tracks 50 years later

The beat goes on - The Boston Globe--The Boston GLOBE has a retrospective here on Jack Kerouac, who was from Lowell. Reading him, and later Ken Kesey, gave a lot of us the ideas that led to the road to San Francisco and the cultural upheaval of the '60s. And now, here is the romance of the beats cropping up again, getting aired out, helping us fall in love with America again, the real America, where "FREE" is something more than what you see on an ironic/iconic big stamp outside a neoclassical shrine to government.

Here are a few quotes from the article I wanted to spotlight, but take some time to read the whole thing. It's a trip:

"Sal, we've got to go and never stop 'til we get there."
"Where are we going to go?"
"I don't know, but we can't stop 'til we get there."

We battled traffic through Oakland and went over the bridge into San Francisco's Chinatown , where we rolled down the windows and took in the smells and sounds that drifted in the long shadows of the late afternoon.
We had arrived at the promised land of the beat generation.
This was where in the 1950s the seeds of a hip, new culture planted by Kerouac and the poets Allen Ginsberg , Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso formed the buds of the beat generation that would flower into the counterculture of the 1960s.