The Rucksack Revolution

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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A young wanderer lies in a sleeping bag on a narrow rock ledge high on a cliff, rucksack beside him, pale grey-blue drop falling away below into washed empty air under bright daylight. — Comfort traded for the open ledge

Close firelit view of a seated man, warm ochre light on his bearded face and the backs of his worn calloused hands held to the flames, dark pines and pale snow washed loose behind him in the night. — Fire instead of screens

A single small hiker with a canvas rucksack walks a thin trail across a vast pale grey-blue mountain ridge at dawn, the figure dwarfed by granite slopes washing into paper-white sky. — Salvation underfoot, not in Washington

The chapter finds Ray and Japhy reunited in the city, their minds still humming from the Matterhorn climb and the weeks of woods and meditation. Japhy has been mulling something. He has been turning over a vision in his head, and now, in a moment of pure prophetic glee, he lays it out for Ray — his great prophecy of the rucksack revolution. He speaks the way young men speak when they have read too much Zen, slept too little, and climbed too high: with the absolute certainty of a man who has seen what the world could be and is angry that it isn't.

The vision is simple, and it is electric. One day soon — Japhy swears it — thousands upon thousands of young Americans are going to break with the whole work-and-spend machinery of their parents' world. They are going to buy secondhand rucksacks. They are going to strap on boots. They are going to walk out the door and not come back to the cubicle, the assembly line, the salary, the mortgage, the television set, the monthly payment on the new car. Instead they will wander. They will hitchhike across the continent and back. They will climb mountains — the Pacific Northwest volcanos, the Rockies, the Sierras, the Alps if they can get there, the Andes, the Himalayas — and they will sleep in the dirt and under trees and in caves and on the ledges of cliffs where the wind nearly blows them off. They will refuse regular jobs. They will refuse apartment leases. They will refuse the whole gleaming promise of the American middle class and all its plastic comforts.

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ImaReadFolio 03 — 03

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to me, they make me feel old and young at the same time, but mostly old.

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Japhy sees it as a quiet revolution, the kind that makes no headlines, the kind that is easy to mock because it looks like loafing. But it is a revolution, he insists — a turning, a flipping of the script, a refusal so total and so joyful that it will remake the country from the roots. Instead of consuming, they will seek vision. Instead of climbing ladders, they will climb real mountains. Instead of staring at screens, they will stare at fire and snow and the backs of their own calloused hands. They will study Zen, they will study yoga, they will study the old pagan religions of the trees and the weather. They will become, in Japhy's word, lunatics — but lunatics in the Chinese sense, the wise-fool sense, the people who have seen through the great American sleep and chosen to wake up barefoot on a mountain trail.

Ray listens with his whole body. He is partly convinced, partly exhilarated, partly aware that this is also the private dream of one man who wants very badly for the world to look like his own wilderness life, his own ascetic discipline, his own dirt-floor cabin on a far hillside. And yet there is something deeply moving about it — this stubborn belief that the answer to industrial civilization is not more politics but more footsteps; that salvation comes not from Washington but from gravel under the boot; that the great American soul will be saved, if it is saved, by foot soles worn thin on a thousand trails, by sleeping cold, by eating badly, by the long patient suffering of the road. This is the ideology of the whole book distilled into a single wild prophecy, and Kerouac wants us to feel the current running through it — that the lunatics and the mountain-climbers and the meditators and the Zen-fools are going to inherit the high places of the earth, that the machine can be outwalked, that the consumer dream can be outdreamed.