August 17, Carbondale, Illinois—These mosquito bites are pure evil. I’ve never experienced anything like this.
Normal mosquito bites leave tiny bumps that itch for a day and disappear. These mosquito bites are puss-filled purple peaks the size of a quarters. They’re all over me. If you connected the bites around my ribcage, you’d draw the outline of my bra. Same with my underwear. I have bites in my armpits, in my pubic hair—there’s even one at the top of my ass crack! The itch is so overpowering I’ve been keeping a tube of Cortizone-10 cream on the nightstand to slather over myself when I wake in the night feeling like my skin has turned into a billion rabid grasshoppers. I can’t help but scratch them. When I drag my nails across the swollen lumps a sparkling-hot current of satisfaction surges through my entire body. It is addictive. Stopping takes every ounce of my willpower.
This has been going on for three or four days.
It’s my fault. I’m a minimalist. I’m constantly trying to reduce the weight of my backpack. I couldn’t bring my trusty two-man tent on this trip. After twelve years, it’s finally breaking. I ordered a one-man tent before I left Klamath Falls, but it turned out to be a worthless piece of shit, like almost everything is nowadays. Fuck it, I said. I’ll just take a tarp and some paracord…
August 13-16, Cedar Lake—I hike Cedar Lake Trail into the woods just south of Carbondale, Illinois. By the time I find a place that appeals to me, I’m drenched in sweat. My shirt and pants couldn’t be more thoroughly soaked if I had actually gone swimming. Such is the southern Illinois humidity. I tie two corners of my tarp to two trees and peg the other two corners to the ground with sticks, creating a lean-to. I spread my sleeping bag directly on the leaf-strewn ground below, lie flat on my back, and look up into the green leaves. Tree trunks turn from gold to brown as clouds pass over the sun. Everything feels soft. Even the ground feels like memory foam.
All I have wanted for about three years is to lie on the ground and look up at trees. Do nothing. Let my thoughts spiral into the ether until my mind is quiet. So that’s what I do. For three days, I just lie there, drifting serenely in and out of dreams. I eat apples in the morning. I eat bagels with avocado at midday—or whatever time it is when my stomach feels empty. I eat another bagel with avocado and tuna when the blue sky starts to burn and blaze. I realize I’m no longer obsessed with food. My mind is not constantly concerned with what I will eat and when—with being perfect.
The first night, rain drums down for hours. When it stops, a million maracas rattle in unison. It’s some southern jungle bug I’m not familiar with. I’m from the northwest, where nights outside are quiet.
A deer bounds between the trees. A turtle crawls slowly through the brown leaves. An armadillo lopes by, carrying its armored leprosy to some secret hollow. I’ve never seen one alive. In the middle of the night, I get up to pee. I use my red headlamp. The white bulb is too bright. When I stand from my squat, I come face to face with two huge bugs that look like the thing that came out of the guy’s stomach in the movie Alien. Long, white, ringed bodies and six skinny, knobby legs. I don’t know if my red lamp has erased their color, but they look ghostly white, almost translucent, which makes my skin crawl. Being half-asleep, I can’t fathom what they might be.
On the second day, nostalgia shimmers in the afternoon light that falls through the trees. Before its fuzzy sparkle spills over me, it evaporates. This forest reminds me of something that never existed. Sadness approaches on tiptoe, hovering behind a tree, hesitating. But that evaporates too. Sadness for something that never existed. Good times? Good times like a peach that looks ripe, until you cut it open. That’s what happened to me every time I bought a peach. I don’t buy peaches anymore.
Once the weight of sadness and nostalgia have lifted, I walk to find Cedar Lake. The banks are all jungle. No good beaches for swimming. I don’t know if I’d want to. I’d forgotten that lakes and rivers in the Midwest are often brown, murky and sinister, not clear and inviting like the ones in the northwest. Oh, well. I really don’t care about the layers of sweat congealing on my skin. I don’t care about the dirt. I don’t even care about the mosquito bites. I know I have some on my face, my ass, my arms—pretty much everywhere—but they’ll go away soon.
I return to camp and lie back down. I drift serenely in and out of dreams. I have no thoughts.
Is it late or early? Have I been waking every five minutes or every hour? The blank behind the trees could be the pale pre-dawn sky or late-morning clouds. Has it been three days? I guess so. My food is gone, and I know I bought just enough for three days.
I fold my tarp, pack my sleeping bag, hike back down to the trailhead.
I have a friend here. She’s incredible. F is smart and strong and resourceful and I think I love her. It’s not that desperate, all-consuming love that obliterates everything else in your life. It’s more like the color pink, like time-lapse footage of a carnation blooming. I don’t feel like I have to grip this love as tight as I can with both hands to keep it from abandoning me when it gets bored. I don’t feel like I have to edit, adjust and erase myself and perform a caricature of interesting and adventurous to earn and maintain it. This kind of love glows, it doesn’t rage. It makes me happy; it doesn’t burn me down.
F drove me here and climbed the hill with me that first night. Before I could tell her not to, she’d grabbed two gallons of my water a bunch of my food and stuffed it in her bag. She lugged it uphill in the oppressive humidity. She climbed the hill again the next night just to come talk with me under the trees. It’s hard for me to believe I’m worth all that sweat and exertion, but she tells me I am. I hope someday to believe her.
On the third day, F meets me at the trailhead and drives me back to town. We go to my rented apartment and eat a “girl dinner” of chicken salad sandwiches, fajita wraps and donuts. We sit on the couch with fuzzy yellow blankets and talk. We talk for hours and hours. The last time I had a real girlfriend was in high school.
“The difference between you now and you a year ago is like night and day,” F says.
I want her to be a part of my new life. I tie my hair into a ponytail and hand her the dull scissors from the kitchen drawer. She chops off the ponytail, marveling at how thick it is, how long it takes to gnaw through it. Some people say hair stores energy. My hair is chin length now and I feel ten pounds lighter. F apologizes for the jagged edges, but I couldn’t care less. I love it.
When she leaves, I miss her. She and I have created something other than what he meant to orchestrate. What we’ve created is helping me to create myself.
I don’t know if I’ve told you yet, but that’s what I’m looking for.
I was erased. Erased isn’t the right word. I was gradually ground out of existence.
Identity erosion. That’s the official term.
It happens slowly, one tiny grain at a time. Ocean waves are beautiful, but they eat the coast. If given enough time, waves change the shapes of continents… or drown them.
The only things I know about myself now are that I love the road and writing and that I’ve always wanted to go to Ireland.
Some people get devastated when they turn 40. The way I look at it, I have half my life left. And I’m starting this half with a lot of experience and wisdom that have prepared me to embrace an infinity of possibilities.
Before I leave town, I go to the salon and pay $38 for a pixie cut. As the strands fall to the floor, my spine straightens and my shoulders lift. I float out onto the sidewalk liberated.
This half of my life belongs to me…
August 18, Carbondale, Illinois—Before I leave my rented apartment, I take a cold shower to relieve the profound itchiness of my mosquito bites and I slather Neosporin and Cortizone-10 all over my body. I’ve been applying baking soda, raw honey and ice to the rashes of red dots across my cheeks, and they have faded slightly, but my face is still swollen. I am on my way to Indianapolis.
August, 19, Indianapolis, Indiana—The Indiana Medical History Museum is one of the weirdest and most fascinating things I’ve seen in a while. It’s something I never would’ve thought to seek out, but my friend K, who works at the Indiana Historical Society, has booked us a tour. The museum is located in the Old Pathology Building, which was established as a teaching and research lab in 1896 by Dr. George F. Edenharter. It’s located on the campus of the Central State Hospital for the Insane, which opened in 1848. The hospital reached its maximum capacity of 2,500 patients in the 1950s, and closed in 1994.
From the early 1900s up through 1956, physicians and medical students gathered in a 100-seat amphitheater to hear lectures on mental and nervous disorders and watch live autopsies. At first, the fluids from the autopsy table at the front of the room drained directly into the city’s waterways. When students began getting tuberculosis, they started doing autopsies in a special room that contained only an autopsy table and a sink. Bodies were stored there, locked down with steel cages to prevent theft. A pathologist would perform an autopsy and dictate his process and findings into a “speaking tube,” a pipe that climbed the wall into an upstairs room where a physician sat listening and taking notes. The speaking tube method helped prevent tuberculosis.
In 1896, there was no refrigeration, so bodies were stored long-term in the “Dead House,” a building next door where they laid on slabs of ice, again locked down with steel cages to prevent theft. In the 1920s the steel cages were replaced with an electric refrigerator. Aside from the autopsy table and speaking tube, the Autopsy Room contains an iron lung from the polio era and an old physician’s table that transforms into eleven different positions. Our guide also shows us the Foreign Bodies cabinet, which can’t be photographed because it contains patient names. This cabinet contains drawers full of objects the people swallowed or stuck up their noses between the 1920s and the 1970s. There are tons of safety pins, eight drawers of peanuts, and an entire knife blade that was swallowed by a 5-year-old.
The Anatomical Room is next. It contains brains. Lots of them. Prior to the nineteenth century, physicians didn’t examine brains, but the autopsies medical students performed at Central State Hospital for the Insane taught them how tumors, strokes, alcohol, drugs and degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s changed the structure of the brain and contributed to mental illness.
Bacteriology, now called microbiology, was also new in the late 1800s. It was developed by French chemist Louis Pasteur and German physician Robert Koch, who discovered that infectious diseases were caused by microorganisms, or germs. The bacteriology lab at Central State Hospital for the Insane was used for diagnosis and research, which focused largely on the study of syphilis. In its final stage, syphilis attacks the central nervous system and can lead to insanity, so, before penicillin was introduced in 1943, it was the leading cause of institutionalization.
The chemistry lab is dominated by a huge table of tile and copper. Historians think copper is antimicrobial, but back in the day, nobody would’ve known that. They speculate that copper was used because it is malleable and not flammable, which is ideal for handling and mixing volatile chemicals.
Pathologists used this lab to do blood and urine tests that helped with diagnosis. Before blood tests were a thing, pathologists relied on the spinal tap, which was painful and came with the risk of paralysis. Infectious diseases trigger the production in the body of defense proteins called immunoglobins or antibodies, which are found in spinal fluid. If antibodies are present when cerebral spinal fluid is added to a solution containing gold particles, the solution’s color changes. This process, called Lange’s Colloidal Gold Test, was used for diagnosis at Central State Hospital starting in 1914.
Histology is the study of the cellular structure of animal and plant tissue. Don’t worry, I didn’t know that either. In the 1830s, the quality of microscope lenses improved enough that pathologists could see the structure of human tissue, which led to the development of cell theory—the idea that tissues were composed of cells—in 1938. Also, in 1865, aniline dyes were developed in Germany. These dyes allowed pathologists to stain tissues so microscopes could pick up the fine details of cell structures. There are five windows in the histology lab, all positioned on the north wall to ensure consistent sunlight throughout the year. That sunlight also tended to bleach the dyes, so they were kept in cabinets with cobalt glass. Wood would have been just as effective, but Central State Hospital for the Insane was designed with style and beauty in mind. Even the names of the dyes were decorative. Red and blue would not suffice. Instead, they were labeled Bengal Rose and Blue Lumiere.
The library contains roughly 3,000 volumes, is one of Indiana’s largest collections of medical texts from the late 1800s and early 1900s. It also contains a picture of several doctors, one of whom is Sarah Stockton, the first female doctor to work at Central State Hospital. She worked here in the 1880s and was a jack of all trades, capable of everything from treating colds to performing surgery.
There’s also a photography lab that houses a photomicrograph. Developed in the 1880s or 90s, this machine must be five or six feet long. Pathologists used it to photograph and enlarge their best slides of germs so they could be published in textbooks and used in lectures. Like the windows in the Histology lab, the skylight points north for consistent light.
Central State Hospital for the Insane used to consist of eight buildings. A 1921 photograph depicts the entire campus, which included dorms, a fire station, and a powerhouse and electrical plant. The latter still stands, but barely. It is half demolished and covered with climbing vines and graffiti.
Central State Hospital for the Insane was actually quite progressive for its era. Prior to the mid-1800s, people thought mental illness was rooted in lack of faith, moral failings, and demonic possession. People were sent to asylums in manacles, chained to furniture or left in cages, and were beaten and malnourished. They goal was not to treat or cure them but to lock them away. The use of the word “hospital” in Central State Hospital for the Insane implied it was a place for healing rather than confinement. Its approach aligned with the Moral Treatment Movement, which proposed that mental illness could be studied and treated and that patients should be given exercise, healthy food, regular doctor visits and windows for fresh air and sunlight. While Central State Hospital did provide more humane treatment for the mentally ill and start to change the public perception of mental illness, it wasn’t perfect. There were also allegations of abuse, neglect and misuse of hospital funds, and doctors and nurses were poorly paid, badly trained, and not emotionally equipped to handle high stress.
Still, it was a step in the right direction.
(See the full Medical History Museum photo gallery here)
August 20-21, Indianapolis to Boston—Method two for sleeping in coach on an Amtrak train: Lower tray table, place neck pillow on table, place head and arms on neck pillow. This works until my arm and leg go numb. I lean back and extend my limbs to restore blood flow, then repeat the process. I can’t sleep sitting up or lying on my back. It makes me feel too exposed, or like I’m going to float away. I’m sitting next to an older lady from St. Louis. Her curly gray hair and her white socks with purple, pink and teal stripes remind me of Lucky Charms, a Golden Book called Pokey Little Puppy, and a broken toaster that shot blackened bread into the air and onto a linoleum floor, so I don’t mind that her presence prevents me from sleeping across both seats.
My back hurts after a single night sleeping in coach, but nothing hurt after three nights sleeping on the ground in the woods. The mosquito bites on my face have almost faded—baking soda and raw honey work surprisingly well. The ones on my body no longer itch, but they’re a horrendous purple-brown shade. In seven years, when my body has replaced all its cells, they’ll be gone. Maybe.
Dull, gray skies sag over Pennsylvania. In the middle of a high school football field, a lone tube man flaps in broken spasms as bursts of air shoot through his green body, causing paroxysms of forced cheer. Sagging gray skies and lone tube men… They make life seem never-ending and predictable in a bad way. They give me that same leaden feeling I used to get walking into work and smelling wet ketchup in the steam of an industrial dishwasher and sensing the weight of another day’s worth of dirty dishes crushing in on me.
I’m in a booth in the café car. A man asks if he can sit across from me. His shoulders are all jerked up under his ears and his eyes bug out over his black covid mask. He talks with an older, more laid-back couple who sit across the aisle, also wearing covid masks. He talks in quick clips that spill out in sharp jumbles like bark dust shooting out a woodchipper. He reminds me of the spastic lone tube man.
“When you fly, you could be anywhere,” the woman says. “I like looking out the window and seeing the land change.”
“Yes, I feel like when I fly, I lose my sense of geography,” tube man says.
Moving at my own pace helps maintain my sense of geography. I no longer have to run to keep up with someone who walks eight miles per hour and never bothers to look back to see if I got hit by a bus. That shit was disorienting. But I have my bearings now. Perhaps being able to move at my own pace is what makes traveling with money seem so much easier than he always made it out to be.
“Do you like Michigan?” tube man asks.
“More now that there are fires everywhere else,” the woman says. “No wildfires, no hurricanes, no sharks in the lakes…”
I don’t know why, but I find it weird that people are so afraid of sharks. It’s not that hard to stay out of the ocean. People tend to forget that the whole idea behind the news is to report that which is novel, not that which occurs with regularity.
Not that wildfires are novel. Not anymore. Certainly not where I’m from.
People tend to forget that the whole idea behind the news is to keep the public afraid and obedient.
You will be killed. There’s nothing you can do about it.
Except stay inside and watch the news. And buy things. And work so you can buy more things.
Tube man is waiting for the right moment to take his coffee back to his coach seat. He doesn’t want to have to squeeze past all the passengers that are on their way to the café car for breakfast.
I don’t like these clouds, this dullness. I don’t like it because even though it’s warm outside, its freezing on this train. It’s always freezing on the train. The weather outside makes it feel colder. I also don’t like it because it reminds me of hurrying to surreptitiously set up a tent in the woods so as not to get caught in the rain. It reminds me of not having a house or a shower or a washing machine and dryer and of how much it sucks to get soaked when you don’t have that stuff. It reminds me of being stuck in the tent with nothing to do for as many hours or days as it took for the weather to clear up. It reminds me of being stuck, stagnant.
There are two ideas my mind won’t let go of. The first is the idea that I have no money. Having no money means that when it gets dark, I must be hidden in the woods in a tent someplace where normies and cops won’t find me, which means by dusk I must be scanning my surroundings for woods, bridges, abandoned buildings… I still do that everywhere I go. The second is the idea that I will never have a home because I will eventually leave the country, never to return. I’m constantly reminding myself that I do have money now, and that it will last a while, especially if I work, which will be easier to do now that I also have a college degree. I’m constantly reminding myself that I’m finally on my own, that I’m no longer trying to keep someone who is obsessed with escaping the United States and its inevitable violent collapse. I have the means to have a home, and I’m allowed to have a home. I can go home whenever I want, and I can stay there as long as I please. If I want to spend a year in Klamath Falls, Oregon, I won’t be told that I’ve become excruciatingly boring.
Travel seems a lot less cold when you can ride a train and rent a room, and when you know you can go home.
August 22, Lowell, Massachusetts—It turns out I am capable of booking trains, finding stations, and arriving on the right platform at the right moment. I am capable of booking a room in a town I’ve never been to, finding it once I arrive, and figuring out how to work the various types of door locks landlords now use to enable self-check-in. I am capable of navigating public transit systems in big cities without getting lost.
It turns out none of this is as hard or as stressful as he always made it out to be.
I take the Orange line from Back Bay to North Station, the Commuter Rail from North Station to Lowell. A soft little geyser of excitement puffs across my clavicles as the train lurches and begins to roll. The walk to Edson Cemetery is an easy mile-and-a-half down Gorham Street. The little lanes that lead between the buried bodies have names. At the corner of Seventh and Lincoln, I spot the wide slab of granite I came to see. Engraved on its glossy front is a signature: Jack Kerouac. Below that, a legend: “The road is life.” The base of the big granite stone is littered with tributes: two pens, two Budweiser cans, a 2-Euro coin, a 2-Franc coin, a crushed pack of Parliaments, and many cigarette butts with stale tobacco spilling out.
Actually, I didn’t come for the stone; I came for the bones buried beneath it. I guess that’s what’s left at this point. John Louis Kerouac was born March 12, 1922. He died October 21, 1969. He was forty-seven.
Actually, I didn’t come for bones or gravestones. Not even Kerouac, really. I came here because I want to find out what’s real. I had this fairytale life I thought was real. Turns out it wasn’t. Neither were any of the characters in it—including me. I need to see something legendary with my own eyes, touch it with my own fingertips. I need to smell and taste it to make sure it’s more than a nebula of pixels, more than 1s and 0s floating in the ether, more than manipulation designed to make me act a certain way.
I need to make sure it’s more than idealization, love-bombing, trauma bonding or intermittent reinforcement. Those are the official terms.
I need to make sure the legends that helped to form me are real.
Jack Kerouac—On the Road in particular—is one of the legends that helped to form me. Not the twisted, mangled me that I performed in my fairytale, but me—the me I was before that fairytale began. I tried so hard to perform that character that I erased myself.
Identity erosion. That’s the official term.
One thing I know about myself is that I’m nomadic. When I was a kid, my mom’s parents lived in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and my dad’s parents lived in Baker City, Oregon. That meant both sets of grandparents were about 300 miles away from my hometown of Portland. When we visited them, I got as excited about the road trip as I did about Grandma and Grandpa. Another thing I know about myself is I’m a writer. I started keeping journals when I learned to write. At age 23, I burned them all in a fireplace and started over with volume 1. I’m on volume 81 now. Writing is something I have to do.
I will keel over and die if I don’t write.
All I have ever wanted to do is wander around and write. Most people consider this unrealistic and unreasonable.
Jack Kerouac was the first person who told me it was okay to be how I was. He told me when I was 16, when I read On the Road for the first time.
I came to see his grave because I want to make him real. I came to see his grave because if he’s real, I might be real.
I look at all the little tributes. I should’ve brought something. I didn’t think of it. Fuck it. He’s dead. He doesn’t need stuff.
I take off my shoes and socks and sit with my back against the granite stone, my bare feet on the grass. I’m sweaty from walking, scabbed from mosquito bites. Skin hangs off a blister on my toe. It’s from riding a train for three days without changing my socks and then hiking into the humid hills of Illinois. It’s healed now. This seems like the right way to show up to Jack Kerouac’s grave. It’s the only way I can show up. It’s how I am.
Last night, when I arrived in Boston, it was pouring rain. Now, it’s sunny and warm. A cool breeze rustles the trees. Green grass cools the souls of my feet, and they tingle. A fly stands on a blade of grass, its back glimmering metallic blue as it rubs its feet together. Ants run up my shins and calves. I think of that line in On the Road where Sal Paradise says he wants to sleep on the grass and eat fruit for breakfast. I’ve always loved that. I always wanted to do it.
I feel so calm, so serene. I could lie down here and never go anywhere again. I stretch out on my back, my hat over my face. I’ve always loved how trees look through a hat. I love the musty smell of the fabric. I feel my heartbeat. It seems loud. I want to fall asleep. If I do, I’ll cook in the sun.
I sit up, lean against the granite again. I’ve never felt this calm. Never in my life. That feeling of soft, slow dissolution that I get when passing from awake to asleep or back again… that’s what it feels like. The motors on the streets seem muffled, far away, and even the granite against my back feels soft. I know that when I walk out of this cemetery I’ll cross from dream to reality. I cry. I cry because it’s so quiet here, and the quiet gets into me somehow, like I’m breathing it in, and I realize I haven’t felt real quiet for a long time, if ever. I cry because everyone here is dead and they won’t wonder what my problem is or demand explanations. A fat tear ticks past each of the fine hairs on my cheek and suddenly, crying is gone, like I breathed it out.
Even my brain is quiet. No anxiety, no grief, no confusion. Just soft quiet.
Lowell is a regular-ass place where people put gas in cars and men in yellow reflector vests drive lawnmowers across the grass at Shaughnessy Elementary School. Lowell is a regular-ass place where birds dart through the air and wires crisscross the alleyways. Coca Cola trucks drive by and people bury people when they die. Lowell is a regular-ass place. It’s real. Jack Kerouac lived here. He’s in the ground here. Right underneath me. There are no crowds, no lines, no gates, no guards, no tickets. Because Jack Kerouac was a real person and real people can’t put up with that shit forever. Eventually, they get put in the ground and everything is quiet. I pick a bouquet of purple flowers. They’re miniscule—each petal the size of a dewdrop. I put them in a plastic sack. I want something that grew out of the ground here.
What do I do now? What do I say to Jack?
“I’m hungry.”
That’s what I say. It’s true. My stomach is empty.
I pick a blade of grass and eat it.
I’ve now taken two things. I should leave something.
I peel the skin off the healed blister on my toe—the blister I got from being on the road—and place it atop a little pile of stale tobacco that spills from a cigarette butt onto the granite base of the headstone.
There you go. You gave me a piece of you, and I gave you a piece of me and I’ve determined, I think, that you were real. Therefore, I must be real. I mean, the real me is real, not the fucked-up fairytale me.
Right.
I don’t want to move.
I can take it with me—the calm, the quiet, the mosquito scabs, the blade of grass, the purple flowers, the footprints of the ants, and my real self… Except that one piece. You can keep that.
“I’m really hungry.”
I’ll go, I guess.
I walk out of Edson Cemetery and down Gorham Street. I get a calzone in a place called Pizza Hazel. It seems real because the awkwardness of the name Pizza Hazel annoys me. It seems real because I have to wait fifteen minutes in an empty dining room with crumbs on the table and because the guy who hands me the calzone when it’s done says in a heavy accent I can’t place, “Calzone ready, Thank you.” I walk a little farther and I get a brownie and some kind of twisty, buttery, berry jam-filled thing at a place called Lowell Portuguese Bakery. It seems real because the two guys in front of me wear dirty steel-toe boots and yellow reflector vests and they take the rest of the donut holes. I sit at the station in Lowell and listen to a woman talk on her phone, and she seems real because she says, “Now, no offense to Tony because I know he’s white, but if you marry a white girl and she can’t cook…”
Back in Boston, I wander the streets. I sit in the courtyard of the library in a metal chair near a fountain and write until it gets dark. I don’t sit in the cafés because they’re too hip for me. When the security guard kicks me out, I wander again. I peer into alleyways. I love brick buildings and fire escapes. I stroll the Public Garden. I love the buildings glittering through the weeping willows. I love the sheen of the black glassy ponds. The silly boats with swan heads and rows of benches—I love them. I don’t feel anxious or stressed or rushed like I always did in the fairytale.
And I don’t feel like a foreigner.
Wandering the streets alone feels easy and natural.
Peripatetic Sarah 