If you ask why a beat goes out on the road you know the answer isn’t always gonna be to get to some other place, because a lot of traveling was just for the hell of it _ because they could. It is hard to believe it’s been fifty years since "On The Road" came off the presses and even stranger yet to think that for the experiences it’s about you’re looking at more like sixty. But in 1957, Sept. 5 was the day it happened.

I myself wasn’t even eight but a little wait and I’ll hear about sputnik long before beatnik. We had Maynard G. to give us a style but that was a chewed up and spit out vision of what Kerouac and the boys were talking about. Freedom. It was after the war and everybody was getting jobs and houses and cars and settling in to that life that was to become the fifties; you know, that feeling to be doing what you’re supposed to be doing. But some of these ol’ Columbia dudes were having none of that after sitting up all night with wine and speed and dreaming about how they could escape and find some landscape that didn’t reflect what they were seeing out there.

So Jack met Neal who had a car and didn’t really exist unless he was behind the wheel out blasting down the highway to somewhere. Put the two of them together on a few cross-country trips with all those stops in Denver, Mexico and California, and Jack with his notebook writing down the thoughts the talks the meetings the girls and everything else.

You know how it all came together later on the scroll when he sat for weeks of mania with a typewriter, coffee, cigarettes, wine and benzadrine. But that was years before he finally was able to revise and rewrite to satisfy Malcolm that the book was ripe and the world was ready to taste it. Of course Allen helped that cause with all his pushing and breaking up the ground with his Howl on that San Francisco night that became like a Woodstock of the fifties because if you weren’t there and didn’t know somebody who was then you just weren’t beat, man.

A lot of kids wouldn’t have been hip either in the sixties without ``On The Road’’ helping them react to the general malaise they were feeling toward the way society and government were going. Many youths packed up their paperback copies and headed off down the highway either in a car or with their thumbs out to seek out that freedom and a setting where they could be real. But with Kennedy, civil rights, Dylan, the bomb, the war and the energy it didn’t take long before those young people didn’t need the book anymore because they were just pickin’ up the vibe and feeling like they had to get movin’.

Throw in those Dharma Bums and you can believe how Gary Snyder could foresee all those kids in rucksacks leaving it all behind and traveling the countryside because they needed to go and it didn’t matter where. I used to hitchhike up and down the East Coast and all over Florida and the South and even the Northeast and usually it was to go somewhere but sometimes it was the act of traveling itself that was the thing because you would always meet people and see interesting places. Not like today when parts of you might end up in somebody’s freezer.

But if the beats were speed in black and white, the hipsters of the sixties were psychedelic and groovy in Technicolor. As always happens, the times were changin’ and that meant the people, technology, drugs and energy too were mutating as more and more hit the road and coalesced around the war and the government that was grabbing so many youths and making them go half way around the world and kill people they had nothing against until they got shot at just because they were there.

By this time Jack’s insides were fried from all those bennies and he couldn’t understand why all those young people were fighting and protesting instead of just going out and seeking the freedom and spirit that the beats found without fighting to change the system that created the need to be liberated in the first place.

He and Neal died nearly forty years ago and it’s all history now as people still read the books and try to figure out what kind of place "On The Road" should occupy on the shelves of 20th century literature. Right here in Oneonta you can spend a semester with Prof Meanor and discuss such matters because he’s been thinking about them for years and has learned a lot from the beats firsthand.

However the book is ultimately judged there’s no doubt that it had a major impact on what occurred in the sixties and helped us understand that those rebels of the fifties were not without a cause.

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Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at cary#thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 217.