TRAMPING: ALTERNATIVES TO TRADITIONAL AMERICAN RITES OF

PASSAGE

by

Anthony Vincent Saturno

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

December 2013

TRAMPING: ALTERNATIVES TO TRADITIONAL AMERICAN RITES OF PASSAGE

by

Anthony Vincent Saturno

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Susan Love Brown, Department of Anthropology, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

~/ d" t --- Michael Harris, Ph.D. gy

Heather Coltman, DMA I 1 Dean, College of and Letters ~-

ii ABSTRACT

Author: Anthony Saturno

Title: Tramping: Alternatives to Traditional American Rites of Passage Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Susan Love Brown

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2013

In America today, adolescent boys do not have a structured, ritualized or guided passage from boyhood into manhood. Many young men feel unsure of their manhood even at an age that signifies the transition. This causes young males to need a self-created rite of passage. Tramping, the act of travelling by train, hitchhiking or foot, is one way in which young males can independently achieve manhood. This is a literary account of the lives of Jack Kerouac, Chris McCandless, and Zebu Recchia. Their personal stories allow a detailed view of the advantages and disadvantages found in a self-created rite of passage. While two of the accounts are successful, in Chris McCandless’s case the rite ends in a transition to death.

Tramping as a rite of passage to adulthood seems effective but the danger in self- creation appears to be the lack of guidance that comes in unstructured rites of passage.

iii TRAMPING: ALTERNATIVES TO TRADITIONAL AMERICAN RITES OF PASSAGE

Statement of the Problem………………………………………...…………………………………………...1

Rites of Passage and the American Male……………………………………………..…………………8

Separation………………………………………………………………………………………………10

Liminality………………………………………………………………………………………………..11

Reaggregation…………………………………………………………………………………………16

Rites of Passage for Adolescences in America…………………………………………...17

Tramping as an American Alternative Rite of Passage……………………………….22

On the Road: Jack Kerouac as Sal Paradise…………………….…………………………………….30

Separation………………………………………………………………………………………………37

Liminality………………………………………………………………………………………………..39

Reaggregation…………………………………………………………………………………………54

Chris McCandless: A Transition from Adolescence to Death……………...………………….58

Separation………………………………………………………………………………………………65

Liminality………………………………………………………………………………………………..66

Reaggregation…………………………………………………………………………………………95

Zebu Recchia: As Eddy Joe Cotton Riding the Rails……….……………………………………...97

Separation………………………………………………………………………………………….…100

Liminality……………………………………………………………………………………………...104

Reaggregation……………………………………………………………………………………….117

iv Three Rites of Passage, Three Liminalities………………………………………………………...123

Appendices………………………………………………………………………………………………………130

References……………………………………………………………………………………………………….149

v CHAPTER ONE

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

A rite of passage is the completion of a journey from one life point to the next.

Rites of passage typically mark events such as birth, adulthood, marriage, giving birth and death, but are not limited to these events. They are “a category of rituals that mark the passages of an individual through the life cycle, from one stage to another over time, from one role or social position to another integrating the human and cultural experiences with biological destiny” (Myerhoff 1982: 103). They are typically well marked and structured and deeply symbolic in ceremony and ritual.

Rites of passage tend to be more celebrated, marked and structured in areas that have not reached high levels of modernization but still occur and are necessary in all communities. “There is every reason to believe that rites of passage are as important now as they have always been for our social and psychological well-being.

Indeed given the fragmented, confusing, complex, and disorderly nature of modern experience perhaps they are more important to orient and motivate us in the predictable and unique life crises that present themselves” (Myerhoff 1982: 129). In

America for boys trying to reach manhood, rites of passage become self-created and tramping becomes one such pathway taken to achieve this goal.

This study will review literary accounts of three tramps from separation, into the liminal stage and the possibility of reaggregation in the end. Jack Kerouac wrote

1 On the Road (1988) about a fictional character named Sal Paradise and his best friend Dead Moriarty. Although this book is found under the fiction genre it is actually a true account of part of Kerouac’s time hitchhiking across the country. Jon

Krakauer wrote Into the Wild (1996), which was a journalistic account of the life of

Chris “Alex Supertramp” McCandless and his time hitchhiking and rail riding across the country leading to his tragic death in Alaska. Finally, Zebu “Eddy Joe Cotton”

Recchia wrote Hobo: A Young Man’s Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in the United

States (2002) an autobiographical account of some of his travels as a tramp.

These three accounts were chosen over numerous other accounts available because they are all factual accounts of American adolescents who traverse in very different yet incredibly similar ways through the liminal stage on to another life marker. The three young men come from very different backgrounds and have different motivating factors and very different experiences, yet the undertones to all three stories have a lot of similarities. These similarities are what link the three men in the commonality of being in the liminal stage.

The stories told in these three accounts show the separation and reaggregation of the tramps, either reaggregation back into the community or, in

Christopher McCandless’s case, reaggregation into another rite of passage: death.

The most important feature of these stories is an in-depth look at how liminality works and the parallels tramping draws on our overall knowledge of the liminal stage. This thesis’s purpose is to show the impact of liminality and the features of the liminal world.

2 “Rites of passage are found in all societies, but tend to reach their maximal expression in small-scale relatively stable and cyclical societies, where change is bound up with biological and meteorological rhythms and recurrences rather than with technological innovations” (Turner 1967: 93). “They thrive in small scale societies and decay or die in large scale ones” (Grimes 1995: 11). When rites of passage become “unstructured” as happens in many modernized societies it becomes more difficult for initiates to go through certain rites of passage and the length of time one spends within the rite tends to become prolonged. Within a rite of passage, Arnold Van Gennep (1960) defines three distinct points: separation, liminality and reaggregation in which any neophyte must pass to completion in order to ascend to the next life marker. Victor Turner (1969) goes on to really detail and completely define the liminal stage and its importance to any rite of passage.

“Adolescence is a journey, a search for self in every dimension of being. It is a bout dreams, fears, and hopes as much as it is about hormones, SAT scores and fashion” (Hersch 1999: 17). The rite of passage known as initiation, the time between adolescence and adulthood where a child becomes a functioning member of the community, is considered to be one of the most perilous rites that a person will go through in their life. For adolescent boys it is a time where they are guided by the men of their community and shown what it takes to carry out the tasks that men are required to do.

Entry into adult life involves the realization of social obligations and

the assumption of responsibility for meeting them. What initiation 3 does is to set a time on the way to manhood and by bringing the

person into formal and explicit relation with his kindred, confronts

him with some of his basic social ties, reaffirms them and thus makes

potent to him his strains against the days when he will have to adopt

them in earnest. [Raphael 1988: 197]

In modernized societies this guidance is largely absent and it becomes unclear what it takes to be a man and when the transition to manhood occurs. Left unguided the adolescent boy who is attempting to become a man must create or attempt to create one's own rite of passage. This tends to prolong the amount of time before an adolescent enters the liminal stage and also delays reaggregation and can make the entire rite of passage more dangerous.

In the United States there is a high value on individualism and personal freedom. These are attributes that make the country what it is, it is part of its national character. These attributes, however, also undermine the community-based power of rites of passage. Placing all of the responsibility on the individual will leave them unguided making the passage more dangerous and time consuming. “In today’s society we seem unable to accept the fact of adolescence, that there are young people in transition from childhood to adulthood who need adult guidance and direction” (Elkind 1984: 4).

In the United States today, adolescent boys do not begin their transition to adulthood quickly. “There is a deep seated fear that we might not ever become men” and that fear tends to be self actualized in a delay in the rite of passage of initiation 4 (Raphael 1988: 145). They tend to stay at home longer or move on to college which will delay the time it will take them to start a career and a family, which are aspects of becoming a functioning member of the American community. The adolescent boy can easily become confused from the array of possible markers for adulthood. “The age that represented adulthood became grayer and grayer as being able to drive, join the army and drink became further apart” (Staller 2006: 18). There are still some guided pathways from adolescence to adulthood mostly for those members of society that are involved in some form of religion. The Bar Mitzvah and

Confirmation are two such pathways. However, for members of the community who are not religious or are not deeply religious, these pathways may be closed or may not bestow definitive assurance of adulthood. They tend to give the initiate instruction and guidance for how to be an adult within the religious community but they do not give instruction or guidance of what it truly means to be a man in

America today.

“The transitional stage between boyhood and adulthood while occurring in such a competitive and superficial context, becomes filled with uncertainties and ambiguities. Some young males find ways to manage the transition successfully, while others try but do not succeed. Still others never ever try at all, or perhaps they attempt to alter the very concept of manhood itself” (Raphael 1988: 190). Without any definitive rite to turn to and without a guide to help them many adolescent boys develop their own rites of passage to come into adulthood. They usually involve survival and a degree of peril or danger. They tend to involve finding freedom, usually from the shadow of their father or both parents. The departure is usually 5 symbolic of this need to remove them from parental authority (Clatterbaugh 1990:

90). Going into a liminal stage marginalizes a person from their society and turns them into a “stranger” or an “outsider”. Without a guide or a community to pull you back in it is very possible you may become stuck in the liminal stage (Turner 1969:

110). In modern times, it also seems to largely involve mobility, a moving away from the place where they were born to a new place or multiple places. The need to prove things to oneself, to survive dangers, to separate from family and travel make tramping an ideal mode for a rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood.

Tramps, or hoboes, are people who leave their communities and their material worlds to travel, by hitchhiking, stowing away on trains, or by walking, with no definite destination in mind. They are typically men between the ages of 15 and 30 who leave their communities for pursuit of a dream or a destination. For a tramp, life is all about the journey and they will continue moving around until they feel like that journey has reached an end. There are many reasons why tramps do what they do and it is suggested that each tramp would have a specific reason or story for their journey (Moon 1996: 81). Tramping is very dangerous, the perils including getting on and off speeding trains, starvation, exposure to the elements, a lack of medical opportunities, police and rail yard guards and even other tramps who might steal or kill just for food or something to drink. A tramp is truly isolated from his community, his family, from the entire world. Even amongst other tramps there is too much suspicion and lack of global direction to remain close for too long.

There is also the possible danger of becoming “stuck in liminality” (Turner 1969:

110). Many tramps go on tramping for large portions of their lives and become so 6 engrossed in the freedom of mobility that they become hesitant to reaggregate back into their community. However, the majority of tramps only tramp through part of their teens and the majority of their twenties. There are fewer and fewer “lifers who jump train until the day they die” (Conover 1984: 6).

Tramping is most certainly a pathway into the liminal stage that will connect the loss of adolescence to the new life of adulthood for boys. “The limen: a term from Van Genneps’s second of three stages in rites of passage, is a no man’s land betwixt and between” (Broadhurst 1999: 11-12). Although tramping is not as popular today as it has been in the past it is still an endeavor that a significant proportion of boys take. Since it is a pathway to adulthood, there is merit in studying how it is effective as a pathway and in studying how effective it is as a pathway. It is also important to note how, as more of the world becomes modern and societies lose the guided pathways to adulthood, it can be implemented and guided to help assure safe pathways for generations to come.

7 CHAPTER TWO

RITES OF PASSAGE AND THE AMERICAN MALE

Arnold Van Gennep coined the term rite of passage and was the progenitor of the idea of a multi-stage rite of passage. He felt, through his study of various cultures, that all rites had this in common -- that every rite had with it a three-stage process. He recognized that these rites would accompany any change, whether it be a change in place (physically), status and social position, state or age (Van Gennep

1960: 90). He saw this in cultural ritual through birth, initiation, marriage and even death. As Victor Turner noted, “Van Gennep examined rites of passage in many cultures, and found them to have a tripartite, processual structure, even when they had many isolable episodes” (1992: 48).

Van Gennep thought that, although many past anthropologists and researchers saw only two stages, the separation and the reaggregation within a ritual that there had to be this complex limen or transition stage where the change actually occurred. “So great is the incompatibility between the profane and the sacred worlds that a man cannot pass from one to the other without going through an intermediate stage” (Van Gennep 1960: 1). He added a middle stage, called marginalization or the limen, in which many of the changes between the first two stages were found to occur. “The frontier, an imaginary line connecting milestones or states, is visible – in an exaggerated fashion – only on maps. But not so long ago

8 the passage from one country to another, from one province to another within a country, and, still earlier, from one manorial domain to another was accompanied by various formalities” (Van Gennep 1960: 26). Van Gennep notes here that this crossing of the threshold is very important and was in human history accompanied by various rituals. Van Gennep’s work was continued, in many ways, by Victor

Turner who did most of his study, research and writing on the act of liminality and the performance of rituals within that stage. Turner, also likens moving through the stages of a rite to that of physical movement or mobility: “A limen is a threshold, but at least, in the case of protracted initiation rites or major seasonal festivals, it is a very long threshold; a corridor of almost, or a tunnel which may become a pilgrim’s road, or, passing from dynamics to statistics, may cease to be mere transition and become a set way of life, a state that of the anchorite or monk” (1992: 49). This idea of a pilgrim’s road really sets in the idea of moving from one place or space to the next but as well a movement through time from one point or stage in one’s life to the next. The whole idea of this journey is that the initiate is breaking off from the place he is in (both physically and spiritually) and moving to a new place or position. The importance of this being that upon separation he is one entity, during liminality that entity dies, and in reaggregation he returns, a new entity that has been in some way changed or completely changed.

This symbolic “death” is sometimes even recognized and mourned by the community as part of the act of separation. “In some tribes the novice is considered dead, and he remains dead for the duration of his novitiate” (Van Gennep 1960:

117). The length of time separated is what made Van Gennep first believe that that time between being “this and being that” was in itself a part of the stages. As Ray

Raphael stated: “The length of time spent in seclusion, apart from the normal life of the tribe, varies from a few days to several years” (1988: 5).

Separation

Van Gennep, in The Rites of Passage, defines separation as “detachment of an individual from an earlier fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions” (1960: 94). He goes on to describe it as removal from a past status with the thought of reemerging at a new and wholly different status. Turner adds to this notion in The Ritual Process (1969), describing the transition into liminality as one that involves two kinds of separation. First there is separation from your government in which you lose your office, title and possessions. “In tribal societies, youth were taken away from their homes to a separate place of transformation”

(Christopher 1996: 113). For adolescents in America you see the removal of toys and things that are youthful, at times you see a nickname no longer used, or they may quit a job to begin college or to find a career.

The second separation is the loss of “psychobiological touch” (Turner 1969:

105). This separation is a split from your community, your family, your institutions and your state. The separated persons are removed from their community and the world around them ignores their existence. This is often a geographic change, a shift from their place of birth to an area away from family and youthful friends. Van

Gennep describes most acts of liminality as times where the passenger possesses nothing; they have no status, no property, and they are allowed no insignia (Van 10 Gennep 1960: 98). Jeanne Armstrong (2000: 13) adds to this notion by saying “they have no position within their kinship and no secular clothing”. He (the passenger) becomes invisible, as if he never existed (Raphael 1988: 15). The person becomes marginal or an outsider and thus begins to yearn to be within his or her social community but can not return until the liminal stage is complete and the person gains new identity (Turner 1969: 24).

This separation is a split from the person in the past and the person yet to be.

“The self is split up the middle -- it is something that one both is and that one sees and, furthermore, acts upon as though it were another” (Turner 1969: 25). Many people are ignorant of the shift within themselves and do not even view their past, present or future selves. “It is, again, not a matter of doting upon or pining over the projected self (as Narcissus did over the face in the pool) but of acting upon the self- made other in such a way as to transform it” (Turner 1969: 25). This marks the beginning of a struggle, through liminality, to retain, regain or reinvent identity

(Renfro-Sargent 2002: 87).

Liminality

Van Gennep defines marginalization or the limen as “a characterization of the ritual subject ‘the passenger’ that passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state” (1960: 94). Going into a liminal stage marginalizes a person from his or her society and turns them into a stranger or an outsider. Turner describes liminality as a moment in and out of time; it is a time of weakness and passiveness, where “he passes through a realm or dimension that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state, he is betwixt and 11 between all the familiar lines of classification” (Turner and Turner 1978: 249). It is also a time of ambiguity, being “neither here nor there” (Van Gennep 1960: 95) and a time where there is “a lack of past and future status, a condition of paradox”

(Climo 1999: 45) It is a time where rituals enact a transcendence from the fixed cultural and social systems to explore, as an individual, alternative arrangements. It is a “transformative process” (Alexander 1991: 17).

This process is no more transformative than in the period, often called initiation, in which a boy traverses into manhood. In traditional societies, this period of liminality is one that is almost always heavily guided with influence on societal instruction. Boys learn the skills of a man that they will need and in many cases cannot do the jobs that run parallel to manhood without proving ability in these skills. However, in modern American society, adolescent liminality is often an unguided, unstructured time of deep confusion. Mary C. Waters and her colleagues stated: “As the traditional markers of the transition to adulthood become decoupled from each other and the lines between adolescence and full fledged adulthood become less sharp, many young people endure a period of prolonged transition with marriage postponed, education prolonged and full time employment taking longer to attain” (2011: 2). These characteristics that young men face in modern society make the transition more perilous and at times lengthier, while the guided transition of tribal communities is often shorter with young men more ready for the dangers they may face in liminality.

There are many examples of rites of passage involving initiation; in fact Van

Gennep (1960: 6) suggests that every society has some degree of rite for the passage 12 from boyhood to adulthood. The vision quest of many Native American groups is an example of a boy being removed from his community sent into the perils of the land and is “a tangible and dramatic example of the intensity of the search for self identity that propels adolescents along different pathways” (Hersch 1999: 18). The

Tikopia make a boy learn the work of a man as his first step towards liminality. A boy first gets to do a man’s work in Tikopia when he participates in a mataki ramanga, a torch (fishing) expedition (Fried 1980: 62). At this beginning stage, he does no more than row, as one of the crew but it is his first chance at experiencing manhood. The child cannot take a wife or do any of the duties of a man until he has learned many tasks, and has killed a large animal such as a great antelope, a giraffe or a buffalo (Fried 1980: 74-75). The Tlingit also make a boy learn the way of the hunt before allowing him to marry. “Fasting and abstinence led up to each hunt and when a boy became skilled at hunting and fishing he was considered a man and ready to marry” (Fried 1980: 85-86). Unfortunately, in a lot of communities, especially modernized communities like America, the ability for a boy to prove manhood through physical feats is disappearing (Large 1997: 32).

“Australian aborigines consider the boy, called a novitiate, is dead and is considered to be dead until the rite of passage ends (Raphael 1988: 4). Many cultures feel similarly and use different symbols to impress upon this death: haircut, loss of personal clothing or items, “the boys literally had to be stripped of their personal past” (Raphael 1988: 28). Certain West African tribes also consider the boy to be dead but it is actually his youth that has died off. After the ceremonies of initiation he is reborn and in some cases gets a new name (Raphael 1988: 4). “Since 13 neophytes are not only structurally “invisible” (though physically visible) and ritually polluting, they are very commonly secluded, partially or completely, from the realm of culturally defined and ordered states and statuses” (Turner 1967: 98).

Many of these neophytes who are considered “dead” spend their entire liminal stage in isolation. Seclusion is also a part of many rites of manhood; this can be seen in tribes in Africa, ancient Greek and Roman communities and with Australian aborigines (Van Gennep 1960: 76).

Since the act of liminality requires specific frameworks, liminality must happen in designated spaces, known as liminal space. Specific places allow for certain indicators (audible and visible) to be used to signal the beginning and end of the time spent in liminality (Turner 1979: 479). Liminal space is set aside specifically for ritual performances, such as a village green, a religious edifice, or a wild, unclaimed terrain (Turner 1979: 479). Even larger events such as Carnival were originally created as celebration for entering liminality, carne vale translating into flesh farewell (Turner 1979: 482). The idea of “the road” as used by tramps is in itself an indicator of liminality and the journey that will take place between separation and reincorporation. Thus, the road is given an interesting dual role when used in a liminal function. “On one hand the road is a purposefully constructed, even intrusive element of the landscape; on the other hand it’s self- effacing, just a means to an end. From a driver’s point of view, ‘it’s no place in particular, it’s always receding’ he observed” (Conover 2010: 299). This idea of the road as a “no place” makes it an ideal liminal stage for the self-created performance of the rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood. 14 With a guide or with instructional and informative guidance the neophyte becomes “clay or dust, mere matter, whose form is impressed upon them by their society” (Raphael 1988: 103). Many would say that a guide is one of the most important parts of the journey through a rite of passage, especially one as precarious as the journey from boyhood to manhood. “It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new situation in life”

(Turner 1969: 81) Turner explains that the guide is there to help a boy to separate, to give instructions for what to expect in liminality, and even to help the boy reincorporate once manhood is achieved. Many times a guide will give strict instructions to obey, that may seem arbitrary or irrational but the demands must be met without complaint or question (Foster 2002: 70).

Without a guide or a community to pull you back in it is very possible you may become stuck in the liminal stage (Turner 1969: 110). Being stuck in the liminal stage bestows the feeling of the “doom of being nowhere or in a random somewhere not of your choosing” (Conover 2010: 299). Here again we see the implicit advantages and disadvantages of individualism in American society: American adolescents can strike out on their own but they are on their own and outside of society and thus it often becomes difficult to come back. There have been some groups that attempt guidance in America such as the boy scouts, collegiate fraternities and the military, however, boys don’t always have access or a willingness to access these routes and so many boys miss out on these potential guided opportunities. 15

Reaggregation

Finally, when the liminal stage ends, there should be what Van Gennep describes as reaggregation: the “passage is consummated when the ritual subject individual is reincorporated and redefined as a stable structural type” (1960: 37).

There is an inherent need for neophytes to return to the community, or to a different community once they have achieved manhood. Barbara Myerhoff stated,

“Rites of passage announce our separateness and individuality to us and at the same time remind us most firmly and vividly that we belong to our group and cannot conceive of an existence apart from it” (1982: 115). This longing to return happens throughout the liminal stage and eventually is what creates the need for reaggregation to occur. Van Gennep (1960: 27) mentions, in his talks about rites of the stranger, that there are many ways in which travelers try to incorporate in their surroundings. These could come to include the picking up of other hitchhikers, drinking with the denizens of a community, employment, sex and marriage. The people met within liminality, which Van Gennep and Turner would likely call guides, are people who are there to help novitiates to reaggregate into society (Turner

1969). With a guide, according to Raphael, “the entire process is both intensely personal and genuinely social, society has in fact helped the individual to become the man he wants to be” (1988: 13).

In communities where rites are undertaken and well guided by their elders, boys have a fairly easy time passing into manhood. This transition is always perilous, but with supervision the reaggregation comes swiftly and a boy is then 16 seen as a man. However, in societies that have modernized, these rites can become less and less structured or guided and in many cases boys need to find their own paths to manhood. Manhood initiation rites become vague and messy, and as Ronald

Grimes (1995: 13) notes, the initiation “is not a moment or an event but a puzzle of shards pieced together”. Many adolescent boys in modern society remain stuck in liminality for some time and the passage to adulthood ends up going unnoticed. But even in modern societies like the United States, “the liminal stage is always temporary – a transition through which an old identity is transformed into a new identity” (Renfro-Sargent 2002: 92). When the perilous time in liminality is over

“marital choice, creativity, and innovation are possibilities that emerge from the agony of isolation and the joy of communitas which may accompany the liminal stages in rites of passage” (Myerhoff 1982: 120).

Rites of Passage for Adolescents in the United States

American adolescents often find themselves in an interesting dilemma. They are left, almost completely, to their own devices to determine when and how manhood is achieved. There are some opportunities for guidance in this, but many times adolescents get lost in a world with very ambiguous markers for adulthood.

American society is very different from smaller, traditional societies in that there is a striking independence from community and an emphasis on individuality. Tribal or small community’s rites of passage encourage the group to have societal ceremonies. In large communities, competitive culture encourages single people to find and make their own rites of passage (Raphael 1988: 190). While more traditional societies provide their adolescents with a great deal of guidance through 17 the process of becoming an adult, in the United States, adolescents with lots of personal freedom and independence, find themselves on their own with little to no ritual or guidance to adulthood.

Christina Grof (1996: 3) states, “Adolescence is a time when we are confused, self-conscious, eager to explore new possibilities and wanting desperately to find our niche”. This leaves the American adolescent with a wide variety of possibilities of finding a way from boyhood into manhood. “As young people grow older, they customarily experienced greater freedom and acquired new responsibilities”

(Turner 1967: 12). Every community treats the passage from boyhood to manhood differently but in each case there is a removal of the person from society as they enter the liminal stage.

Separation happens at the home and within the home community. Typically boys leave the home community after high school moving on to jobs or college in a new geographic area. Joseph Kelt states, “They left home, took different jobs, and moved again in search of still more jobs which also signifies a different view of growth, not as a gradual removal of restraints but as a jarring mixture of complete freedom and total subordination” (1977: 29). In this case, American adolescents might find it necessary to create their own rites of passage. When creating rites of passage, male adolescents, with their great independent streak and their heightened desire for wanderlust, might choose a more mobile and at times dangerous path to adulthood. For example, Raphael suggests that “A youth would appear more manly, not less, if he can not only endure his rite of passage but also create it; such an approach is certainly more in keeping with the frontier ethic of rugged 18 independence still closely involved with masculine mystique in modern America”

(1988: 50-51). In such cases, hitting the road provides a gateway to liminality. In the American tradition, the road as a setting for novels or movies resonates with our national and cultural passion for mobility, and our view of the road, articulated by poet Walt Whitman, as a place where everybody meets everybody, where democracy happens (Conover 2010: 300). This mobility created by the road gives adolescents a place to leave their childhood identity behind and strike out in search of a new one.

The transition from adolescence to adulthood for any person is really a story of the search for one’s identity. Out of all the transitions one makes and rites of passage one goes through, the transition from male adolescence to adulthood can be a quite tricky one. Fried (1980: 58) explains how perilous adolescence can be:

“Perhaps because adolescence is a time of tension between pleasure on the one hand and of high turmoil and danger on the other”. Jon Krakauer, in Into the Wild, states that mobility and tramping have a lot to due with leaving the shadow cast by family and becoming their own person (1996: 154). Adolescence is considered by some to be the most important time in a boy’s life when everything they need to become men is absorbed and their self, separate from family, is realized. David

Elkind states that, “When years of special prep for adult life are required these years become a distinguishable period with its own custom rules and relationships”

(1984: 20).

The special training that Elkind mentions can be found in attending college, joining the army and getting a job, amongst others. These are all rites of passage that 19 help boys to become men. When a boy goes to college and attends orientations and begins his first classes, or goes to boot camp or basic training, or begins the training for an entry-level position, he is entering the liminal stage. The majority of boys in the United States take one of these routes. However, some boys do not take these paths and find an atypical, invented pathway into liminality. They sometimes feel dissatisfied with the idea of a settled life and postpone college, jobs and marriage to look for something that seems missing to them, something they need to fulfill before moving on to these other markers (Boteach 2008: 2). They have a need for adventure, while also a feeling of being trapped by the luxuries and relative safety found within their society (Grimes 1995: 115). Some young men move on to getting jobs or pursuing higher education, but there is a constant resistance to crossing the threshold to manhood (Grimes 1995: 176). They lack a time period free of pressure in which to move towards adulthood (Elkind 1984: 9). Without a structured rite of passage to help them transition adolescent boys tend to seek their own rite of passage, at times unconsciously. “When rites of passage disappear from conscious presentation, they nonetheless appear in unconscious and semi-conscious guises”

(Meade 1996: 32).

The key to this idea of utilizing the road and mobility to achieve manhood lies in the idea that in the United States individuality is such a basic tenet of

American culture that it allows boys to create their own pathways from separation to reincorporation. Boys are not forced to graduate college, to join the military or to get jobs; however, through guidance or on their own, many decide to do just that.

Adolescents have the ability to forge their own destinies and to become men in ways 20 that they see fit. “There is an active relation to ritual. Instead of having rites performed on us, we do them to and for ourselves and immediately we are involved in a form of self creation that is potentially community building, providing what Van

Gennep would call regeneration, by revitalizing old symbols from the perspective of the present” (Myerhoff 1982: 131). With the individual in control of his own rite of passage into adulthood he gets to decide the impact his transformative process has on the community during reaggregation.

Individualism has been a tenet of American culture before it even established itself as a nation. Throughout American history, there has always been a desire to roam free across the country. Men were constantly using the unknown “savage” lands as a way to prove their manhood. The pilgrims that arrived here fleeing prosecution, the pioneers mapping out the land, the seekers of fortune and the people who wanted a vast land to call their own all began this act of movement from the colonized area in the East. Then in the fifties and sixties, the Beat generation began to rekindle that sense of movement, leading the way for the largest American generation, the Baby Boomers. “The Boomers were not only actively exploring their world – out there hitch-hiking and backpacking - but were calling upon their generational siblings to come join the expedition” (Staller 2006: 17).

Mobility has become a tool in which these wanderers or tramps, as they have often been called, achieved the rite of passage into adulthood. It is hard to ascertain if this is the directive of the young man who begins wandering or if the transition is an aftereffect of the journey. The cause, or underlying impulse, to use mobility to pass through the liminal stage into adulthood intertwines with the American 21 emphasis on freedom and independence that we see as key characteristics in the adolescent male.

Many adolescent males try to avoid or postpone the transition into adulthood partially because of the intense pressures of adolescence coupled with a great amount of insecurity seen in young males. “Young males today still feel an urge, a yearning, a mysterious drive to prove themselves as men in more primitive terms”

(Raphael 1988: xii). Mobility and “the road” seem like ideal ways to postpone that shift to college, work, marriage or military service. This works well, as in most cases, as a time spent travelling the country brings an adolescent into adulthood due to the nature of the road.

Tramping as an American Alternative Rite of Passage

“The word tramp originates in World War II from small bands of soldiers

‘going off on a tramp of their own” (Kusmer 2002: 124). Tramping refers to people, mostly men between 15 and 30 years of age, who decide to leave familiar surroundings and their material possessions behind in pursuit of some dream or destination. For the purpose of this research, tramping specifically will look at people who take to the road either by train, hitchhiking, or even at times by foot to cross and continuously travel their country in search of identity and manhood.

Sometimes the journey begins with the idea of finding better prospects elsewhere, becoming a part of occupational mobility (Eighner 1993: 103). Within the act of tramping, there is the idea of danger and adventure about getting dirty and doing something risky that surrounds the idea of manliness. “One’s transition to adulthood

22 is often set in motion by a ‘call to adventure’ which includes challenge or risk”

(Christopher 1996: 111).

Most people who begin this wandering either by rail, by thumb or by foot are in the age group where adolescence is ending and young adulthood begins. College might not have been an option for them, and in times of economic downturn careers might not have been readily accessible. They also might not have fallen in love yet or had just recently fallen back out of it. Whatever the reason, this journey they go on that takes them all over their country and sometimes out of the country is most certainly a rite of passage and is an entrance into the liminal stage between youth and adulthood. They separate from their community both physically and mentally; they learn survival necessities for being out on the road or in the wilderness; they become isolated and alone with their thoughts; and hopefully, they return to their community or a new one a whole and new person.

One major difference between tramping as a rite of passage and more traditional initiate rites is the lack of a guide. Without guidance and structural markers to help them along the way, young men can become lost within the liminal stage and not come back out again without succumbing to some of the dangers of liminality. Without a guide, it might take them longer to figure out how to survive in their liminal setting and it might make the journey more perilous and the chances of fatality more possible. It also prolongs their time and increases their chance of becoming stuck in liminality, becoming a tramp forever and never reaggregating into their communities.

23 Arnold Van Gennep (1960: 20) discussed a ritual called territorial passage, which talked about the ceremonies that apply to changing your environment. He talked about crossing the threshold which is a journey from one group to another.

This rite is usually symbolized by transcendence through some sort of portal or the crossing over of some kind of sacrifice (Van Gennep 1960: 23). This specific type of passage is exactly what tramps are doing. Every town, every state, every border they cross is an example of the passage from separation to reincorporation. They are constantly moving further away (separating) and at the same time moving closer to

(reaggregating) something, their dreams. Tramps of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often talk about a transference from a sort of aristocratic group in the East to a rough and tumble group in the West (Eighner 1993: 24). “The reasons for tramping were as various as the individuals who comprised the new class of mobile, homeless men. Making too sharp a distinction between ‘involuntary’ and ‘voluntary’ causes of this phenomenon obscures the complex social reality that often lay behind an individual’s going on the road” (Kusmer 2002: 126).

A tramp is self-actualizing change within this rite of passage; he is entering into the stage of liminality of his own free will and without guidance. He is actually using the harshness of the environment of his choosing to transcend from boyhood to manhood. Tramping is a hard idea to define, and when asked many tramps have many very different definitions. Some would lump being a tramp, a bum, or a hobo all into the same category, while others would be offended by that notion. In the glossary created by Eddy Joe Cotton in Hobo he defines a tramp as follows:

24 one who loafs and walks. In the United States the word covers

practically every unfortunate on the road or off it, yet there are

thousands who have no membership in the real tramp

fraternity. The real tramp is a man unto himself, one who

‘wanders and never works’. [2002: xv]

Many other books, including Douglas Harper’s Good Company: A Tramp’s Life (2006) however, allow that tramps at times do work to help them get where they are going.

The definition of tramping built through this research would be the act of leaving what society would deem a traditional lifestyle behind in the pursuit of one’s personal dreams: through a journey, both physical, spiritual, and emotional, with no set destination nor a planned schedule or timeline.

The interesting thing is that from the 1700s to today the qualities and characteristics of an explorer seem to be very similar. Tramps possess creativity and an optimism that seem to be looked at as odd by their peers. It is something that on G.K. Chesterton’s first trip to the United States he labeled a super-positivism (Frankel 2007: 18). They possess an ability to be so unmaterialistic as to drop all of their “stuff” and strike out with virtually nothing but a couple of dollars and their dreams. This is also a characteristic of entering the liminal stages described by Turner in The Ritual Process

(1969). Tramps are not attached to family in a way that American culture would deem necessary. They are observers and tend to take things at face value (Cotton 2002: 56). They don’t have the healthy fear that American 25 culture instills in its population. They have a drive and ambition but not in the capitalist, corporate way traditionally seen in the United States. They are a part of a counter culture and yet their counter culture springs from

American culture itself.

Tramps, in general, seem to be dreamers, optimistic and idealistic to the point that most would say they have “their heads stuck in the clouds” or that “the luck of the tramp changes as the whistle blows” (Cotton 2002: 37). They know great adversity, at times suffer bouts of depression, and are ingrained in the reality of the downsides to their lives. They seem to just make the most out of a situation that some seem stuck in. Tramps take ideas and enlarge them into what many people might think of as dreaming. Their creativity is also seen in their storytelling. They tell stories about their travels and even tend to embellish on them exaggerating them to increase their excitement.

Tramping is an activity best suited for loners. Many individuals who have been tramping for years will tell you how dangerous it is to go in groups and how likely both theft and murder can be even with other members of the tramping world you have grown to trust. That being said, in the jungles, the areas near train stations where tramps eat and sleep, there are communities forged by a unified lifestyle. It is a place where people involved in rail riding come together and share food and share stories. This, unfortunately, helps members in this liminal stage become stuck as it creates a community within their rite of passage, instead of excluding an adolescent from a community as happens in most adolescent male rites of passage.

26 Tramps are, typically, not materialistic. The only things they take with them are necessities for life on the road and as soon as something becomes unnecessary they give it away or leave it behind. Alex McCandless was known to bury the things he didn’t have immediate use for around the country, only to come back to them if he thought they’d be important later.

(Krakauer 1996: 37). They repair the things they need until they have completely lost usefulness. Like the frontiersmen they emulated, they learned by doing: everything from grabbing their first train, to dumpster diving and repairing clothes was figured out through failure. This is much the same as the men of the West did when repairing wagons, shoeing horses and building cabins (L’Amour 1988: 15). Our trash is their treasure and so the dumpsters of the United States are their shopping malls. Part of their learning experience is in finding ways to travel and survive with no money.

They gladly take handouts but most of them look at beggars and panhandlers with disdain. They believe in the “story of the little man who works hard, takes risks, believes in himself and eventually earns wealth, fame, and honor”

(Reich 1987: 23). However, as the tramp gets older many times he becomes cynical and questions the world in which he strived for (Leeflang 1984: 93).

Many of them felt a sense of burden on their former lives and wished to relieve their families of that burden. As in Eddy Joe Cotton’s (2002) case, he oftentimes says that he felt a burden and a waste on his father’s life. They are such individuals that they tend to just leave everything behind and seldom regret it until they get to such an age that they feel it is too late to return to their previous life. The 27 idea of leaving the family and going on a journey all on their own is one that is echoed in many societies as a major rite of passage, that act which Van Gennep calls a sacred act in the course of men is a necessity (Belmont 1974: 61). These people yearned for a place to call home, but continued to pursue it all over the West. This lack of attachment makes them a stranger to everyone they contact. Ted Conover talks about returning to his family and them not recognizing him anymore (Conover

1984). This stranger is a powerful figure just as often hated and feared as he is taken care of and seen as powerful and mysterious (Van Gennep 1960: 18).

Tramping is a time of strength, hardship and enduring adventure (Harper

2006: 82). Many think that in the modern era the tramping lifestyle has disappeared, yet it is a custom still practiced and observed today. These travelers live a life constantly on the move either running away from a past they wish to forget or towards a future they hope to have. They were at one point workers, members of a community, and of a family. For a multitude of reasons they would leave that community to join another much different one: a community of tramps, a community that mainstream Americans have a difficulty understanding and a community that transcends but is a part of the American culture (Van Gennep 1960:

21).

Tramping is a tool used by adolescents to pass from youth to adulthood, possibly unconsciously. It is a method of learning how to survive in the world that the young boys are figuring out how to live in. It is a free choice and a created pathway into liminality that is dangerous especially when unguided but it does accomplish the goal at hand, becoming a man. There are many stories written and 28 told about tramps, and, to accomplish this study of tramping as a rite of passage to manhood, three stories have been analyzed and reported in this thesis. These stories are On the Road (1988) by Jack Kerouac, Into the Wild (1996) by Jon Krakauer, and

Hobo: A Young Man’s Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in the United States (2002) by Eddy Joe Cotton. The three stories were chosen because of their placement in different parts of modern American history, their factual nature and the accessibility to supplemental data for context.

29 CHAPTER THREE

ON THE ROAD: JACK KEROUAC AS SAL PARADISE

On the Road is in reality a telling in fictional form of the rite of passage of the book’s author Jack Kerouac. It tells a semi-fictionalized story of Kerouac and his friends and their travels across the United States. What reads to be just some boys getting their kicks, drinking and partying on the road and in cultural hot spots around the country is really a deep telling of an alternative rite of passage from their adolescence into their adulthood. It is the story of the fictionalized Sal Paradise, an adolescent, but was in fact an account of Jack Kerouac’s own travel through liminality in his passage to adulthood.

His travels tramping and hitchhiking are a fun yet dangerous view of how a boy could attain manhood in the United States in the 1900s and today. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (Kerouac and his good friend Neal Cassady) show the reality of a time where wandering helped those who felt lost to get away and survive for a time before reintegrating into society as adults. The important thing to note for

Paradise/Kerouac is that although there are dangers he was able to successfully reaggregate into society. He not only returns to society but also becomes a cultural figurehead and leaves a legacy behind for aspiring writers.

30 Jack Kerouac was born of French-Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack and

Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. He had one brother, Gerard, who died in 1926 when Kerouac was four. His brother’s death spurned him to later write Visions of Gerard, which speaks of his brother’s passing from rheumatic fever.

He won many accolades as a fullback in football and had a scholarship to

Columbia University in 1941 until he stopped playing (Lelyveld 1969: 1). The scholarship ran out when he was injured and he dropped out of college shortly afterwards. He was a merchant marine in 1942 and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943 until being discharged (Clark 1990: xv). “The Navy discharged him, in fact, for being schizoid, for having a split personality. In other words, one side was all man, while the other side was all intellectual – a poet and a dreamer” (Kerouac-Parker 2007:

106). This was only after eight days of service. The important thing about his time in both the university and the military is that these are both typical avenues for adolescents to enter the rite of passage to manhood. Since both of these more common avenues were closed to him, he would need to either find another avenue such as entering the work force or create his own path to manhood.

It was his meeting in 1944 with fellow “beat” writers Allen Ginsberg, William

Burroughs and eventually and most importantly Neal Cassady, that his life on the road truly began. He met Ginsberg through a friend from Columbia, Lucien Carr, and at first tolerated the youthful Ginsberg only because of the mutual friendship to Carr

(Clark 1990: 61). However, after a few intensely literary and philosophical conversations, they became close intimate friends. Ginsberg stated once, “I suddenly 31 realized that my own soul and his were akin, and that if I actually confessed the secret tenderness of my soul he would understand nakedly” (Clark 1990: 61).

Kerouac’s first introduction to Burroughs went just as well and the three became close friends.

His travels took him between New York, Denver, Detroit, and San Francisco and down to Mexico City as well as other stops along the road. Neal Cassady was the inspiration for Kerouac’s spontaneous writing style as it was this same style that

Cassady wrote letters to his friends while on the road. “Cassady had never been published, but he wrote voluminous letters – ‘fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed,’ Mr. Kerouac later recalled – that gave the aspiring novelist his idea of spontaneous style. Specifically the inspiration for On the Road was a letter from Cassady that ran to 40,000 words” (Lelyveld 1969: 2). This fast-paced style of writing was developed from their fast paced adolescent life on the road, constantly going and always on the move. His writing style reflected his lifestyle at the time: frantic, rapid and descriptive.

The bulk of Kerouac’s stories represent a chronicled look at his own life and his travels with his good friends. “More than that of most novelists, Kerouac’s

‘fiction’ is generally autobiographical. He wrote directly from the experiences of his life, transforming details into art via intensified language” (Theado 2000: 9).

Ginsberg was the first of his friends that really transformed his outlook on the world and inspired him spiritually and metaphysically. “Kerouac and Ginsberg found in each other an opportunity to speak honestly, from their minds, rather than feeling the pressure of having to make trite or clichéd exchanges” (Theado 2000: 16). It was 32 with Ginsberg that Kerouac began to get feelings that he didn’t fit in within society.

He was very patriotic but at the same time felt displaced amongst his society. “He was not a rebel by nature, but was curious and fascinated by those unlike himself and could not resist the lure of those temptations” (Kerouac-Parker 2007: 22-23). It was from all these interactions that in a few short days on one long scroll of type paper that Kerouac created the artistically told story of his life On the Road. Even though this book is typically found in the fiction section of libraries and bookstores, it is very difficult to place this into the genre of the novel, because of how autobiographical it really was. “The term novel, too, is problematic, for the story traces with few variations, the actual events that actual people experienced”

(Theado 2000: 32).

Jack’s travels back and forth between San Francisco and New York, with an almost necessary stop in Denver and Chicago were the “research” for his stories of

The Duluoz Legend, a compendium of stories including; Atop an Underwood: Early

Stories and Other Writings, Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, The Town and the City,

Maggie Cassidy, Vanity of Duluoz, On the Road, Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans,

Tristessa, The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, Big Sur, and Satori in Paris. Actually, these were an anthology of his life that ranges from close to his birth to close to his death (estimated from1922-1965). Also, at times included in this “legend” are

Lonesome Traveler and Book of Dreams, the latter being a dream journal from 1952 to 1960. On the Road specifically chronicles his travels on the road both in America and in Mexico with Neal Cassady (Moriarty). The entire “legend”, however, chronicles his life from boyhood through adulthood and beyond. 33 The reason that On the Road is the key book for this study of Kerouac’s rite of passage is that it views the time during his travels where clear separation and reaggregation can be found. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in many ways looked at each other as a mentor to one another. But it is important to note that neither of these boys could have been a true guide to the other because they were both traversing the liminal stage between adolescence and adulthood together. In their story, it is their friends who end up being the best guides through role modeling or speaking of reaggregation. Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg) and Old Bull Lee (William

Burroughs) probably, to an extent, represent this better than any others. They both try to convince either Sal or Dean or at times both equally to stop their travelling around the country and to find something or someone to believe in.

The importance of all of this is to realize that they were on this journey largely unguided and, consequently, the perils were even more dangerous and the movement between transition, initiation and reaggregation were even tougher. You can see this throughout the book as there are times where it seems like reaggregation might happen but doesn’t because they haven’t completely traversed the liminal stage.

All of those personal details are echoed, if somewhat fictionalized, with his character Sal Paradise. Sal Paradise grew up with minimal attachment to his parents, living instead predominantly with his aunt. He went to college and also was in the military and had a wife whom he divorced prior to his travels on the road. Sal is a boy, although by age quite possibly a man, who shows a great naivety to the world as well as a feeling after his breakup of “everything being dead” (Kerouac 34 1988: 3). This life very closely if not completely mirrors that of Jack Kerouac and excerpts from his journals and biographies show the tie between Sal and himself just as easily as they show the mirror of Dean Moriarty and Neal Cassady.

Kerouac quickly introduces the character of Dean Moriarty, a man he attributes as the catalyst for his road travels. He describes Dean as being a “jailkid” just out of reform school who had recently married a girl named Marylou and was coming to visit New York for the first time. Dean’s immediate connection to Sal was that Dean wanted to write, and a mutual friend, Chad King, told Dean that Sal was a writer. Truthfully, it was Sal whose writing benefited by the presence of Dean. There was a quick connection between the two. Dean was using Sal for a great many things, Sal refers to him as the “great American con man” (Kerouac 1988: 6) but Sal also used Dean’s energy which Kerouac makes reference to many times in the letters between him and Neal Cassady.

“Although Kerouac was not immediately impressed with Neal, he soon came to see him as a new kind of American hero, one who would show him new ways of written expression and who would serve as the hero of some of Kerouac’s best books” (Theado 2000: 18). Some of Sal’s need to travel came in the form of him wanting or needing to be a part of things; his friends and fellow intellectuals had spread across the country and he wanted to go and talk with them. “Then came spring, the great time of traveling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting ready to take one trip or another. I was busily at work on my novel and when I came to the halfway mark, after a trip down South with my aunt to visit my brother Rocco,

I got ready to travel West for the very first time” (Kerouac 1988: 7-8). The childlike 35 excitement for the journey he is about to take is very telling of an adolescent yearning for freedom and the ability to be out on his own and independent.

His travels began largely because his friends had begun travelling and he wanted to remain connected. “His perception of his friends scattered across the continent sets up the loose structure the book has. Sal runs from one group to another just to see what will happen – and it also establishes the roots of the Beat

Generation that the book will spread” (Theado 2000: 58). It is interesting to see that his separation from society, the beginning of his rite of passage, came out mostly because he wanted to remain connected to his friends who had already started travelling. “And this was really the way my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell” (Kerouac 1988: 8-9). Kerouac’s writing has that tramp storyteller edge to it; his story is too fantastic to not be told, but that fantasy shows more importantly the naivety of what he could possibly be getting himself into.

Sal’s mind was almost constantly on travel even from his youth. Perhaps that is the reason he chose tramping and roaming as his way to adulthood. When a initiate begins his rite of passage without a guide and by his own volition it is a self- created rite. Kerouac, like most tramps, decided on his own to begin hitchhiking and riding trains to earn the freedom of mobility. He thinks back on his daydreaming as a child always on the move always going somewhere. “As a child lying back in my father’s car in the back seat I also had a vision of myself on a white horse riding alongside over every possible obstacle that presented itself: this included dodging posts, hurling around houses, sometimes jumping over when I looked too late, 36 running over hills, across sudden squares with traffic that I had to dodge through incredibly –” (Kerouac 1988: 187).

Dean laments of similar daydreaming as a child and also talks of the carefree ability of the way the two of them were living their life as they ride across to Denver.

“Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see” (Kerouac 1988:

187-188). Dean is talking about responsibilities: a huge part of the change between an adolescent and an adult. He shows how he understands the difference between where he is and where the family who picked him up are within a person’s own life cycle.

Separation

Sal’s first attempt at travelling to San Francisco is very telling as to what a rite of passage would be like unguided. Many rites of passage for boys going to manhood involve them learning about the things the men do in their community.

They learn by observing the behaviors of the men and then emulating them. Sal had nothing to observe, just the wild and mysterious ranting of Dean Moriarty who was already a somewhat seasoned tramp but who was also just barely in the liminal stage himself. Before coming to New York, Dean rode rails between Colorado,

Arizona and Texas and had already apparently “stolen over 500 cars” (Kerouac

1988: 8). So with no training or guidance, Sal plans this route that seems like a perfect straight arrow through all the cities he wanted to visit resulting in arrival in

San Francisco. This is where he gets “stuck” and learns his first lesson of the road. 37 Filled with dreams of what I’d do in Chicago, in Denver, and then

finally in San Fran, I took the Seventh Avenue subway to the end of

the line at 242nd Street, and there took a trolley into Yonkers; in

downtown Yonkers I transferred to an outgoing trolley and went to

the city limits on the east bank of the Hudson River. [Kerouac 1988:

11]

Sal deliberately went out of his way to go nowhere and then ends up having to return through and catch a bus. He got stuck in a torrential downpour and finally a man was nice enough to let him know he’d never catch a ride from the Bear

Mountain pass. “It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes” (Kerouac 1988: 12). Paradise learns that there are certain rules to travelling the road but he had no idea what they were.

A tramp needs to follow frequently trafficked roads where there are a lot of stops and a lot of cars stopping. Not only does Sal put himself in a place where he won’t likely get picked up but he gets stuck in the rain with no protection and wore shoes that look nice but aren’t good for walking. He ended up spending most of his military pay on the bus ride to Chicago.

It becomes obvious that Sal Paradise needs some guidance to effectively become a tramp and survive on the road. One thing mentioned numerous times in the book is Sal’s visit to hobo jungles (a hobo jungle being a place close by to a train or bus station in a wooded area where tramps would congregate, drink, eat and tell 38 stories), his first experience being shortly after his arrival in Chicago. This is important because many first time tramps talk about going into the hobo jungle to listen to stories from seasoned travellers. When you are lacking a guide, you may gravitate to situations where you can learn from people still within the liminal stage or just recently reaggregated from the rite of passage. We see this same method employed by Eddy Joe Cotton, as discussed in Chapter 6. For Kerouac, though, he doesn’t go into a great amount of detail about what Paradise actually does during his time in the jungles so it is unclear what, if any, advice he picks up.

This is the point where he really began his hitchhiking from Joliet, Illinois and this also signifies the real clear point of separation. “My first ride was a dynamite truck with a red flag, about thirty miles into great green Illinois, the truck driver pointing out the place where Route 6, which we were on, intersects with Route 66 before they both shoot West for incredible distances” (Kerouac 1988: 13). His travel from his home to Chicago was a time of uncertainty and the little money he had on hand funded it. At any moment, he could have just turned back and gone home but when he is out of money in the middle of the country and he grabs this first of many rides he is removing himself from his past life and community and moving on to the life of a tramp. He is self-creating an opportunity for growth and change necessary when in the liminal stage.

Liminality

We see Sal Paradise slip distinctly into the liminal stage when he begins to lose his identity. This last piece of separation is perhaps the most important and signifies that the initiate is in the liminal stage of his created rite of passage. In Des 39 Moines, Iowa there is that powerful sense of a loss of identity that Kerouac describes as Sal Paradise is looking in the mirror.

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time

in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I

was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel

room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss from the steam outside, and the

creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the

sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t

know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was

just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted

life, the life of a ghost. [Kerouac 1988: 15]

For a few seconds he doesn’t even know who he is, he calls himself both a stranger and a ghost. These are important comparisons when you think of the community effectively calling neophytes into the rite of passage between boyhood and manhood a stranger or even pretending that those initiates are dead.

These ideas of being a stranger, an outcast, a ghost, or the unseen are echoed by many tramps in stories both written and told and are a key point of focus for

Turner’s idea of liminality (Turner 1970: 110). This imagery is so important because in many rites of passage for the adolescent male there is a sense of death and loss of identity and we can see this sense of loss echo in many sentiments of other tramps.

Van Gennep shows this within his description of aboriginal boys from Australia 40 entering the rites of manhood. “The novice is considered dead and remains dead for the duration of his novitiate” (Raphael 1988: 4).

Sal Paradise has entered the liminal stage. It is interesting that liminality, or the transition stage, is considered a crossing of a threshold by Arnold Van Gennep when considering Kerouac writes these feelings while Sal Paradise is in Iowa exactly halfway into America. “I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon” (Kerouac 1988: 15-16). Kerouac can sense it, maybe in retrospect while writing this back in New York, that ‘Sal

Paradise’ was changing and in transition between his youth in New York and an adulthood that was gleaming in the near future.

“These are people who have tried to create for themselves some semblance of a rite of passage, although many of them seem to have had considerable difficulty in finding, or passing their appropriate limitations” (Raphael 1988: xiii). When you are unguided, you are seemingly self-creating a rite of passage and as you have no mentor or no previous knowledge you are naïve and unsure, a neophyte without a teacher to journey with. His naivety is apparent all throughout his first journey. He blows his money quickly and frugally and has no survival mentality whatsoever. He subsists almost completely on apple pie and ice cream. He gets stuck again in

Davenport, Iowa and loans one of his only pieces of winter clothing to another tramp named Eddy who leaves Sal with the article of clothing at the first sign of a ride out of the place.

41 Although there are many pitfalls, these stumbling blocks are symbolic in many ways to the act of being in liminality. He blows his money and quickly has nothing left which is very common to Van Gennep and Turner’s ideas on transition.

They talk heavily of a loss of status and you can see that he has gone from being a somewhat well off college student to a poor wanderer. This shows again the difficulty in creating and navigating one’s own rite of passage. “Either Sal is on a quest or he is simply moving, leaving behind confusion and creating certainty and order in the very act of compulsion, riding the ‘protective road’ of anonymity”

(Theado 2000: 59). Many times Sal and Dean feel lost and confused unsure of what they are doing and why they are doing it.

The act of getting stuck places without another ride shows both the naivety of the initiate and also the effect of being in the liminal stage without guidance. The guide or guides are there to tell the initiate the rules of the rite of passage, they are there to give advice and they are there to warn against the potential dangers. The stumbling blocks that Kerouac writes about along the way are an interesting look about how lost and confused he was at times throughout his journey.

Also shown in his time in Davenport is the need and danger of companionship. In some rites of passage, the initiate is left in complete solitude while in others the young adolescents form a peer bond with other individuals in their age group. Tramping offers young men a chance for companionship but at times with a dangerous cost. Hoboes tend to form loose bonds of friendship and community while on their travels. As referenced before, there are the hobo jungles, frequent meeting places of people on the road and there also just chance encounters 42 while riding trains or when hitchhiking with people who may pick up large groups.

However, the risk is that many hoboes and tramps resort to theft and at times violence to help them survive. Many tramps talk of trust being a difficult thing to find in their travels and theft is a common occurrence in their travels.

Sal’s first companion comes right after his feeling of identity loss when he meets Eddy. He becomes desperate for personal connection with people and he finds a friend in Eddie, an awful looking hitchhiker that reminded him of a cousin back home. He was desperate for companionship by this point and the two of them stick together for a while and it was with Eddie that Sal gets stuck for the second time. This time Sal, with Eddie, is stuck in Shelton, Nebraska, where they were offered a job to work concessions for a carnival. They decline and Sal begins to feel camaraderie with his new travel buddy, but Eddie very quickly ditches him for a ride, stealing his sweatshirt. As Paradise readies to head further west through the

Rocky Mountains he now finds himself without any winter clothing. This is important because the harshness of the climate is one of the biggest dangers a tramp will face.

However, he does get picked up and this is the point where Sal tells about the best ride he ever got in his travels.

The greatest ride in my life was about to come up, a truck, with a

flatboard at the back, with about six or seven boys sprawled out on it,

and the drivers, two blond farmers from Minnesota, were picking up

every single soul they found on that road – the most smiling, cheerful 43 couple of handsome bumpkins you could ever wish to see, both

wearing cotton shirts and overalls, nothing else; both thick-wristed

and earnest, broad howareyou smiles for anybody and anything that

came across their path. [Kerouac 1988: 22]

This was Paradise’s best ride because of the human contact that came with it.

Paradise was used to hanging around in his big social group and all the alone time or one on one time with a driver was getting to him. Lack of human contact can stop a tramp from journeying and stop them from surviving so at a point when Kerouac describes the extreme loneliness of Sal Paradise this ride becomes crucial for his mental stability.

Being in the liminal stage can be a lonely place but from time to time you can come across others within that stage. He gets off with a man named Montana Slim in

Cheyenne, Wyoming where he needs to head south to reach Denver. He and

Montana make a good time of the city night before he begins his journey south.

There is a moment where drunkenly Montana Slim writes to his father and asks Sal to put it in the post. “Dear Paw, I’ll be home Wednesday. Everything’s alright with me and I hope the same is with you. Richard” (Kerouac 1988: 31). This act of wanting to reach out but not taking the final step of mailing it shows that even while disconnected from the community there is always a pull to reconnect but it is one that is fought against while trying to find yourself. The liminal stage is not always a lonely place. In many cases, an initiate might be with one or more individuals within his own age group and create a bond for the rest of his life. However, tramping 44 specifically as a rite of passage is in almost all cases a fairly lonely affair. There may be cases from time to time when you ride with others, but, as each tramp has their own destinations in mind, travelling together only works for small periods of time.

When Paradise makes it to Denver, he is reunited with many of his friends and gets a lot of the personal human contact he needs, so much so that a desire to stop travelling is mentioned and you can tell that there is real internal conflict within him. Chad King, a prominent figure in Paradise’s later reaggregation, tries to tell him to look for work in Denver and stick around. Paradise doesn’t see much of

Moriarty while there and this helps him to resolve to continue on to the West coast.

Paradise does visit Moriarty and Carlo Marx one night when they stay up all night talking about “IT”.

“IT” represents a key part to the liminal stage for Kerouac and his friends.

This search for “IT” is really a search for something. What it is, you are not sure, but when you come out of that search, the search changed you and you have found what you’ve been looking for all along: a change in self from within. “And I said, That last thing is that what you can’t get, Carlo. Nobody can get that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all” (Kerouac 1988: 44). This shows completely how the world of liminality is one of possible outcomes; it is more than transition but a place for potentiality “not only what is ‘going to be’ but also ‘what may be’” (Alexander 1991: 18).

“IT”, for Carlo Marx and Dean Moriarty, is a manifestation of some feeling or some enlightened state or possibly a spiritual occurrence, but in reality “IT” for Sal

Paradise is coming out of the liminal stage and into adulthood. They choose a lot of 45 methods for finding this state of being including their travels, jazz music, drugs and alcohol use, long intense late night conversations and sex. These are place markers that they have set up for themselves on the road to manhood. They feel they need to do these things all to be a part of their journey and thus become a part of Kerouac’s telling of their travels, but they aren’t quite sure what they are doing or why they are doing it. This “IT” is also showing of an underlying theme throughout the story.

Dean, Sal and many of their friends are quite unsure of their identity and their purpose which is also a commonality of people traversing the liminal stage.

On his last night in Denver, Kerouac writes once more about being on the threshold as Sal Paradise looks across towards the Rocky Mountains. “In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and whisper of the wind, except the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the Eastern Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken

Americans in the mighty land” (Kerouac 1988: 50). This is an often cited part of On the Road. Sal Paradise, although enjoying Denver to its fullest, is looking at the

Rockies and thinking about what is on the other side, he quickly begins “itching” to leave and see San Francisco. Dean and Sal’s relationship lessens at this point and that is part of what makes Sal realize he is ready to leave. Kerouac again writes about loneliness but in contrast shows that Paradise has friends who are in a similar situation as him. Kerouac writes Paradise a little bit darker, at this point more

46 somber; there is a transformative process at work here and with it an emotional as well as a mental change.

Sal’s time in California was a time of being stuck again. He stayed with his friend Remi Boncouer for a time and Remi represented a culmination of perils that

Sal had already faced. Remi represented presenting Sal with the possibility of negative growth and even death. When trying to grow and continue within liminality, there are many “traps” that can stop a person from moving forward. This forward motion is a necessity of liminality because the goal of liminality is to be transformed and reaggregate. The greatest danger of tramping, for Kerouac, is the possibility of never leaving liminality. This danger is made apparent in Chapter 5 and is almost repeated in Chapter 6. In the book, Remi is not the only impediment in the progress of Sal Paradise’s journey because he meets a young woman, Terry.

Terry brings Paradise on a “Hobo Holiday”, a time when a tramp attempts to fold back into society. Hobo holidays seem like a good thing necessary for a tramp’s social and emotional well-being but they are dangerous in that they create a sense of reaggregation before the transformative process is finished. The hobo holiday is a deadend for tramps that are traversing because it’s an attempt at stopping growth and transformation prematurely. “I forgot all about the East and all about Dean and

Carlo and the bloody road” (Kerouac 1988: 88). In Paradise’s case, he spends this time and enjoys it and doesn’t really show a sense of realization that this time is hindering his progress through the rite of passage. Perhaps too, this break from transition helps him in some way to be prepared for the rest of his transformative process. 47 When Dean shows up at the family dinner ready to take Sal off on the next adventure, once again Sal’s status as a stranger is apparent. They were having their traditional Christmas dinner and in bursts Dean with Marylou (LuAnne Henderson) and Ed Dunkel (Al Hinkle) and they start “eating voraciously” (Kerouac 1988: 101).

Sal’s identity diminishes even more as once he begins talking and planning with

Dean his family no longer seems to know him; even his aunt (actually Kerouac’s mother) seems to not know him at this point.

As their second trip across the country begins, Paradise reveals an important piece of liminality in the description of his friends. Carlo Marx, Old Bull and others have stopped travelling either to go to school or get married. The telling part about this is the rites of passage don’t always have a steady structured time line. The act of tramping as a rite of passage can take months or years to be a complete transformative process. Even though the initiates may have started their rite of passage at the same time, they might not all finish it at the same time. For some of

Sal’s friends, it was just a few months before they finished this rite of passage, but for Sal Paradise and others like Ed Dunkel that process would take more time.

Sal retells a dream he had to Dean and Carlo which represents the fear one typically has while travelling within a rite of passage in the description of a

“Shrouded Figure” who pursues him through a desert to a “Protected City” (Kerouac

1988: 111). In the end, the journey should have only one of two results: reaggregation or death from the perils found within the liminal stage between adolescence and adulthood. This is seen in many indigenous rites of passage as young men often are out on their own in the elements of their environment forced 48 to survive or die, or other rites such as seen in the Ndembu where a boy is exiled from the community during his time of initiation. “Since neophytes are not only structurally ‘invisible’ [though physically visible] and ritually polluting. They are very commonly secluded partially or completely, from the realm of culturally defined and ordered states and statuses” (Turner 1975: 98).

Carlo Marx becomes a guide, his days of travel past, on the day that Dean,

Marylou, Ed Dunkel and Sal are about to head back west once again he asks them all in all seriousness what their plans are what is motivating them to do this once again.

He tries to talk them out of yet another journey and tries to highlight that Dean is running away from troubles not really running towards anything. “One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled”

(Myerhoff 1982: 129). None of them seem to be able to completely answer this question as to why they are getting back on the road again.

Sal begins travelling on his own again for a while and ends up in Denver and feeling very desolate and alone and once again begins questioning what his identity really is. . He is on his own, he’s not sure what he’s doing there and he begins really daydreaming about his identity. “I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned”

(Kerouac 1988: 161). He also begins thinking about death and what death in Denver would be like. He is lost and confused and quite possibly part of him does die in

Denver. While ambling around the streets of the city he gets in a car with two pimps and drives clear to San Francisco with them. “As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the 49 desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, ‘Pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven’” (Kerouac 1988: 163). Where his first moment of identity crisis in Iowa is met with a gleam of excitement, now we see Paradise as a sad and lonely, tired young man questioning when he will know who he is or who he is supposed to be. These questions of identity are what return him to search for his good friend

Dean Moriarty; he searches for something familiar. He does this because he is searching for himself and many times when forming new identity initiates will try and hang on to old things or try and reclaim things from the past identity while in the liminal stage.

Dean Moriarty, Kerouac’s friend Neal Casady, continually shows up in his life with new ideas for places to take off to and with Paradise excited to get back on the road. Sal and Dean are bad for each other. It isn’t one conning one they are both conning each other. This becomes apparent when Sal, not ready to settle down ends up on Dean’s doorstep in San Francisco. As soon as Dean sees him he forgets his wife and kid and is ready to walk all the way to New York. Sal and Dean both, once again, become even more the stranger to their friends and this is the point where many people completely turn their back on Dean and lose a lot of faith in Sal as well. Just as Sal had been a stranger to his family in Testament, when Dean returns to Denver he is treated like a stranger by his cousin. He is effectively disowned from his family and is, like Sal, completely alone. Dean lost his first wife, second wife and kid, many of his friends and then his whole family while in this period of liminality.

Kerouac is showing another aspect of liminality by showing Sal and Dean’s commitment to the road. When you go into liminality you are in a state of flux and 50 when you come out you are a new person with a new identity. Sal and Dean show their desire to get back on the road. Yet all Sal’s friends who have already reestablished themselves in the community try and stop Sal from returning to the road. This act is yet another sign of the need to get off the road and settle down. Sal speaks on “the purity of the road”; every time he and Dean get on the road it is at the climax of some large argument between either the both of them or between them and other friends and lovers of theirs. They are running away in a sense but also they are yearning to be washed clean of their past. “All alone in the night I had my own thoughts and held the car to the white line in the holy road. What was I doing?

Where was I going?” (Kerouac 1988: 124). They go to Louisiana where Ed Dunkel’s new wife Galatea waits at the home of Old Bull Lee, an old friend of Sal and Dean’s.

Old Bull in New Orleans becomes another person trying to tug Sal back into the world. “If you go to California with this madman you’ll never make it. Why don’t you stay in New Orleans with me?” (Kerouac 1988: 132). When they leave (Sal, Dean and

Marylou) New Orleans, Ed Dunkel and his wife Galatea remain behind to look for work.

The third trip also ends up being the most dangerous one they take. Dean almost gets the two of them shot, arrested and in two really big car accidents and that is all before they even make it as far as Denver. For the passage from adolescence to adulthood to be fulfilling, it must be rugged, dirty and dangerous, so when a rite of passage such as this is independently self-created the dangers often are self-created as well. They almost get shot because Dean had been harassing the girl next door where they are staying in Denver. They almost get arrested more than 51 once because of all the cars that Dean has been stealing. And they almost die twice in the car because Dean is so far gone on drugs and alcohol.

Many different rites of passage from male adolescence to adulthood involve an entire community, family included, pretending that the initiate doesn’t exist. Sal and Dean have both now turned their backs on their family and friends on many different occasions. Dean inquires about his family in Denver. You can see a side of

Dean rare throughout the entirety of their road travels. Dean like Sal wants a home and a place to belong to, but fights against that desire with all of his might. His cousin Sam’s declaration that the entire family wanted nothing to do with him anymore was a way of keeping him on the road and in liminality. Dean becomes a ghost even amongst his closest peers. He loses his friends in San Francisco and he loses his family in Denver. Sal and Dean only have each other at this point in the story.

This trip is also full of warnings for Sal from his family and his friends. His ignorance of their pleas and continuance to travel with Dean is the moment in which he turns his back on his community. They are all trying to get him to understand what traveling with Dean Moriarty is doing to him. “Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) is, of course, the very soul of this voyage in pure abstract meaningless motion. He is the mover, compulsive, dedicated, ready to sacrifice family and friends, even his very car itself to the necessity of moving from one place to another. Wife and child may starve, friends exist only to exploit for gas money… Neal must move” (Cook

1971: 50). They all see the potential it has to prove too dangerous and end Sal’s life.

His aunt cautions him before he leaves Testament, VA and Lucille (Kerouac’s 52 girlfriend at the time Pauline) tells him before he leaves New York City. Even Carlo

Marx, who travelled with Kerouac on their first trip, is very cautionary to both of them about what their travels really are and the dangers of a continued existence on the road. Carlo really pleads to Dean about his recent wife Camille and their child

Amy (Carolyn and Catherine Cassady). “Kerouac was the victim of his own restless urgings and of the deep seated alienation he felt from the culture that created him and from the counter-culture he helped create” (Cook 1971: 5). Dean listens to none of this and Sal wants to continue travelling for his book. When they get to New

Orleans it is Old Bull Lee that tries to separate them, “If you go to California with this madman you’ll never make it. Why don’t you stay in New Orleans with me?”

(Kerouac 1988: 132). Lee is trying to explain the dangers of Dean Moriarty just as

Sal talked about in his cautionary dream about the Shrouded Figure chasing him across the desert. It is interesting that even Sal makes the connection later in the story. Right when he is about to go down to Mexico with Stan and finds out that

Dean is coming to join them on the trip he calls Dean the Shrouded Figure.

“Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me” (Kerouac

1988: 232). This fearful vision of Moriarty that Kerouac portrays gives you the idea that Paradise in no longer in love with their travels, with what he now looks like in a comparison to a ragged travelling salesman with nothing to sell. His vision of tramping has changed as it is becoming apparent that he, himself, has changed and is beginning to adopt a new identity. 53 Reaggregation

Reaggregation is a period of the rite of passage where changes are becoming obvious in the neophyte who, in this case is no longer an adolescent and is almost an adult. It is not an instantaneous change from being in liminality to gaining a new identity. There is a period where you begin to reintegrate into the society.

Sometimes there is a time of healing from wounds or illness received while away from society.

The first big change we see is in the method of travel for Sal Paradise. He received money from his first book sales and he is no longer hitchhiking or riding trains or stealing cars. Instead he takes the bus across the country and plans on renting a car to drive down to Mexico.

The second change we see is that the unguided adolescent is now becoming a guide for an adolescent just beginning to separate and enter liminality. A friend of

Tim Gray’s, Stan Shepard, wanted to go with Sal to get away from family troubles in

Denver and they plotted to bring Tim along as well. There is a big argument between Dean and Stan’s grandpa, who knows what traveling with Sal and Dean could do to the boy, but in the end Stan goes with them despite his family’s attempts to get him to stay. Stan is just another young guy taken for a spin by the mad dreaming of Sal and Dean. Even though he isn’t out of the liminal stage yet they are becoming guides taking initiates like Ed Dunkel and Stan Shepard with them through this rite of passage.

After the trip to Mexico and Dean leaving Sal with Stan with dysentery and a horrible fever, Sal returns home one last time and there meets Laura (Joan Kerouac), 54 Laura marks the end of Sal’s travels on the road. “Dean hits the road again while Sal stays home, wondering about the meaning of their travels but somehow more secure about America and its people” (Theado 2000: 58). Kerouac at this point marries Joan, his second wife. He later marries Stella and they both spend their later years taking care of his mom. His mom and dad are very critical to both the beginnings of his travels and the end of them. His mom supports his writing and travel and wants him to get away from it all for a while but his dad’s dying words about loyalty and duty ring clear and when she takes ill he stays by her side almost obsessively. Neal Cassady is another story: after divorcing Camille (Carolyn

Cassady) in the story and leaving his daughters, Amy and Joanie, he marries Inez

(Diana Hansen) and has a child with her as well.

Neal does write the 18,000 word letter that Kerouac describes Dean Moriarty writing and he does come back to New York one more time to visit Jack and Joan before heading back West one last time. Although Jack’s marriage and concern for his mother ended his road travels, Neal’s road life didn’t end when he came back to

Carolyn. Also the divorce written about in On the Road, doesn’t stick in America and his marriage to Hansen ends up being bigamous. His travels after Kerouac settles become even more frenetic, drug-inspired, and dangerous. He left his second trip to

Mexico and went San Francisco, Denver and New York within months and was right back in Mexico again. On one last trip to Mexico attending a wedding party he was found passed out along some railroad tracks in Guanjato, Mexico. Much like his mysterious life his death that night in Mexico remains a mystery. Many people quote exposure, but there was a large amount of the barbiturate Seconal in his system; his 55 widow Carolyn claims renal failure. Although Jack Kerouac is able to reaggregate at the end of his travels, the life he lived on the road catches up to him and he passes away a year after Cassady on October 20th 1969 from an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis. He was living with his third wife Stella Sampas Kerouac and his mother Gabrielle at the time. “take good care of yourself – when I met Jack, I thought

I had finally reached the end of the rainbow.” (Kerouac-Parker 2007: 112).

Dean had a way of capturing Sal’s imagination; he painted a movie like picture of the West for Sal, which left him anxious to see it for his own eyes.

Although Sal had military service under his wing he was wide-eyed and naïve about what the trip would be like. “And in his excited way of speaking I heard again voices of old companions and brothers under the bridge, among the motorcycles, along the wash-lined neighborhood and drowsy doorsteps of afternoon where boys played guitars while their older brothers worked in the mills” (Kerouac 1988: 9).

Kerouac describes here one of the key things that Dean helps him to see, what Kerouac later calls the American spirit. “He was the archetypal American man”

(Cassady 1990: 652-653). Sal starts his journey not feeling good about himself or the world he lives in but Dean’s “frontier spirit” captures Sal’s imagination and by the end of the book Sal becomes very happy with America, Americans and himself.

Jack Kerouac made it through his journey and established himself with society again. So much so that his home near Orlando, Florida is now a center for aspiring writers to take a couple months and just write the same way On the Road was written. Some of his friends, Neal Cassady among them, were not so lucky and fell peril to the liminal stage without reaggregating. Many times when unguided, and 56 even some times when guided, a boy finds that he can’t escape the danger of liminality. Such is the case with the next story, the chronicle of Chris McCandless and his tramping journey through liminality.

57 CHAPTER FOUR

CHRIS MCCANDLESS: A TRANSITION FROM ADOLESCENCE TO DEATH

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, is a journalistic look at the life of Chris

“Alexander Supertramp” McCandless. This nonfiction chronicle begins with the childhood of McCandless but focuses mostly on his time travelling from the east to the west of the United States and his ultimate fate on the Stampede Trail in Alaska.

Krakauer interviewed the McCandless family (most importantly Chris’s close sister

Carine McCandless). Krakauer then read through McCandless’s journal and highlighted passages in his books and also was able to look through Chris’s photo album, which McCandless left with Wayne Westerberg, one of the friends he met on the journey. The Krakauer book jumps back and forth in time, but my analysis of it follows the chronological order.

Chris McCandless couldn’t be any more different than Jack Kerouac. While

Jack travelled for his writing, for womanizing, and drug use and experience, Chris travelled in order to leave society completely behind him-- to remove himself from the material world and fully enter the wild. Christopher Johnson McCandless was born to Walt and Billie McCandless on February 12, 1968. “At the age of two, he got up in the middle of the night, found his way outside without waking his parents, and entered a house down the street to plunder a neighbor’s candy drawer” (Krakauer

58 1996: 106). This act of walking out was the first of many that showed Chris

McCandless was an independent boy and that independent streak grew as he got closer and closer to manhood. At a young age, it was noticeable that he was different and fiercely opposed the lifestyle of his family. His sister Carine stated, “He didn’t seem to need toys or friends. He could be alone without being lonely” (Krakauer

1996: 107). His father Walt describes Chris as always being fearless-- as not believing that the laws of nature were out of his control (Krakauer 1996: 109). A friend of his from high school, Eric Hathaway, reported to Jon Krakauer early feelings of not wanting to conform or to follow American social norms. “Chris didn’t like going through channels, working within the system, waiting his turn. He’d say,

‘Come on Eric, we can raise enough money to go to South Africa on our own, right now. It’s just a matter of deciding to do it” (Hathaway interviewed, Krakauer 1996:

113). When Eric told him that they were just kids Chris rebounded by saying that right and wrong should matter despite age. Chris felt fervently that he could make a difference in the world, that even if just he made changes it would help the world to change.

Chris did not get along very well with his father, Walt, which may have been the reason for Chris’s tramping rite of passage. Separation from family is typically seen as the first step of a rite of passage between adolescence and adulthood, but for boys typically a male of the family would be the guide or offer instruction.

One such group that has male guidance is the Tallensi of Ghana. Their focus on patrilineal guidance means that the father serves as a primary guide and offers the son many “gifts” before the son is separated from the community (Turner 1977: 59 116). These are not material gifts but gifts of survival knowledge. Prior to the rite of passage beginning a son should watch and listen to his father and absorb as much of the father’s abilities as possible.

Another group is the Kurnai of southeast Australia who are noted to be cut off from all females and all objects of their childhood to begin their preparation into the duties and responsibilities of manhood. Their liminal stage is very instructional and it is the father or sometimes the uncle along with other men of the village who perform that instruction. Alfred William Hewitt notes:

The intention of all that is done at this ceremony is to make a

momentous change in the boy’s life; the past is to be cut off from him

by a gulf which he can never re-pass. His connection with his mother

as her child is broken off, and he becomes henceforth attached to me.

All sports and games of his boyhood are to be abandoned with the

severance of old domestic ties between himself and his mothers and

sisters. He is now to be a man, instructed in and sensible of the duties

which devolve upon him as member of the Murring community.

[Howitt 1904: 532]

His father actually loved spending time with him even though he found their time frustrating. “Chris had so much natural talent, but if you tried to coach him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up. He resisted instruction of any kind” (dialogue of Walt McCandless, Krakauer 1996: 111). This 60 quotation of Walt is a clear showing of the stark contrast between father and son.

The son was independent and stubborn and the father was trying to teach but possibly overbearing and just as stubborn. This relationship possibly helped to push

Chris to make some of the decisions he made and pushed away a typical guide in his father.

However, Walt and Chris’s extreme stubborn natures would be a catalyst for

Chris rejecting his father as a guide. “Given Walt’s need to exert control and Chris’s extravagantly independent nature, polarization was inevitable” (Krakauer 1996:

64). In a letter to his little sister Carine, Chris gives away his plan to remove himself from his family life. “I’m going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live. I’ll be through with them once and for all, forever” (Krakauer 1996: 64). To some friends he scarcely talked about his family but to others he depicted them as tyrants constantly trying to control his life. His friend Eric Hathaway told Krakauer that: “Chris just didn’t like being told what to do. I think he would have been unhappy with any parents; he had trouble with the whole idea of parents” (Hathaway interviewed, Krakauer 1996:

115). It became clear that Chris’s anger towards his parents came from Walt’s previous marriage, which he had hid from his children, and from the way in which his family spent money. Chris found out about that marriage and would later try and find out more about the other family. He thought that buying things or going on vacations was a misuse of money that could be used to help better their community and society as a whole.

61 Jack London, amongst many literary greats, was a very important influence on McCandless’s life. He was a literary young man and had a love for the classics. It is easy to tell without looking at his writing that Twain, Tolstoy and Thoreau were heavy influences, but none influenced him to the degree of London. “London’s fervent condemnation of capitalist society, his glorification of the primordial world, his championing of the great unwashed – all of it mirrored McCandless’s passions”

(Krakauer 1996: 44). Chris read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “To

Build a Fire”, “An Odyssey of the North”, and “The Wit of Porportuk” (Krakauer

1996: 44). His romanticized idea of what it would be like in Alaska may have outshined the harshness of the environment that London wrote about in his stories of the Alaskan wilderness.

As a teenager, in high school and early college life his disposition towards his family and towards society began to really change. He wasn’t happy with the governmental or societal systems that he saw and as early as high school tried to advocate against these perceived wrongs. “On weekends, when his high school pals were attending ‘keggers’ and trying to sneak into Georgetown bars, McCandless would wander the seedier quarters of Washington, chatting with prostitutes and homeless people, buying them meals, earnestly suggesting ways they might improve their lives” (Krakauer 1996: 113). He fervently wanted to right the things he felt were wrong with the country and wouldn’t take no for an answer on this crusade.

On one occasion Chris picked up a homeless man from the streets of

D.C., brought him home to leafy, affluent Annandale, and secretly set 62 the guy up in the Airstream trailer his parents parked beside the

garage. Walt and Billie never knew they were hosting a vagrant.

[Krakauer 1996: 113]

McCandless wasn’t a firm believer in college and thought of it as just another invention of the “twentieth century system” (Krakauer 1996: 114). Regardless, to appease his parents, he went to Emory and studied anthropology and history there.

Before leaving for college and immediately following his high school graduation and Walt’s birthday he went on his first road trip. He left Virginia and followed south and went through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to the West coast

(Krakauer 1996: 118). His parents were unhappy with the trip but they knew his stubbornness and were just really happy that he conceded to going to school. Walt told Krakauer: “We had our hearts in our mouths the whole time he was gone, but there was no way to stop him” (Krakauer 1996: 118). Chris’s father reflects on trying to talk Chris out of things and that Chris would just nod and then do as he pleased. Chris was not a person to be talked out of doing or creating anything; he acted as though he didn’t need a mentor through his formative years. When he returned home, two days before his first semester at Emory, he looked gaunt and sickly and his family immediately tried to feed him. Chris had become lost in the

Mojave Desert and he barely had enough supplies with him for the amount of time it took him to find his way back out again.

In college Chris was surprisingly active. He co-founded the College

Republican Club using Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” as a guide (Krakauer 1996: 63 123). He also was a editorial page editor of The Emory Wheel which became an outlet for some of his intense feelings on the government. “He lampooned Jimmy

Carter and Joe Biden, called for the resignation of Attorney General Edwin Meese, lambasted Bible-thumpers of the Christian right, urged vigilance against the Soviet threat, castigated the Japanese for hunting whales, and defended Jesse Jackson as a viable presidential candidate” (Krakauer 1996: 123). His editor, Chris Morris, remembered McCandless as an intense and lone college student. Although he was involved on campus he was becoming more and more a solitary individual.

His second lengthy journey came in the spring of 1989. He sent his family a postcard stating that he was heading to Guatemala but apparently he had changed his mind and took off north to Alaska instead (Krakauer 1996: 124). It was this short time spent around Fairbanks that had made him “smitten by the vastness of the land, by the ghostly hue of the glaciers, by the pellucid subarctic sky” (Krakauer

1996: 124). This unguided adventure was another in which you can see that Chris is just very unsure about his direction, he seems to change tracks quickly, which you will see repeated in his rite of passage. Between his two trips, he had spent time in the Mojave Desert and in the far northern reaches of Alaska, and both times he made no mention of attempting to make friends or have companionship on the journey.

Although these previous trips were journeys of both physical and spiritual nature, it wouldn’t be until he took his entire life away from his community that he would truly be separated.

64 Separation

It was in May of 1990, when Chris graduated from Emory that he began his life as a tramp. He had already travelled extensively while going to college, boasting to his sister that his car had “spanned the continent from Miami to Alaska”

(Krakauer 1996: 21). He took the remainder of the money that was in his bank and donated it to OXFAM America, a charity dedicated to fighting hunger (Krakauer

1996: 20). His family thought he intended to use it to go to law school. Many formal rites of passage attempt to “abolish property”. In the created rites of passage, seen both with McCandless and Kerouac, it is the initiate who decides to “abolish” or simply go without currency and property (Turner 1969: 129).

“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy, which found no outlet in our quiet life. Leo Tolstoy,

Family Happiness” (Krakauer 1996: 15). This was a highlighted excerpt from one of the books found in Chris’s possession and it spoke of everything that he was doing out on the road. He craved a life more exciting and more sacrificing then the one presented to him with his community. He left Emory and took to the road to find that “outlet” for his “superabundance of energy”.

This was the last time any member of Chris’s family would ever hear from him. He had loaded all of his belongings into his treasured Datsun and headed west with no plans or goals in mind.

65 The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic

journey that would change everything. No longer would he answer to

Chris McCandless he was now Alexander Supertramp, master of his

own destiny. [Krakauer 1996: 22-23]

This change was much more immediate than Jack Kerouac’s where Kerouac travelled halfway across the continent before the symptoms of being immersed in the liminal stage; Chris entered liminality as soon as he tore off West in that dusty yellow Datsun.

Liminality

That Datsun was found, three months later, in the Lake Mead National

Recreation Area by a ranger named Bud Walsh. It was abandoned in a ditch with no license plates and a note stating “This piece of shit has been abandoned. Whoever can get it out of here can have it” (Krakauer 1996: 26).

In the car Walsh found a Gianini guitar, $4.93 in random change within a sauce pan, a brand new electric razor, a garbage bag full of old clothes, 25 lbs. of rice, a fishing rod with tackle box, a harmonica, some jumper cables and a football (Krakauer 1996: 26).

The abandoning of the car and the subsequent burial of his things represents his abandonment of his previous identity. He is burying

Christopher McCandless, burying thoughts of Annandale and Emory and burying his past away when he buries the possessions. He may unearth parts

66 later on in life but this phase of his life is being abandoned and he will don a new identity, as he becomes a tramp, the identity of Alexander Supertramp.

The rangers got the car started a few weeks later, the keys being found in the glove box, and said that it “ran like a champ” (Krakauer 1996:

26-27). It is at this point in his book that Krakauer (1996) begins to question some of the things that McCandless does. McCandless ignored regulations that there was no off-roading in the Mojave Desert (near Lake Mead). His registration had expired two years before, his driver’s license was also expired, and the car was uninsured. Krakauer suggests that, like Kerouac,

McCandless was a dreamer and Chris took his literary progenitors to heart.

McCandless believed in “statutes of a higher order” and took Henry David

Thoreau’s essay “On Duty of Civil Disobedience” as gospel (Krakauer 1996:

28). His act of ignoring the rules society sets for him is just another way in which he sets himself distinctly apart from his own community.

. McCandless’s use of burial is very symbolic and happens for the first time here near Lake Mead. Burial is symbolic of death and shows this moment as another step in his separation from his former existence. He conceals the car under a brown tarp, he hides the license plates and he buries items he thinks he may need again. Abandoning the car and burying his possessions is his way of removing himself further from a society he doesn’t feel at home in. This act, which is a clear movement into the liminal stage, sets him apart from his family, friends and his community. There is an idea that he will come back for them when the time is right. Later in the book, 67 Krakauer shows McCandless coming back for certain items buried in other areas of the country so, although he definitely leaves the car for anyone to take, it appears the buried items might be something he will return for. In the desert, he buries his Winchester deer-hunting rifle and some other important items including some books. He looked at the loss of his car as an exhilarating event that allowed him the “opportunity to shed unnecessary baggage”

(Krakauer 1996: 29). Walt, Chris’s father, had mentioned that “Chris as very much of the school that you should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run” (Krakauer 1996: 32).

For McCandless, his separation comes in stages and while he moves in liminality you can see further instances in which he withdraws deeper into himself and at the same time separates further from his community. Chris abandons his car, which his parents gave him and he buries his gun that was meant to protect and provide for him. Chris’s father, Walt, told Krakauer that:

“Chris was very much of the school that you should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run” (Krakauer 1996: 32). He is almost completely on his own and his next action will further thrust him into liminality. “Then, in a gesture that would have done both Thoreau and

Tolstoy proud, he arranged his paper currency in a pile on the sand – a pathetic little stack of ones and fives and twenties – and put a match to it.

One hundred twenty-three dollars in legal tender was promptly reduced to ash and smoke” (Krakauer 1996: 29). In the transitionary stage of liminality

“you possess nothing, no status, no property, no insignia. You lose your 68 position within the kinship system” (Van Gennep 1960: 95). So in the end, all the things that his family and his society gave him, even what he earned in employment, is left by Lake Mead. He possesses nothing, has no property and no status.

McCandless began hiking the perimeter of Lake Mead, firmly affixed in the liminal world and as a liminal person. It would be months later that he found himself staring at himself in a mirror and realizing that he wasn’t recognizable as the Chris McCandless who left Emory. In Chris’s diary,

Krakauer notes: “Can this be the same Alex that set out in July, 1990?

Malnutrition and the road have taken their toll on his body. Over 25 pounds lost. But his spirit is soaring” (cited in Krakauer 1996: 37).

Speaking of the role of liminality, Myerhoff notes: “When an initiate is stripped of all that she or he knows and understands – the sources of knowledge of self and society – she or he is likely to develop freer, deeper, understanding of the system from which she or he has been removed” (1982:

118). In many tribal societies, boys are forced into a similar separation from their family and community in order to move from childhood to adulthood.

They are separated physically and mentally from them, and families at times

“forget” they exist.

McCandless’s journey into liminality was completely self-created. He was a boy with a promising future, possibly in the legal field, from an affluent family. He went on this journey because he felt that wealth and power were afflictions that his family and his society suffered and he felt that he stood 69 alone against those issues. He created his rite of passage because he desired a chance to get away from the “trappings” of material life and the capitalist world he lived in. Since his rite was self-created and unguided it was an even more perilous journey than other formal rites of passage.

McCandless’s journey into the wilderness was very similar to Native

American vision quests, like that participated in by the Sioux. However, the main difference is how young Native Americans are equipped for this journey and how the neophytes were meant to survive. Elders of a group would guide, by explaining how to survive from exposure, dehydration and wild animals, in order to insure the success of the adolescents. Although some died from these violent perils, the vast majority would survive and reaggregate into adulthood.

This peril was seen first on his hike around Lake Mead. It was the beginning of July (July 10th) and it was close to if not over 100 degrees

Fahrenheit. His journal admits a “tremendous mistake… In extreme July temperatures become delirious” (cited in Krakauer 1996: 29). He was suffering from heat stroke and it had hit him badly when fortune led him to be able to flag some boaters down to give him a lift back to the marina on the west end of the lake. Proper hydration is a necessity for any tramp but even more so when the travel is through arid regions like deserts. He learned a little bit about being unprepared for a situation in this event but it is surprising that it wasn’t a lesson already learned from his time in the Mojave

70 Desert. This, and many other experiences, didn’t dissuade him from continuing tramping through the West.

This is how McCandless’s journey went for some time -- his going out into the wilderness until it became too much for him and then returning to the road and more civilized areas. Over the next two months he visited Lake

Tahoe, the Sierra Nevada, and he would walk parts of the Pacific Crest Trail

(Krakauer 1996: 29). It seems like these walks into the wilderness are all trials. Chris is trying to prove to himself that he can survive without society on his own in the wilderness. He is testing himself to see how much solitude and how much surviving he can do.

Occasionally tramps need to work and McCandless at times took work, just like Kerouac when need or opportunity presented itself, in order to have money for necessities. He works for a man named Crazy Ernie who picks him up and brings him to his ranch in northern California but never received payment. McCandless, a firm believer in hard work earning good reward stole a ten-speed bike after working eleven days straight (Krakauer

1996: 30). McCandless, although often not wanting to be an established part of a system, believed that hard work should be compensated and his outrage led him to steal the bike. He took the bike from Ernie not because he is dishonest or even wanted to steal but on the principle of him believing that payment was due to him. This is important because working and not receiving a lesson teaches Chris about the honesty of society and that he would need to fight for what he believed was right. 71 On August 10, 1990, Chris would have (presumably) his first encounter with the law. He received a ticket for hitchhiking near Willow

Creek, California. He gave his family address, which finally gave his family some clue as to where he had been. They had hired a private detective, Peter

Kalitka, who was able to find no trace other than the ticket and finding out about his college fund going to OXFAM (Krakauer 1996: 31). The police are a constant issue for tramps and they represent in the liminal stage a further recognition that tramps are apart from society. Chris’s run in with the law made him a little bit more cautious about the method of looking for rides on the roads, especially in certain states that he found to enforce certain laws more determinedly.

It was close to the border of Oregon and California that Chris first met

Jan and Bob Burres, a pair of drifters that picked them up in their old van.

The three would become fast friends and remain in touch for the rest of

Chris’s life, over the next two years. He continues using the name Alex and at the time they found him he was mostly just skin and bones. The Burres’s commented that he “Said he’d been surviving on edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud of it. Said he was tramping around the country, having a big old adventure” (quoted in Krakauer 1996: 30). He camped with the couple for a week before continuing north up the coast.

“When he left, we never expected to hear from him again, but he made a point of staying in touch. For the next two years (1990-1992) Alex sent us a postcard every month” (Krakauer 1996: 31). On that one week, the Burres’s 72 were like temporary guides for Chris, trying to teach them what they knew of surviving as a drifter. Mostly they taught survival tricks, hitchhiking tips for avoiding police or for knowing the type of cars that might be more inclined to pick him up. It’s unclear how much of these come to use for Chris, but you can tell that he enjoyed spending time with them by his postcards back to them.

While Peter Kalitka, the private detective that the McCandless family hired was scouring all of northern California for a sign of McCandless, Chris was moving east through the panhandle of Idaho and into Montana. He was very lucky with hitchhiking, apart from the ticket incident in California, and travelled quickly to Cut Bank. It was there that he would meet a second temporary guide in Wayne Westerberg.

Wayne Westerberg was a man from Carthage, South Dakota, who picked up

Chris, in the fall of 1990, under his newly created name of “Alexander” McCandless and gave him work and enjoyed his company. “He used to sit right there at the end of the bar and tell us these amazing stories of his travels. He could talk for hours”

(Westerberg quoted in Krakauer 1996: 16). McCandless was heading for Saco Hot

Springs, in Montana, a place he thought there would be a gathering of “rubber tramps” -- tramps that owned or had use of a car --but he ended up going with

Westerberg to Sunburst. Krakauer stated that: “McCandless stayed with Westerberg for three days, riding out with his crew each morning as the workers piloted their lumbering machines across the ocean of ripe blond grain. Before McCandless and

Westerberg went their separate ways, Westerberg told the young man to look him 73 up in Carthage if he ever needed a job” (1996: 17). Chris returned and worked with

Westerberg for a while before once again leaving. “The attachment McCandless felt for Carthage remained powerful, however. Before departing, he gave Westerberg a treasured 1942 edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. On the title page he inscribed,

‘Transferred to Wayne Westerberg from Alexander. October 1990. Listen to Pierre”

(Krakauer 1996: 19). This is important because the idea of reaggregation becomes a possibility at this time. You can see him helping the community, talking to friends of

Westerberg, and thinking about fulltime work. This idea only lasts a short time before McCandless breaks away and returns to tramping.

Chris wrote to Westerberg often following their first meeting in 1990. While he wasn’t communicating with his family, it’s possible he looked at Westerberg as a guide. Westerberg gave him a ride, fed him, gave him shelter, and even hired him while McCandless was on his travels. Westerberg, along with the Burres’s, was a connection Chris kept to the real world, and it shows that although he craved the dangerous wild world of nature, he maintained connections that might have been useful had he made it to that part of the rite of passage when it was time to rejoin society. But it was clear that that was not his intention at the time: “I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up” (Krakauer 1996: 92).

From Carthage, Chris moved back into warmer climates and headed back into California though when reaching the Colorado River he stopped and went south on foot through the desert. He walked twelve miles into Topock, Arizona, along

Interstate 40 that intersects the California border (Krakauer 1996: 32). On impulse 74 he took the money from working with Westerberg in Carthage and bought a secondhand aluminum canoe he would paddle for over four hundred miles from beyond the Hoover Dam to the Gulf of California across the Mexico border. When

Chris stopped in Yuma, he once again wrote to Westerberg. He reiterated the importance of him reading War and Peace and thanked him for his hospitality

(Krakauer 1996: 33).

He paddles across the border to Mexico, but once again, lack of guidance becomes an issue for him. “Canals break off in a multitude of directions. Alex is dumbfounded” (Kerouac 1996: 34), his journal reads and goes on to describe him crossing the language barrier and getting some officials on the canal to draw him a map to the Pacific Ocean (he was actually paddling west towards the Baja

Peninsula). Alex has a miraculous way of finding help when lost and finds some

English speaking duck hunters who drive him to El Golfo de Santa Clara which finally grants him access to the Pacific. His journal speaks of hopelessness and frustration and feeling of incredible confusion and solitude. It betrays the truth of his time in liminality, his ideal being a fun adventure and the real being a time of lost and confused wandering and challenge.

His frustrations continue as he begins to realize that it is nearly impossible for a one-man canoe to be rowed upstream back north towards California. On

January 11th, 1991 his journal reads:

He screams and beats canoe with oar. The oar breaks. Alex has one

spare oar. He calms himself. If loses second oar is dead. Finally 75 through extreme effort and much cursing he manages to beach canoe

on jetty and collapses exhausted on sand at sundown. This incident

led Alexander to decide to abandon canoe and return north.

[McCandless’s diary quoted in Krakauer 1996: 36]

Crossing the border back into the US was not as easy as coming in and he had to concoct a story to get himself (without the .38 caliber handgun he carried) back into the States.

The next six weeks took him as far east as Houston and as far west as the Pacific Coast and he even attempted to get an ID and took full time work in Los Angeles; however, his journal reports him feeling: “uncomfortable in society now and must return to the road immediately” (Krakauer 1996: 37).

Being out on the water and camping for over a half a year, he became more isolated and less sure of social situations, his self-extraction from society makes it harder and harder for him when attempting to be in social situations. This is a sharp contrast from Kerouac’s tramping, since Kerouac tried to spend a lot of time on the road and in the company of others. Like

Chris’s sister stated he seems to really like being alone that made tramping life an ideal route for a rite of passage.

Like many tramps, Kerouac included, there were intervals in his journey where Chris had to get back to society and go on a Hobo Holiday.

McCandless first does this seven and half months after he began his journey when he returns to the site where he left his Datsun. He unearthed his old 76 Virginia plates, his rifle and other belongings and hitchhiked back to Las

Vegas where he got a job at an Italian restaurant (Krakauer 1996: 37).

“Alexander buried his backpack in the desert on 2/27 and entered Las Vegas with no money and no ID, the journal tells us” (Krakauer 1996: 37). He would last almost three months in Las Vegas before getting the itch to move on again. His camera irreparably damaged from burying it outside Vegas, no more pictures would be seen for a time; however, the loss doesn’t pull at him.

“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found” (Krakauer 1996: 37).

Not much is known about where Alex goes at this point, when his camera is destroyed and he also stops writing in his journal. Bob and Jan

Burres received a letter from him in July and by October, 1991 he ends up in

Bullhead City, Arizona. Bullhead City was unlike the typical trappings

McCandless dreamt about in the Tolstoy and Thoreau fashion, but he liked it and thought of it as a place to stay for a while. In fact, he stayed there longer than anywhere else he had gone so far, about two months. In a card sent to

Westerberg, he stated that it would be a good place to spend the winter and that he might abandon his tramping life (Krakauer 1996: 39). Chris

McCandless entered into a formal rite of passage with guides or direction and thus there is no clear point for him to enter or exit the liminal stage. That is why there is this sense of ambivalence or an unknowing aimlessness to his wandering and staying in places. He took a job at the local McDonalds and even opened up a bank account there. 77 He stayed in an abandoned trailer in Bullhead City and even invited

Bob and Jan Burres to visit him there and sent his first letter with a return address. However, in true Supertramp fashion, seemingly disappearing and reappearing on the map at random, Chris showed up on their campgrounds when Bob and Jan were getting ready to go down to Bullhead. “McCandless explained to Burres that he’d grown tired of Bullhead, tired of punching a clock, tired of the ‘plastic people’ he worked with, and decided to get the hell out of town” (Krakauer 1996: 43).

He stayed in Niland, in southern California, for a while with Bob and

Jan. He stayed in “The Slabs” – an abandoned naval base that became the

“capital of a teeming itinerant society” (Krakauer 1996: 43). Chris helped Jan out a lot and was playful and flirtatious with her. He was great at selling books at their flea market and really talked up the classics. “Among the residents of the Niland Slabs was a seventeen-year-old named Tracy, and she fell in love with McCandless during his week-long visit” (Krakauer 1996: 44).

Chris didn’t pay much attention to her; he was nice to her but felt that she was too young for him. He told Jan that he couldn’t really take her seriously

(Krakauer 1996: 44). He was very social amongst the tramping community and made a lot of friends while he stayed there. Like Kerouac’s character, Sal

Paradise, you can tell that Chris doesn’t usually fit himself into social situations well but at other times he seems happy in the spotlight (Kerouac

1988: 112).

78 Chris was very much a solitary young man but, even so, there were times where he needed companionship to survive. Throughout his life he was actually really good at making friends and people liked him and opened up to him. It was hard for anyone to call him an introvert but many people called him a solitary person. It’s possible that being in liminality he sought out people like him. Jan and Bob Burres were definitely drifters and Wayne

Westerberg was described by Krakauer as a modern day cowboy. So although McCandless was a loner he might have been seeking out people who were likeminded to himself. He may have left when realization came that, although these people were similar, they were people who were at home in society and in their communities. “He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn’t a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around” (Krakauer 1996: 44-45).

After Krakauer’s original publishing of the story of McCandless’s death in the January 1993 issue of Outside, he received a letter from a man named

Ronald A. Franz. The letter described a situation in March 1992 in which he picked up a boy named Alex in Salton City, California, and drove him to

Grand Junction, Colorado on his way to South Dakota. Ronald had been so impacted by Chris in this time that they drove together that he felt for sure that this Alex was the one who had passed away in Alaska. “McCandless made an indelible impression on a number of people during the course of his hegira, most of whom spent only a few days in his company, a week or two at 79 most. Nobody, however, was affected more powerfully by his or her brief contact with the boy than Ronald Franz, who was eighty years old when their paths intersected in January 1992” (Krakauer 1996: 48).

We find out through Franz that after leaving Jan and Bob Burres and the tramp home of the Slabs, Chris went into the Anza-Borrego Desert State

Park just east of the Salton Sea in southern California. He made a camp for himself out there and went into Salton City when he needed provisions. It was during one of these routine walks back to the “phantasmal badlands of

Anza-Borrego (Krakauer 1996: 49) that he met Franz. Chris, who was living near another tramp homestead, affectionately called “Oh-My-God Hot

Springs”, didn’t live amongst the tramps there but just on the edge of their campgrounds.

Franz, similarly to Jan Burres, felt the heart pangs of a son he missed when looking at Chris McCandless. His adult life was in the army stationed in

Shanghai and Okinawa and it was during this time that both his wife and son were killed. “On New Year’s Eve 1957, while he was overseas, his wife and only child were killed by a drunk driver in an automobile accident”

(Krakauer 1996: 50). This feeling that he got made Ron Franz the next in line to try and guide Chris through and back out of his trip into liminality. “Franz decided to talk to Alex ‘about how he was living. Somebody needed to convince him to get an education and a job and make something of his life”

(Krakauer 1996: 51). McCandless took some offense to this, telling Ron that

80 he had a college degree and that this was a life choice, yet this initial prickliness left him and he warmed up to the man quickly.

During those next few weeks they spent a lot of time together and they began building a great rapport. “He confided that he was biding his time until spring, when he intended to go to Alaska and embark on an ultimate adventure. He also turned the tables and started lecturing the grandfatherly figure about the shortcomings of his sedentary existence, urging the eighty- year old to sell most of his belongings, move out of the apartment, and live on the road” (Krakauer 1996: 51).

One of the most important pieces of the liminal world for adolescent boys is gaining knowledge that would benefit the person’s abilities in the adult world. In some cultures, such as the Nuer of the South Sudan, the

Maasai of East Africa, and some groups in modern-day Iran, a boy can’t choose and marry a girl until they proved that they could be a man and do the things that are necessary in their culture for men to do. This is where a guide is most crucial, and this is where Ron Franz was most like a guide. “An accomplished leatherworker, Franz taught Alex the secrets of his craft. For his first project McCandless produced a tooled leather belt, on which he created an artful pictorial record of his wanderings” (Krakauer 1996: 51).

Ron taught Chris a trade, where others in McCandless’s life taught him survival tactics. For his travel in liminality, Franz gives Chris something that he can use once he returns to society. He gives him knowledge that would help him in the community that he comes back into. 81 Chris didn’t end up utilizing this at that moment. Instead he begins riding rails and tramps from Franz’s home all the way up to Seattle and then back down to Grand Junction, Colorado, where he called Ron again and asked to be picked up. This is when Ron had asked of Chris something very special but that made Chris very uncomfortable. “My mother was an only child’ he explains, ‘so was my father. And I was their only child. Now that my own boy’s dead, I’m the end of the line. When I’m gone, my family will be finished, gone forever. So I asked Alex if I could adopt him, if he would be my grandson” (Krakauer 1996: 55). McCandless was noncommittal and told him they’d talk about it when he returned from Alaska. “He’d successfully kept

Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now he’d slipped painlessly out of

Ron’s life as well” (Krakauer 1996: 55). This is really important because Ron tries to insert himself as a father figure, a figure that represents an important guide in many rites of passage. Unfortunately, Chris denies this attempt on

Ron’s part to further help Chris in his passage.

In April, prior to heading for Alaska, he sent a long letter to Ron Franz, much like ones he had previously written to Burres and Westerberg. He once again tells Franz to get out of Salton City and to hit the Road. He tells him to let go the chains of sedentary security and embrace the nomadic life. He even quotes the religion and spirituality that both he and Ron embrace. “You are wrong if you think joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything 82 we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living” (Krakauer 1996: 57).

Alex returns to Carthage at this time and begins working for

Westerberg again. Westerberg comments on Alex not being machine minded and that it being comical to watch him get the hang of the farming equipment.

He also talked of a lack of common sense, “Many who knew him have commented, unbidden, that he seemed to have a great difficulty seeing the trees, as it were, for the forest” (Krakauer 1996: 63). Many also remarked on his isolated nature, Gail Borah an on again, off again girlfriend of

Westerberg’s took a liking to him and remarked on his nature. “He acted like it was hard for him to be around people. I just figured that was because he’d spent so much time by himself” (Krakauer 1996: 63). His intent on returning was to make money with Westerberg to afford the gear he felt he needed for his trip back up to Alaska. He planned on leaving Carthage no later than April

15th and staying in Alaska until the Fall harvest when he’d return to Carthage.

“I got the impression that this Alaska escapade was going to be his last big adventure’, Westerberg offers, ’and that he wanted to settle down some, He said he was going to write a book about his travels” (Krakauer 1996: 66).

Westerberg commented on trying to get McCandless to stay longer but once

Chris was decided on something there was no changing his mind (Krakauer

1996: 67).

Just as he had said he intended many times, Chris finally left Carthage on April 15, 1992 in the cab of a Mack truck hauling sunflower seeds 83 (Krakauer 1996: 157). He crossed the Canadian border at Roosville, British

Columbia, and hitchhiked north. Unlike all his previous trips, this wasn’t a meander-- he wasn’t strolling through the great American backyard, he was on a mission. Like many young boys before him he wanted to go into an ultimately savage, perilous, and isolated wilderness. A photograph of him at the start of the Alaskan Highway, Mile “0” in British Columbia, was found among his things. Along the way, at a hot springs in a public campground near Liard River, in the Yukon Territory, he met Gaylord Stuckey. “Stuckey – bald and cheerful , a ham faced sixty-three year old Hoosier – was en route from Indiana to Alaska to deliver a new motor home to a Fairbanks RV dealer, a part-time line of work in which he’d dabbled since retiring after forty years in the restaurant business” (Krakauer 1996: 158). Stuckey was reluctant to pick up hitchhikers but realized almost immediately that

McCandless wasn’t your usual tramp. He agreed to take him halfway, to

Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory. However, by the time they got that far Stuckey took a liking to McCandless and decided to drive him the whole distance to Fairbanks, despite the possible firing he’d incur for picking up someone.

Chris was open about his Alaskan adventure and Stuckey told Krakauer that

Chris “Said he didn’t want to see a single person, no airplanes, no sign of civilization.

He wanted to prove to himself that he could make it on his own without anybody’s help” (Krakauer 1996: 159). Stuckey tried to get McCandless to at least call his family before heading into “the bush” but McCandless wouldn’t commit to it. This is 84 a mirror image of feelings Walt, Chris’s father, had mentioned when talking about the stubbornness of Chris. Walt mentioned to Jon Krakauer that

Chris was good at almost everything he tried, which made him

supremely overconfident. If you attempted to talk him out of

something, he wouldn’t argue. He’d just nod politely and then do

exactly what he wanted. [1996: 119]

Once again Chris chooses to not take the advice of someone who, most likely, knows better about the environment and potential dangers of this part of his journey. Had he listened to reason from any number of people he might have been better prepared for his journey into the Alaskan wilderness. Even well prepared people find a lot of trouble in that environment but unprepared he was setting himself up for great potential failure. Chris chose his rite of passage and he continually chose not to have a guide. He was too determined to do this entire thing as much on his own as possible and it was this stubborn determination that would lead him to the tragic end of the rite of passage.

The last postcard Westerberg received from McCandless simply stated, “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild” (cited in Krakauer 1996: 134).

This last line from which Jon Krakauer takes his book title is very important to how driven McCandless was in proving things to himself and thus completing the rite of 85 passage. “I now walk into the wild.” He moves even deeper into liminality by cutting all ties and going fully in to nature.

McCandless then got all his provisions ready in Fairbanks and read up on good edible plants at the University of Alaska before hiking down George

Parks Highway that would bring him to the Stampede Trail. It was on this highway that Chris picked up his final ride into the wilderness from a man not much older than he, Jim Gallien. Gallien was an electrician who was on his way to Anchorage. Jim remarked on how little Chris had with him for survival, and Jim gave McCandless day’s lunch. Gallien was worried about

McCandless; he had seen a few like him, wild-eyed about living off the land.

He tried to caution Chris about the reality of Alaska, “The rivers are big and fast. The mosquitoes eat you alive. Most places, there aren’t a lot of animals to hunt. Livin’ in the bush isn’t no picnic” (quoted in Krakauer 1996: 4-5).

However any objection Gallien offered met with an answer from Chris,].. “He was determined. Real gung ho. The word that comes to mind is excited.”

(Gallien quoted in Krakauer 1996: 6).

When Chris left the car to turn into the Stampede Trail the biggest part of his pack was in fact laden with books.

The heaviest item in McCandless’s half-full backpack was his library;

nine or ten paperbound books, most of which had been given to him

by Jan Burres in Niland. Among these volumes were titles by Thoreau

and Tolstoy and Gogol, but McCandless was no literary snob: He 86 simply carried what he thought he might enjoy reading, including

mass-market books by Michael Crichton, Robert Pirsig, and Louis

L’Amour. [Krakauer 1996: 162]

McCandless took a library of books, heavy books in that time period where today he might have had all his literary needs met by a Kindle. The important thing here is to note all of the things that he should have had in his pack instead of books. It takes a lot to survive in the wilderness and he really had nowhere near the amount of survival necessities for the journey he was planning. In late April he waded across the low (due to freezing temperatures) depth of the Teklanika River.

The Teklanika became the threshold where Chris McCandless further separated himself from all.. Jon Krakauer refers to the river as “his Rubicon”

(Krakauer 1996: 163). What Chris failed to know or realize was that while during Alaska’s winter the Teklanika was relatively easy to cross, in the coming months warmer weather would add to its volume tremendously, about nine to ten times the volume than when he had crossed. This was going to be part of his undoing, since crossing it at its full Spring current would be completely impossible.

It was shortly after he crossed the river that he found the “Magic Bus” that would become his home. “Fairbanks bus 142 is parked beside a coppice of aspen, ten yards back from the brow of a modest cliff, on a shank of high ground overlooking the confluence of the Sushanna River and a smaller 87 tributary” (Krakauer 1996: 176). It would make a perfect shelter and base camp for McCandless’s time in the interior. However, it wasn’t just to be a base of operations as Krakauer describes seeing the inside himself it felt like a home. On it he writes, what Krakauer details as his own declaration of independence:

Two years he walks the Earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no

cigarettes. Ultimate Freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager

whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not

return, ‘cause “the West is the best.” And now after two rambling

years comes the final greatest adventure. The climactic battle to

kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual

revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking

bring him to the great white north. No longer to be poisoned by

civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become

lost in the wild. Alexander Supertramp May 1992 [quoted in

Krakauer 1996: 163]

This manifesto in itself is very symbolic of a ritual that Chris is performing on himself, an initiation into nature and a reinforced separation from all of society. He talks in his journal about wanting to “explore the inner country of his soul” an idea echoed in London and Thoreau where a travel in unclaimed country land is symbolic of a travel in unknown parts of the mind, body and soul. It is perhaps this ideal that he must purify himself or that he 88 needs to be victorious against something within himself that he wants to destroy that keeps him from reintegrating back into society.

Even while on his inner journey, McCandless had trouble providing food for himself. Although he had become skilled with a gun, he couldn’t kill any game. He failed to shoot a grizzly on May 2, some ducks on May 4, but he finally bagged a spruce goose on May 5 (Krakauer 1996: 164). Many hunters have speculated that the type of gun he was using wasn’t meant for hunting big game like bear, moose or caribou and Krakauer mentions that it might have been arrogance not ignorance that had McCandless ill prepared for his time in Alaska. The lack of success did not dampen Chris’s spirit. His makeshift journal is filled with positivity. “On May 22nd, a crown fell off one of his molars, but the event didn’t seem to dampen his spirits much, because the following day he scrambled up the nameless, humplike, three-thousand-foot butte that rises directly north of the bus, giving him a view of the whole icy sweep of the Alaska Range and mile after mile of uninhabited country”

(Krakauer 1996: 164).

At first McCandless stayed on the move, but by the last week of May he made the bus his permanent residence. It wasn’t exactly far from civilization (thirty miles west and sixteen miles north of trafficked areas), but he didn’t see another soul the entire time he was there. He began getting better and better at providing food for himself and even started giving himself short-term and long-term projects while he was there. He was really making a home out of this little area around the bus in the Sushanna 89 drainage. “And under the heading LONG TERM he drew up a list of more ambitious tasks: map the area, improvise a bath tub, collect skins and feathers to sew into clothing, construct a bridge across a nearby creek, repair mess kit, blaze a network of hunting trails” (Krakauer 1996: 165-166).

On June 5 his naivety really shone through when he killed a moose but used methods unsuitable for Alaska to preserve the meat. He used advice from his friends and coworkers in South Dakota who would always smoke their meat to preserve it. However, in Alaska the best preservation method was cutting thin layers of meat and air-drying it on a rack of some kind.

“June 14: Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective. Don’t know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life” (Krakauer 1996: 167). He began being much more cautious when it came to selecting food and began using Thoreau’s Walden, especially the section titled “Higher Laws”, as a rulebook on eating.

Towards the end of June McCandless seemed to be making preparations for ending his Alaskan journey. He may even have been ready to go home. On a piece of birch bark he made a list of things to do before departing. “Patch jeans, shave, organize pack…” (Krakauer 1996: 169). He began the hike back to civilization but began encountering obstacles he hadn’t encountered before. Ponds, which had previously been, iced over and passable were now barriers to be crossed with difficulty or circumnavigated with even greater difficulty. “When he’d first crossed the river, sixty-seven days earlier in the freezing temperatures of April, it had been an icy but 90 gentle knee-deep creek, and he’d simply strolled across it. On July 5, however, the Teklanika was at full flood, swollen with rain and snowmelt from glaciers high in the Alaskan Range, running cold and fast” (Krakauer

1996: 170). It was now uncrossable.

At first McCandless wasn’t worried by this, or as Krakauer (1996:

186) reminds us his journal didn’t betray any fears he may have had. The issue at hand was his sizable calorie deficit, he was burning way more calories than he was getting from the lean meats, berries, mushrooms and other wild plants he was eating. He began reading and marking in Doctor

Zhivago. In it he noted some things that have been commonalities in other books he had read, the connection between nature and purity and thoughts of taking refuge in nature for examples but one new thought crept up in his writing. “Happiness only real when shared” (Krakauer 1996: 189). During his journey he spent long bouts in solitude but none had been as long and lonely as his sabbatical in Alaska (Krakauer 1996: 189).

It is possible that McCandless had a time frame in mind or maybe some objectives on a mental checklist that he needed to complete but somehow he had proved to himself that he was able to last the harsh wilderness of the Stampede Trail and decided that he could return. It is unclear if leaving the area meant a return home or a further journey elsewhere but McCandless stated many times that his journey to Alaska was going to be his ultimate adventure. It is very possible that that culmination of

91 so many wilderness experiences had filled a void that proved to him that he was masculine, an adult and could survive the rugged wild land.

Doctor Zhivago would be the last book McCandless would read and two days later (July 30) he would leave an odd entry in his journal.

“Extremely weak. Fault of pot. Seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving.

Great jeopardy.” (Krakauer 1996: 189). This entry was so odd because nothing before this day even began to suggest that he wasn’t doing well. “He was hungry, and his meager diet had pared his body down to a feral scrawn of gristle and bone, but he seemed to be in reasonably good health.”

(Krakauer 1996: 190). The coroner was unable to tell when exactly Chris

McCandless died out in the bus on the Stampede Trail but it is speculated that he died August 18 1992, 212 days after walking out into the wild, when his last journal entry was written thanking the Lord for a blessed life and saying goodbye.

Krakauer posits, after interviewing Priscilla Russell Kari, the author of

Tamina Plantlore, that while McCandless had been eating the root and seed of wild potato plants (Hedysarum alpinum, --a wild plant that was completely edible that even the Dena’ina people, an Alaskan Native people from south central area of Alaska, would eat-- he may have gotten some seeds of a closely related species, wild sweet pea (Hedydsarum mackenzii). “Although a slightly smaller plant, wild sweet pea looks so much like wild potato that even expert botanists sometimes have trouble telling the species apart”

(Krakauer 1996: 191). The seeds didn’t actually kill him, but they 92 incapacitated him to an extent of not getting any nourishment. The look-alike plant was detrimental enough to prevent him from having any energy to gather any more food. This coupled with the return of winter in August was beginning to spell a certain doom for McCandless. “The temperature was dropping, and the days were becoming noticeably shorter. Each rotation of the earth held seven fewer minutes of daylight and seven more of cold and darkness; in the span of a single week, the night grew nearly an hour longer”

(Krakauer 1996: 194). It is hard to know, even with his journal, what

McCandless thought as time was getting away from him.

Most likely on August 18, 1992, Chris zipped up the sleeping bag his mother had sewn for him a lifetime ago and died. It would be almost another twenty days before his body would be found.

One of his last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing

near the bus under the high Alaskan sky, one hand holding his

final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave,

beatific farewell. His face is horribly emaciated, almost skeletal.

But if he pitied himself in those last few hours – because he

was so young, because he was alone, because his body had

betrayed him and his will had let him down – it’s not apparent

from the photograph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is

no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at

peace, serene as a monk gone to God. [Krakauer 1996: 199] 93 It wasn’t until early September, 1992, that his body was found when “six people in three separate parties happened to visit the remote vehicle [the bus] on the same afternoon” (Krakauer 1996: 10). They crossed the river using elevated big rig pickup trucks and drove the rest of the way to the bus in ATVs. They had yet to go inside the bus but noticed a bad smell, a makeshift signal flag and the note that Chris left for anyone who came to the bus.

S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak

to hike out of here. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the name of

God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close

by and shall return this evening. Thank you, Chris McCandless.

August?” [Krakauer 1996: 12]

One of the people who showed up at the campsite, a man by the name of

Gordon Samel who worked at Ken Thompson’s (also present) auto-body shop in Anchorage, looked in from the window shook the sleeping bag and found Chris McCandless’s body. He had been dead about two and a half weeks. “At the time of autopsy McCandless’s remains weighed sixty-seven pounds. Starvation was posited as the most probable cause of death”

(Krakauer 1996: 14). His real name had been written at the end of his S.O.S. note and photos developed showed many self-portraits. So identifying the body had been relatively easy. But, because he had no identification, the 94 authorities had no idea who Chris McCandless was or where he had come from.

The New York Times ran a piece on the tragic death of this unknown man but was unable to run a name. The Alaskan State Troopers were beginning to believe that McCandless was a field biologist. They ascertained this from the “perplexing diary recovered with the body” which had many notes on flora and fauna on the Stampede Trail. Jim Gallien read about the tragedy in the Anchorage Daily News and called the troopers immediately knowing that this was the boy he had given a ride to back in April. On

September 13, after Gallien shifted their investigation to South Dakota,

Wayne Westerberg heard the story on a radio show. Westerberg had

McCandless’s Social Security number, which finally led them to the

McCandless’s permanent residence in northern Virginia.

Reaggregation

There would be no real reaggregation for Chris McCandless. It is apparent, in the end that the desire was there, but the means of fulfilling that desire and the guide to bring him back were not present. Had he known more about the world he had entered, he would have known that to the south of his bus there were some supply shelters with extra food, first aid kit and other necessities, or he would have known that to the north the river was more easily passable. However, he was in the dark and alone, and so he died within the liminal stage, unable to come back as an adult into the world. 95 “Young men die earlier than young women and die more often than older men largely because they are trying to live up to certain models of manhood – they are dying to prove that they are ‘real men’” (Barker 2005: 3).

McCandless said within his journal and even in letters to those close to him that this “Alaskan Odyssey” is more than just an adventure and that he wanted to prove it to himself that he could live in the wild and ,unfortunately, sometimes the neophyte doesn’t make it through their transition and instead they transcend into the rite of passage of death.

Death is always the possible outcome of a rite of passage but in most cases it is not the end of the initiation rite. Even for people self-creating their rites of passage, like Kerouac and McCandless, the end result would be reaggregation. However, in some cases, like the case of Zebu Recchia, it is sometimes hard to see the precise moment of reaggregation and there can be the appearance of an initiate becoming stuck in liminality.

96 CHAPTER FIVE

ZEBU RECCHIA: AS EDDY JOE COTTON RIDING THE RAILS

Zebu Recchia was born in Rhode Island, in a home built by his parents, just outside a nudist colony, in 1972. His middle name, Beauty, was given to him by a retired merchant marine that taught his mother home birthing (Cotton 2002: 4). To supplement his writing I was able to get an interview with him over the phone in which he clarified and added to the story detailed in his book, Hobo: A Young Man’s

Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in America (2002) (See Appendix 1). Throughout this chapter, I will refer to Recchia as Eddy Joe Cotton, his tramping name, unless making mention to the interview.

Eddy Joe Cotton’s story is a rite of passage that at first glance seems to never end. It isn’t until further investigation occurs that Eddy Joe Cotton’s rite is given terminus and reaggregation is found. At times it may seem like a passenger in a rite of passage may get stuck or may seem to stay in liminality. What becomes apparent is that there are times when an initiate has periods of rest within liminality where he or she is moving neither backward nor forward.

Eddy Joe Cotton’s childhood was one that was on the move. His parents were drifters and eventually their divorce left him alone with his father in a home they built in a nudist colony. They would spend a lot of time in the woods walking and

97 talking and he would learn a lot of things about being a tramp through the stories his father would tell of his or even his grandfather’s journey. Recchia describes his family as “free spirits” and that financial security was not as important a factor as their ongoing search for freedom (Appendix 1).

Cotton’s written story begins with two words, “You’re fired!” (Cotton 2002:

3). The words came from his father, whom he had worked with off and on since he was 12 years old. It hadn’t been the first time that he and his father came to blows.

“When times get rough between my father and me, I’m usually the first one to go”

(Cotton 2002: 3). However, this time a determined 19-year-old decided to walk away from his father and keep walking on October 24th, 1991. It wasn’t a life he had thought about before but he had met tramps in the pool halls he used to visit with his dad as a kid. “I remember reading The Dharma Bums (Kerouac) but I don’t remember there being anything about riding trains in that” (Appendix 1).

That same first day, after finding a pen on the road, Cotton decided to write down the story of his travels. He took notes along his extensive travels and wrote his book about some of the adventures experienced on his travels. He had a flair for descriptive writing but he wrote very true details about his emotional and mental state within his journey through the liminal stage.

Eddy Joe Cotton also gave insight into his history showing him coming from a family who used mobility as a means to grow and develop. “I remember my father telling me stories about riding his Harley Davidson from coast to coast” (Cotton

2002: 4). His father had a dream of seeing Mexico, a dream that spurred his son on as well. “Dreams make dandelions taste good, and, like my father, sometimes you 98 have to make sacrifices to go pretty places, ya know?” (Cotton 2002: 4). His father crisscrossed the country six times on his Harley Davidson back in the sixties, “when everyone was on the road” (Cotton 2002: 4).

His mother was also a person who had tramped and been from one side of the country to the other. “When my mom was nineteen she hitchhiked from San

Francisco to Key West with a drag queen named Spencer” (Cotton 2002: 12). This happened in 1974, before meeting Cotton’s father, and took ten days. She met

Cotton’s father in El Paso on the way back and shortly after crossed into Mexico and they got married. They divorced when Cotton was two years old and he stayed with his father at that time and didn’t really spend time with his mother after that. He was an only child and growing up the only family he spent time with was his father.

His father was certainly the initial guide or instructor for Cotton’s travels. He told him stories of himself, Eddy’s mother and grandfather, of their trips around the country. In those stories came instructions and lessons learned that would help him on his journey. “There is no romance in poverty, just the lesson of our independence” (Cotton 2002: 5). These words echoed in his mind at the beginning of his trip. He remembers being on the front porch in Rhode Island hearing them for the first time as they were just about to leave his home state for Colorado, penniless and without his mother. This lesson is on his mind because of the feeling in his stomach as he is walking away from the brickyard. He realizes that meals will be few and far between but also realizes that it is worth the sacrifice. His father also gave him guidance in the form of a destination; it was that thought of Mexico that became a driving force for Cotton. 99 I put my hand in my pocket and felt something between my fingers. It

was the old Mexican postcard that my father had given me. I stopped to

look at it. It showed the serene Mexican landscape. For a brief moment

it gave me a reason to live, a warm breeze to look forward to. [Cotton

2002: 32]

“Some things are more important than shame and better seen through pain” (Cotton

2002: 49). Cotton explains that this is the most important lesson he learned in life.

He received the instruction from his father but it wasn’t until his time in liminality that he understood its meaning. As a drifter he knew he was leaving behind an identity filled with sadness: “bad memories, bad days and no pay” (Cotton 2002:

40).

Separation

Separation for Cotton happens quickly. He has little to no money and his thoughts of his father early on reveal a loss in psychobiological touch as well

(Turner 1969: 105). Although his father’s guidance will prove helpful, his father was also the reason why he left for the road. This is often the case where a boy feels the need to get out from a father’s shadow in order to prove his manliness.

“I was walking down the side of the road completely busted and unsure of where I was going” (Cotton 2002: 5). This is a feeling echoed by many tramps including Jack Kerouac (1988) and Chris McCandless (Krakauer 1996). The first man to pick him up offers him a bologna sandwich; he looks at him and says he figures he’s not going far (Cotton 2002: 25). Tramps are not usually planners but 100 they do usually have some kind of “gear” or “rig” (backpack) in which they hold a change of clothes, especially socks, and food. They don’t typically have possessions the way many communities think of possessions (such as McCandless’s book collection) but they have survival necessities. Cotton, having rashly taken to the road, had no preparation and thus his journey would be even more perilous. For

Eddy that bologna sandwich was his “first taste of freedom” (Cotton 2002: 25).

“I had the feeling that I would be spending a lot of time in fast cars and lonely truck stops” (Cotton 2002: 26). Eddy was realizing early that he would be in the liminal stage for some time and that the cars he’d grab rides from and the truck stops he would wait for cars in would be his wilderness for that time. The road becomes the liminal place where he will spend all his time until he can reaggregate back into society. He leaves his first ride at a truck stop somewhere in the middle of

Wyoming to go to a diner. “I found a spot at the counter and placed my last dollar on the counter” (Cotton 2002: 27). This action is a crucial one to separation he is now without money and will need to completely fend for himself. A truck driver, named

Jack, talks to him while eating once again helping to push him on to the road. Jack sets the framework for Eddy’s regard of the road as a haven. “He turned his stool and pointed out the frosty windows to the freeway. ‘That could be the last safe place in all of America. You’re young and believe me there aren’t many young folks out there. I’ll push your ass out there before I let you go home” (Cotton 2002: 29). The man tries to impress upon him that he has a chance of a lifetime to see things he’d never seen before. This experience is at the crux of what liminality is all about: seeing, learning, growing and most importantly changing. 101 Jack’s father was actually a tramp who rode rails but always took time to meet with his son at that truck stop when he was in the area. “When’s he coming in?’

‘Soon, real soon. You can’t really tell with those trains. I’ve waited at this stop for days, spelling my name out on napkins, sleeping in the truck” (Cotton 2002: 30).

Tramps are never on a set schedule. “As bad for a hobo it seemed, as having someone impose a schedule on you was imposing one on yourself” (Conover 1984:

115). However, as Jack explains, the idea of not running on a schedule was an illusion for his father and all tramps, he explains his father comes through every fall and that he could tell Eddy where his father was at any time of the year (Cotton

2002: 30).

Eddy’s next separation was the loss of his identity in the form of his name.

When Jack asked Zebu Recchia his name he replied simply, “My name’s Eddy Joe

Cotton” (Cotton 2002: 32). For Recchia, this was a simple choice but one he wasn’t sure why he did. He felt it wasn’t necessary. Yet, on instinct, he removed his real name and gave the name of Cotton, a name he would use for his entire journey as a tramp.

When I arrived at that truck stop in Wyoming I saw the reflection of soft

white clouds in the window. They reminded me of cotton. It was a nice

feeling – soft – heavenly. That’s where I got Cotton from, Joe came from

“Joey”, meaning clown, and I have no idea how I thought up “Eddy”. I

don’t really know why I chose to do this. I was new to the push and

102 thought it was appropriate to change your name. [Cotton 2002: 32

footnote#2]

Fear settles in as they sit outside waiting for Jack’s father’s train. He starts to realize the severity and finality of the choice he has made. “I didn’t just leave home mad, I left empty-handed and that was the scary part” (Cotton 2002: 33). He considers turning around and returning to Denver but in Denver all that waits for him is a need to settle down. That idea of settling would be a complete giving up of freedom; he wanted to hold on to the irresponsibility of youth. He didn’t realize that this journey would end with the responsibility of adulthood. He considered being a tramp, becoming a “Gentleman of the Country”, and considered it an honorable role

(Cotton 2002: 33). He is creating a rank for himself, because as he moves into liminality he has no rank at all.

Even though Jack did a good job of glorifying the road as a place that Cotton should really spend time and get to know, he also began to detail the perils that could befall someone on the road. When Jack rode rails with his father he earned the tramp name Half Step, his name had come as a result of such dangers. “I was drunk.

I tried to get on a train that was going to fast. If you grab one of those ladders at a certain speed you’ll get thrown right over the top” (Cotton 2002: 34). Jack lost four toes from a miscalculated jump on to that train. Cotton continued to be lucky with finding guides along his way when he met Jack’s father. “A little skeleton man with a blackened face flew from the train and rolled a few yards on the rock” (Cotton 2002:

34). Alabama was a drifter for most of his life, a life he picked up after returning

103 from the Vietnam War. Alabama would be the main guide during Eddy’s time in liminality.

Liminality

Alabama begins quickly teaching Eddy important pieces to surviving as a tramp. Alabama has camps in four different states that he leaves things in when he has a surplus. This is very similar to McCandless who buried items he might come back for if he felt he needed them (Krakauer 1996: 37). He uses veteran pay to help fund his life but “after that it’s dumpsters or shelters or anything. You can go anywhere in the world and make a living if you just use your head” (Cotton 2002:

36). His tutelage is not just survival-based but also philosophical; he gives skills to become a tramp but also helps with Cotton’s growth within the liminal stage. “I mean, if you’re feeling like a king all the time, then you forget what it’s like to be a bum, and if you feel like a bum all the time, you forget what it was like to be a king.

Neither of them makes any sense. It’s the place in the middle that makes the most sense, that’s where we all belong, right in the middle” (Cotton 2002: 37). Alabama also reaffirms Eddy’s dream of Mexico created by his father’s postcard. Alabama lived down there for a while and talked about the beauty and simplicity of the country. Cotton would stick with Alabama for a while and learned the rules of riding the rails from him.

Peril on the road comes in many forms, but for tramps one of the worst dangers comes in the form of bulls (railroad security or possibly local police). When

Eddy and Alabama stop in Greybull, Wyoming, he has his first run in with potential 104 law enforcement. “He continued to drive alongside me. I thought about running, but

I knew that would just trigger his excitement” (Cotton 2002: 50). The man caught him just outside of a convenience/liquor store with hot dogs to eat for lunch. He took one look at Cotton and suspected that he was riding on the train. The man

(who turned out not to be police) got irritated when Cotton was calmly answering questions but walking towards where Alabama was waiting for him. Eddy ran away to a darker area in the yard; the man followed him with one of two rifles in his truck.

When Cotton returned to the boxcar, the portly man gave chase and caught up to him in the boxcar. After punching him in the ribs with his gun for lying to him about being on the train, he hopped off and they were free.

Another danger that all tramps feel on their journeys would be harassment.

They live in a world outside of all communities, even though at times they are a community unto themselves, and being outside, being the stranger often makes them looked down upon. At times it makes them invisible to the community at large but at times when it seems that they are not making any progress towards structurally created goals they are loathed and outcast. When Eddy leaves the rail yard and goes into the convenience store to buy hotdogs, he leaves the liminal space and the man who harasses him sees him as a stranger, as someone who is doing something both taboo and illegal. He asks him if he’s riding the train illegally not because it is his duty or his business but because he sees a stranger and doesn’t want the stranger to be there in “his” world.

The next danger that Cotton faces learning the ways of riding rails with

Alabama would be in tramps themselves. Stated above it is easy to assume that if 105 tramps at times make a community they shouldn’t be a danger to each other.

However, within liminality, you are inherently alone and the community created amongst tramps on the road is an illusion at best. People without identity, in the rugged wilderness or in the harshness of constant mobility, tend to be for their own interests and their own survival, for it is surviving their time on the road that will prove their manhood. When Alabama and Eddy approach the hobo jungle just after crossing into Montana, they meet Bobby Blue and Levi Stout to more tramps. “I don’t mind sharing camp with a street fighter or a man who smears Vaseline on his artillery, but there’s something instinctually wrong about sleeping alongside a murderer” (Cotton 2002: 55). Jungle Buzzards are tramps that prey upon others of their kind, robbing unarmed tramps with a gun or knife for food, drink or possibly money. They can also be tramps that eat and drink with other tramps never giving in to the “communal store” (Cotton 2002: 65). Tramps are known to steal from each other, lie to each other and worst of all kill each other just to fill their stomachs. It doesn’t happen all the time but any camaraderie between tramps is loose and full of suspicion.

On his first boxcar ride, Cotton met most of the dangers one meets on the road and the final one was the elements. As the train crossed the Montana line and headed slowly through the Rocky Mountains, the temperature changed radically and Cotton and Alabama had to face the possibility of hypothermia. Just like adolescents from many tribal nations in the north, Eddy had to be able to survive the harsh cold climate with clothing that wasn’t beneficial. Exposure and hypothermia were real dangers, especially at night. “Four hours later the sun went 106 down and the temperature changed… When I looked down at my fingertips I could see the colors changing. I shook my arms in circles and kept moving. I had to keep moving or hypothermia would set in. I felt the pain” (Cotton 2002: 61).

All of these dangers stack up against you and Recchia mentions in an interview that there were many instances where he felt like giving up. There were many occasions where he just wanted to go home. He didn’t turn his back on his journey though and usually a “serendipitous event” would keep him on the road

(Appendix 1). He mentioned both finding work and finding a good travelling companion as things that motivated him when he felt like he was lost and should stop (Appendix 1). Recchia mentions that, for him, the worst danger on the road was loneliness. He said that many tramps turn to drinking not because of financial hardship and not for camaraderie but because they are so alone on the road. Zebu jokingly states that it was “even worse when we didn’t have cell phones” (Appendix

1).

Just like Sal Paradise (Kerouac 2007), when Cotton finally got into a bathroom in Missoula, Montana, to look at himself in the mirror, he saw something different.

While looking at myself I felt something coming to the surface,

something I never knew I had. It was the will to stand through so much

with so little. It seemed that through all my time on the planet I had

never had much more than a strong will. It was stronger than ever

before and if the rain started to fall or the loneliness got too strong I

107 knew where to go. Right here, right here in my heart where no one

could ever understand. [Cotton 2002: 62]

While in Missoula, they looked for food. Alabama, once again was teaching him the fine art of dumpster diving and scavenging for food in the town. “Alabama dug fast- food containers out of a garbage can and I rustled through the restaurant patios looking for half finished plates or bread or anything” (Cotton 2002: 63).

While dodging a bull back in the train yard as they caught their next train out of Missoula, Eddy finds a book with no cover. He read the entire book and at the time he published Hobo: A Young Man’s Thoughts on Trains and Tramping he never knew the title of the book. It was Catcher in the Rye. This echoes to both Kerouac’s

(1988) and McCandless’s (Krakauer 1996) need for literature in their lives.

Loneliness can do a lot of things to you, and books and writing seem to be a survival need to combat loneliness.

Cotton meets acquaintances of Alabama’s at the Missoula train yard: Yukon

Sam, Tall Tim and Billy the Kid as well as Carny Chris and Bear. They hadn’t seen each other in years but they embraced as close friends would. Zebu was weary of this group, especially Billy the Kid who competed in street fights for money every weekend. “He drank his beer. He smiled. He didn’t give a damn about anybody or anything” (Cotton 2002: 71-72). Cotton talks about the outsider and that you can’t be much more of an outsider than a tramp but at times tramps were outsiders amongst themselves. This reveals the truth about liminality, even amongst outsiders you were always in truth a man apart from the whole community. Billy the Kid had a 108 pistol and a penchant for getting into confrontations with the bulls of the train yard and this caused trouble for all tramps.

The next morning the “four dirty outlaws” went into town to get drinks at the bar (Cotton 2002: 80). Once again in the little bar Eddy starts to think about his removal from his normal community and his place here with these tramps that he has befriended and sought guidance from. “I was on the great divide – between home and the road. It had been seven days since I left, one week that felt like three months – not in a bad way but in a way that makes you think” (Cotton 2002: 83).

Cotton is evaluating his progress in liminality; he talks about how meaningful his first week on the road and on rails has been. It makes you think he might be ready to turn around but within a moment you are sure he is committed to this path.

“Behind me was home and ahead of me was a fantastic railroad of opportunity. I had the golden ticket – gifted me by my friends, the tired and ancient knights of the

American railroad” (Cotton 2002: 83-84).

“The jungle tramp lives every moment as his last breath and looks for nothing more in life than a hotshot to haul his sorry ass out of town. Going home is not part of his journey” (Cotton 2002: 84). Cotton had learned a lot in a week and he felt that he and Alabama were akin to brothers now, brothers of the railroad.

Although he felt this attachment, this was Eddy’s final act of separation; he told

Alabama he was moving on. “He knew as well as I did that the fastest way to travel is alone” (Cotton 2002: 84). Alabama simply replies with, “That’s what a drifter does, he drifts” (Cotton 2002: 84). Tramps in liminality are always on a journey.

They all search for something, which is why they are always on the move and it is 109 also why they sometimes return to places they’ve already been. “I also decided that if a boy can’t find the beauty in every town he passes through, he should just stay home and eat pork rinds and get pork grease on the sofa” (Cotton 2002: 89). For

Eddy specifically, the search was in experience. He wanted to experience everything

America and beyond had to offer him. Experience for him came in the beauty of things seen, heard and interacted with but experience was also in learning and in gaining attributes necessary to claim his manhood.

When Cotton leaves on his own, he is almost removed from the train by a bull. His skills from Alabama about how to get around bulls paid off as he jumped from the train into some thorny bushes and then snuck back to the train as it picked up speed and he re-boarded in time to leave the bull by his truck shaking his head.

The efforts reminded him of his first night grabbing the train with Alabama in

Wyoming and it made him realize that he had left his guide behind on his way to anywhere. “I was alone and it felt good because I still had the breeze to keep me company and I was starting to think in a hobo drawl” (Cotton 2002: 91). The train was headed west from Montana into Idaho, as the ground began freezing he was definitely ready for warmer pastures.

He was heading towards Pocatello, Idaho’s biggest train yard. From Pocatello he planned to go back south into Green River, Wyoming, a hub for Union Pacific. He knew from there his destination could be anywhere. This idea of the unknown as a destination is both an excitement and a perilous moment for the tramp. As a stranger, any new place held its wonder and its danger. His postcard became an effigy of survival for him. When he was alone, the girl on its front kept him company. 110 When he was cold, the warmth of the Mexican sunshine warmed him, and when he was hungry, the thought of coconuts like the one Jack had given his father, Alabama, sustained him.

There she was, the candy-lip senorita in a red and white polka-dot

dress. She had coffee skin and black hair that fell into Caribbean blue

skies. She was fixing her hair and dancing around the base of a

coconut tree. I put her in my shirt pocket – beside my winter day

blues. I whistled a cold song and tapped my shoes. [Cotton 2002: 96]

The post card was what took him away from his guide, Alabama. Alabama never had a fixed destination and was going to stay in Missoula for a while. Cotton was ready to go south and meet the girl from the postcard. “I had to get on that train and open those boxcar doors and ride my pumpkin dream all the way to Mexico” (Cotton

2002: 106). That night in the shelter Eddy made a promise to himself. He kept

Alabama’s teachings in mind but he resolved to keep tramping until he found what he was looking for. “I had to keep walking – no matter what people do, who comes and who goes – you have to keep walking to Mexico or wherever your heart wants to go” (Cotton 2002: 107).

While Cotton is stopped in Blackfoot, Idaho, he meets another man who serves as a temporary guide. The man was planting flowers in his rock yard at about

2 am when Cotton was waiting to catch the train down to Green River. “It takes a lot to keep a man in one place. There’s only two things that will do it: Work and love. 111 You have to work to be strong and you have to be strong to love” (Cotton 2002:

117). The man tells Eddy about what love is really like and Recchia tells the man love is easy. This is telling to the man who now realizes how young Eddy really is.

When Cotton comes out of his liminal stage, the man believes he will know more about the truth of work, strength and love. The conversation reminds Cotton of his dad whom he left back home when he started this journey. The man tells him that if no one ever knows where he is he might be alone for his entire life (Cotton 2002:

119). He leaves the man on a grainer back towards Green River, Wyoming, a little bit wiser and more prepared for the days to come. “I knew that train would roll for at least four hours, and for those four hours no one in the whole world could touch me. No one knew where I was. There was no idea or notion that could mislead me”

(Cotton 2002: 120).

In Pocatello, where the train stopped to change crews, Eddy gets out and makes his first “pirate stew” (the name given to a collection of foods cooked in a can over firewood). At first he contemplates eating raw onion but then he sees corn and begins putting things together one by one to make his stew. He is able to collect firewood just in time to run back before the train makes its way out. He is surviving, using skills acquired on the road thus far, by making use of all the things he finds along the way. It is Green River that Cotton would get his most unlikely of assistance, in the form of help and guidance from the brakemen and engineers of the

Union Pacific.

“I think it’s because of the time they spend following the paths of pioneers.

They look like frontiersmen” (Cotton 2002: 126). Cotton describes the curious 112 Union Pacific men and is trying to figure out why instead of harassment they give him directions on how to catch trains to get him to Mexico. He decides that it is their dedication to “the spirit of the West” that makes them want to help a fellow traveller. They even helped a fellow tramp that was “bail-jumping”. “The Union

Pacific men got me on the next train for Ogden, Utah” (Cotton 2002: 128). It was on this train that Eddy would meet the fourteen year-old tramp Jefferson.

Jefferson has just started travelling, he has just entered into liminality and for him, his Mexico, is just simply the ocean or the memory of a trip in his youth to the ocean (Cotton 2002: 129). At first Eddy treats him like just a kid, however, he quickly sees bits of himself in Jefferson.

Jefferson ended up being more than a sidekick. He was a reflection

of myself. Traveling with him was a huge lesson in self-identity. He

wanted to ride. He didn’t care where he was going as long as he

could prove something to himself by getting there He is the pride of

all stories. A boy with frontier [Cotton 2002: 153].

Cotton’s analysis of Jefferson and himself through Jefferson shows what it is like being in liminality. It is a time of self-identification and about proving an ability to reach manhood to themselves and their community. “I needed to know I could build my own fires, ride my own trains, and focus my entire life on one Mexican dream”

(Cotton 2002: 154). He realizes that just like Alabama he needs to help this kid get his start as a tramp. “Well, you’re still a kid then, if you’ve never seen a palm tree, 113 then you’re still a kid” (Cotton 2002: 130). “Listening to him talk was like reading a children’s book. He was trying to understand a part of life that a man twice his age shouldn’t have to think about” (Cotton 2002: 134). Cotton is seeing someone who is trying to adjust to life in the liminal stage without any guidance. Jefferson seems lost and confused; he is trying to jump to adulthood.

Jefferson and Eddy remain together for a while and stop off in Evanston for food at one of the shelters there. Jefferson even teaches him a little bit in the importance of finding happiness everyday. Eddy is complaining about things, he is feeling lonely for a woman’s touch and for a hot meal. He sees Jefferson with a big smile on his face one morning and doesn’t understand what he could possibly be so happy about. “Well, everything’s alright, isn’t it, I mean why wouldn’t I be smiling?”

(Cotton 2002: 137). Jefferson says you never need a reason to smile, they are safe, they have a whole world to play in, and no one could stop them from living the life of their choosing. Cotton asks Jefferson where he’s really heading in life, where he actually wants to go. Jefferson says he is never going to stop moving he says he’s not sure where, “but I sure know where I’m not goin’. I’m not goin’ back where I came from. No way!” (Cotton 2002: 138). On the way the pair get in a fight over eating

Jefferson’s melon. Jefferson naively wants to wait until he gets to the beach to eat the fruit but Cotton knows by then the fruit will be bad. They almost come to fists when Jefferson jumps off the train deciding they can eat it outside under the sun.

The fooling around almost makes them lose the train but they get back on, Cotton losing his sleeping roll in the process. Jefferson decides to jump out again to grab the roll and seemingly misses the train back on. “I don’t want to admit it but I’m 114 going to – I got a tear in the corner of my eye. It sat there for a second, then rolled down my cheek and splashed onto my boot” (Cotton 2002: 147). Jefferson did catch the train and after that fight they became good travelling companions. However, in reality, tramps don’t tend to make friends, as they are very wrapped up in their own individual liminal passage. For the time being, Eddy was willing to take Jefferson under his wing. “Jefferson and me had both grown up too fast and fallen down too young, but luckily we found buddies, like each other, out there on the bum, who could show us how to get back up again” (Cotton 2002: 152).

Cotton describes the road and the rails as a place where a man can truly be alone (Cotton 2002: 155). This coincides with the idea that trains and the roads of

America can truly be determined as liminal space (Turner 1969: 55). He doesn’t identify it with spiritual solitude like found with monks or with prayer but he refers to it as a place “with wide-open sky and wide-open space” and that it is both comforting and scary and at times “you find yourself looking for a building or a light from someone’s house – anything to break up the night” (Cotton 2002: 154). He and

Jefferson grab the wrong train and are heading farther west instead of south, it seems that Eddy did this on purpose to help Jefferson get to the ocean he is dreaming of and when Jefferson is asleep he gives him some of his blankets and he jumps off the train in Winnemucca, Nevada. “It gave my life new opportunity. It was the beginning of a vicious love affair” (Cotton 2002: 153).

The love affair that Cotton speaks of will be twofold: he begins to see Nevada as his favorite tramping grounds, and he meets a woman whom he falls for while in

Las Vegas. In the second part of the book, he spends almost all of his time in Nevada. 115 Nevada also represents the place where Eddy began to feel a sense of identity resume into his life and thus was the beginnings of his reaggregation. “Some folks believe a man has to have a home, a career, and a debt to have an identity. I had found my identity the hard way” (Cotton 2002: 162).

He becomes very attached to Nevada from the beginning but doesn’t really want to admit it. “I love Nevada. I might say it a million times while I’m there, ‘I’m hankering to get out of this state.’ But I’d just be lying to myself. I can feel that state inside my bones. I can feel the neon enter my veins and the plastic sunset lift my spirits” (Cotton 2002: 165). At the bar of the Desert Oasis Casino he meets a bartender who at first wants nothing to do with him, sees just another freeloader off a train looking for a free meal or drink. However, as they talk and as he tells the bartender some of his stories and some of the advice he had written down that

Alabama gave him, the bartender became intrigued. He then became yet another encourager on his voyage to Mexico. “Before you can really enjoy anything, you have to learn to appreciate it, and if you get yourself into the right part of Mexico, you can have that vacation and you can get that respect and you won’t need much money to do it” (Cotton 2002: 173).

Love is a typical event that stops tramps from travelling or brings them to a

“hobo holiday”. For Cotton, love came to him at that bar as he drank the pina colada he got from the bartender. “Ten minutes later a lady with curly blond hair put her hand on the bar and split her fingers in two” (Cotton 2002: 173). Misty, as Eddy called her for the brand of cigarettes she bought, was an instant attraction for

Recchia who had been on the lonely road without a woman in his life for too long. 116 “I’ve learned to disguise my intentions with the opposite desires, simply because it’s safer that way. I might walk away from camp in a southernly direction, but that doesn’t mean I’m on my way south” (Cotton 2002: 175). Cotton is hesitant to get in the car with Misty and head to Reno; he is hesitant to trust people, especially people who aren’t tramps. The solitude of liminality often makes initiates view everything as a predator or as a dangerous trap. In the end, he decides to take her up on the trip to Reno. This part of his trip would be what brings him back and holds him fast into the rite of adulthood.

Reaggregation

When the initiate is deemed ready by guides, they reaggregate back into their community or possibly into a new community they need. Tramps, however, don’t have guides or don’t have stable guides with them through their entire journey. This makes reaggregation harder as the initiate doesn’t know how or when they will come back to the community. The idea of reaggregation isn’t on the mind of a person going through the rite of initiation.

Yukon Sam becomes Eddy’s first look at the idea of reaggregation. “I’m thinking about retiring my spurs” (Cotton 2002: 73) he tells Alabama. He talks about the other world and how he has only ever been in that world once or twice his whole life. He refers to this other world as a safer place where he’d like to live the rest of his life. Sam and Alabama argue about this point, Alabama saying it is even less safe in the “real world” than it is tramping while Sam details better access to food, shelter, women and the finer things in life (Cotton 2002: 73). Shortly after hearing Sam talk about this Cotton sees a white picket fence and a housewife doing 117 laundry. It made him homesick and it made him think about settling down and about having a wife. He became nostalgic for that other world that Sam talked about

(Cotton 2002: 74).

Although he was unaware, a desire to return to the world is seen through his reactions with Alabama, Bobby Blue and Levi Stout. It was danger, not nostalgia, that was pushing Cotton at this time. The danger of the two murderers that Alabama was making friends with, their Molotov Cocktail and the swelling Montana rivers ready to flood their little hobo jungle. “I sat there helpless for an hour and every minute after that hour, I had a different emotion and a different hope and a different sorrow” (Cotton 2002: 101). Eddy was giving up; he was headed towards the interstate and wanted nothing more than a shower and a woman. The meeting with the Mexican at the Salvation Army changed his mind and put him back on track.

In Reno, Cotton solidified his spiritual identity, he was a man for no church and his religion was America, the roads and trains that he travelled on.

America is a hooker with a purse full of dreams, a stiletto gate, and

somewhere hidden in her valleys of optimism is the belief that life

could be a little bit better. I’ve paid little Miss America too many

visits to be part of any church, my religion is the country – the greasy

spoons, the quarter panel from an old Mercury that kept me out of

the rain that one cat-and-dog night in the howling boneyard, the free

bar of rotten motel soap they gave me at the shelter, for now these

things are who I am. [Cotton 2002: 195] 118

It was shortly after their visit to the church in Reno that Cotton and Misty decide to get on the road together to Las Vegas for a night and then onwards to her home in

Los Angeles. It seems as though Misty will be the figure of reaggregation, the guide to bring Zebu out of liminality and firmly into adulthood. “If you really want to meet the people of the earth you have to take the slow roads” (Cotton 2002: 197).

Highway 95 was one of the slowest roads Eddy had experienced and he felt like he learned and experienced so much just on this short leg of his journey. His thoughts have changed; you can actually feel the maturity process happen as he crosses on his way to Las Vegas with Misty. Although he had come along way, he was still not completely ready for reaggregation but he was coming much closer.

“She coldcocked me. My knees buckled. I landed on the gravel. She sped away” (Cotton 2002: 203). Misty was getting more and more crazy the closer they got to Vegas and you could tell that their relationship wasn’t going to last many more miles. Cotton’s survivor streak kept him alive, having kept a five-dollar bill on him just in case. He gets a ride from two old guys in a convertible, bouncing around in the small back seat. The guys were very quiet and his mind turned back to

Mexico, with Misty out of his life his purpose was renewed although it was clear he had this intense love of Nevada. He felt that his “destiny was back in good hands”

(Cotton 2002: 207).

Death is one possibility for all neophytes in the realm of liminality. “Death is the chance you take every day, so you may as well have a side of adventure and shot of stupidity to go along with it, that was my thinking” (Cotton 2002: 207). Death in 119 itself is a rite of passage and when Chris McCandless (Krakauer 1996) entered liminality hoping to reach adulthood it was the rite of death that he reaggregated into. Liminality being a time of great peril and danger always leaves the option of death to those who can’t survive it. With the two old men, death was at Eddy Joe

Cotton’s door in the form of a high-speed chase from the police. The two had a bunch of drugs and paraphernalia on them and knew if they were caught they’d end up in jail. The cops let him go as a hitchhiker and arrested the two men, Cotton was able to find the bag they threw out of the car that contained an ounce of marijuana he could sell and fifty dollars rolled up (Cotton 2002: 209).

Once Eddy arrives in Vegas the feeling of being lost and unsure returns. He says and thinks many times, “What in the hell am I doing in Las Vegas” (Cotton

2002: 217). It was in Vegas that Cotton finally decides to call his father; it’s the middle of November only three weeks but quite a journey from when he left his dad after getting fired.

You’ve reached Eddy and Wild Bill. We’re both temporarily away from

home. If this is you, Eddy, there’s plenty to eat in the pantry. I brought

enough wood for a couple days and there’s ten bucks under the bed. If

you need me I’ll be out on the highway looking for you. It was the only

place I could think to look, I talked to some fella who swore he saw

you in Winnemucca. If you need a couple more weeks alone I

understand. Take care of yourself. I love you [Cotton 2002: 222]

120 Hearing his father’s voice shook him awake from his dream, he felt like he had to see his father right away. “After hearing my father’s voice I didn’t have the nerve to go on” (Cotton 2002: 223). He feels like maybe the destination in his travels truly didn’t matter, he thought about the words of Alabama and other tramps along the way and thought it really wasn’t about the place. “Maybe it’s not about getting there but what you learned along the way” (Cotton 2002: 223).

“Airports are the places where people are reunited. I pictured myself walking off the plane in Denver and seeing my father” (Cotton 2002: 235). He takes what money he has and buys a ticket back to Denver to reunite with his dad. He is nervous and excited and as he walks back to Denver he thinks about Denver always being a place for leaving. “I would go home when I was broke” (Cotton 2002: 236).

Cotton says this to himself as he reaches the boarding gate and then just as suddenly turns around and walks back out into the Las Vegas sun. He calls his father again from a pay phone, he lets him know he’s alright and that he’s heading for Mexico

(Cotton 2002: 236). This is where the story ends, he says he stays in Vegas and doesn’t go to Mexico. He sets up shop there, walking the strip often and begins writing this book. He leaves you unsure about how he does or does not enter into a community again.

Zebu Recchia’s book gives you the impression that Eddy Joe Cotton became stuck in the liminal stage. It is difficult to tell from the ending whether he just keeps tramping, if he stays in Nevada or returns home to his father in Denver, Colorado. I was able to interview Recchia to find out what exactly happened. Recchia did stay in

Nevada for a time while he wrote his story. While there he did finally make it down 121 to Mexico which he states was an amazing experience but that the journey was so much more meaningful to him.

He does make mention to his guide Alabama. It is unclear if Alabama was in his own rite of passage as well but Zebu mentions him and states that he was pretty sure he had died. He was most likely murdered by another tramp that had gotten into an argument with at a bar (Appendix 1). This shows again the dangers and perils of tramping.

He likens the journey to things like learning how to start a fire or swing a hammer (Appendix 1). He felt that it was so important for him to show himself that he could survive with no money and really no help that he could make it on his own.

After the book ends he does ride trains a few more times but he feels like the book ends when his life as a tramp ends (Appendix 1). He reclaims his identity as Zebu

Recchia after that as well and becomes the lead singer of a travelling jug band.

Travel was still in his heart but he had gone through reaggregation. It is possible that the moment of reaggregation came when he reunited with his father shortly after the end of the book.

122 CHAPTER SIX

THREE RITES OF PASSAGE, THREE LIMINALITIES

After analyzing these journeys it is clear that there are immediate parallels between the journey of a tramp and the liminal stage between boyhood and manhood. The three accounts analyzed give us a glimpse of what life as a tramp is all about. All three boys leave family, and in some cases everything they knew, to go on a journey across the country in search of themselves. The journey took them “there and back again” and when their journey was over they were most certainly changed.

There is a clear separation from their community and family. Separation is the time where ties are cut and the initiates are isolated from all they know. Jack

Kerouac was walking in the wrong direction in the rain and felt all alone realizing he’d have to go back towards New York City on his way across the country. Chris

McCandless would never speak to his family again when he drove off west in his little yellow Datsun, and Zebu Recchia just walked away from his father having been fired from his job and kept on walking. Each one of these men felt the incredible separation and later on each of their journeys would find a longing to reunite with the people they parted from.

They lost their identities, their rank and status, and their possessions on this journey. Jack Kerouac had trouble holding jobs, spent his money foolishly on booze and bus rides, and had that moment in the middle of the country where he looked in

123 the mirror and didn’t recognize himself. He used the name Sal Paradise to write his book On the Road (1988). Chris McCandless would bury anything he didn’t need to survive, abandon his car, and would change his name to Alexander “Supertramp”.

Finally, Zebu Recchia would become Eddy Joe Cotton; he’d share an experience with

Kerouac looking in the mirror and not knowing himself.

They each had a form of reaggregation; a moment where they returned to the community although for Chris McCandless that return was actually a completion of a different rite of passage. Chris died in Alaska, alone, afraid, and malnourished but he was returned to the community in the funerary ritual after his parents brought him back to Virginia. His reaggregation brought him not out of the liminal stage to adulthood but through the completion of the passing rite of death. For Jack Kerouac, he did finish his travels and chronicled them in his many books. He returned home to get married and spend a great deal of time taking care of his ailing mother. He became a pillar in his community and his life has left us with long lasting thoughts and aspirations for road travel. His new identity was as a leader of the Beat

Generation and an established author. He began a new family and also returned to his family and helped his ailing mother in her later years. Eddy Joe Cotton eventually gave up his train riding and returned to his community. He reunited with his father and did finally complete his journey to Mexico. He now travels around the western

United States singing in a travelling band. His new identity was one of a man who knew he could survive on his own travelling and singing and could make a living on his own without his father’s help. Just as important he was able to reconnect with his father and reestablish a familial connection there. 124 The liminal stage was the main focus of this work and it shows that tramps go through many similar rituals as other cultures do when it comes to traversing liminality. They have to face incredible dangers. Jack Kerouac rode in cars with drunk drivers, drank excessively, did drugs, and got in cars with criminals. Chris

McCandless almost died numerous times from exposure, from kayaking in the ocean, from not being prepared as far as food needs and protection from the elements and he did finally die from not eating edible berries, not eating enough and exposure. Eddy Joe Cotton found danger in the tramps he sometimes associated with, in interactions with law enforcement, and in the very act of riding rails itself.

Being a tramp in its very nature is a life of danger. Whether you choose to hitchhike, ride trains or go by foot there are initially a great deal of peril to be found.

Riding trains is a very dangerous activity, just getting on can kill a person. If you misjudge how fast the train is going you could be pulled under or thrown over the train. Hitchhiking is also perilous only that you have to trust a person you’ve never met before. A hitchhiker has no idea who the person is that they get in a car with and what their intent may be. Eddy Joe Cotton gets into a car with two criminals, as does Jack Kerouac on their travels. Both were lucky to escape with their lives and were lucky to escape without being implicated with the criminals. Just going by foot, which Chris McCandless does often, is dangerous because you are out in the elements, facing exposure to the climate and being isolated from sustenance.

This danger highlights one of the large differences between tramping as a rite of passage compared to other more traditional methods of initiation. This highlight is on the lack of community involvement and guidance. Tramping in itself is an act of 125 outcasting yourself from your society; tramps are outsiders, “edgemen, who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status”

(Krakauer 1996: 129). They are men on their own “engineering their own transitions” (Raphael 1988: xiii). In their travels they all have brief encounters with guides for Kerouac who meets Old Bull Lee, his many talks with Carlo Marx and even in some ways his friendship with Neal Cassady; for McCandless, who meets Wayne

Westerberg, Jan Burres, and Ron Franz, all providing much needed, albeit mostly ignored advice; and finally, for Eddy Joe Cotton, who learns the rails from veterans like Alabama, Yukon Sam, and others and also gives advice to Jefferson. On the road and on the rails every person you meet becomes a potential teacher and guide.

However, there are long bouts of isolation where a tramp only has his own wits and common sense to get through any situations. With all the danger the question becomes not whether tramping is a rite of passage into adulthood for boys but, is it an effective one?

Tramping becomes a tool for those who aren’t looking to survive within society and want to return to a world in which they survive on the road or in the wild. Wanderlust was the ignition to get these three men to change from adolescents to men. “I wouldn’t deny anyone these luxuries but if you really want to have a good time you’ve got to spill a little wine, sleep in the dirt…” (Cotton 2002: 64). This makes men go on “a male quest for adventure that tends to lose its “civilized trappings” (Cross 2008: 5). The quest may have been to lose those civilized trappings but the end result was manhood. Even for McCandless who didn’t survive

126 his rite of passage there were telling parts in the end where you can see that he was achieving, or at least beginning to achieve, adulthood.

Tramping seems to be, or has been, a beneficial way for boys to find their way into manhood. In a world where the path to adulthood has become very ambiguous, with a multitude of possible pathways, boys have become quite unsure as to what makes a man. This stress, caused by the ambiguity, also instigates boys into entering the world of the tramp. “When stress becomes too great, more than the teenager can manage, the teenager’s major aim becomes escape” (Elkind 1984:

184). Escape is the first thought on a tramp’s mind and whether it be the road or the rails there is plenty of outlet for this need. Instead of being judged by any of the hard to define rites (such as being able to drive, drink, vote or join the military) these young men that take to the road go back to a more primal version of survival closer aligned to those you see in smaller less modernized civilizations.

Another byproduct of tramping as a liminal stage between boyhood and manhood is an extension of that time moving into adulthood. Where some of the other rites mentioned (i.e., getting a driver’s license) are quick processes with little to no ceremony, the act of tramping could take as long as a person might need: days, months, or possibly years. “Extending youth, its freedoms, and its delay of life defining choices can be an opportunity, a beneficial byproduct of modern affluence”

(Cross 2008: 18). However, the downside to this as stated previously is the potential to become “stuck” in liminality. When this happens the initiate becomes more and more removed from society and it becomes harder and even less likely for reaggregation to happen. Picture Chris McCandless alone and deep within the 127 wilderness of Alaska. When he passed away, he was almost as far from society as a person could be. “There are simply no alternatives, for there is no place in society for the uninitiated male. There exists no such creatures” (Raphael 1982: 14). The life cycle must eventually continue and staying permanently in liminality is not an option for people with a finite amount of time.

“The liminal state is always temporary – a transition through which an old identity is transformed into a new identity” (Renfro-Sergeant 2002: 91). Tramping ends up being harsh, but educational; isolated, but community building; wild, yet time constrained; way of traversing the liminal stage between boyhood and manhood. It takes many of the characteristics of American culture: mobility, independence, and self-assurance, which is why it is more popular in our country than others around the world. It is efficient, but would be more efficient with guidance and although efficient will still have some initiates not make it back to society. Tramps do die from time to time, like Chris McCandless did, just as they do in rites of passage around the world but the death rate isn’t a remarkable statistic that shows that tramping is an ideal method for becoming a man in America.

I think further research could focus on the modernization of tramping.

Today, there are not as many “pure” tramps as mentioned in several works

(Conover 1984: 12). However, the young male population of today do go on cross- country biking trips and backpacking trips around the world. Mobility as a baseline for tramping could be looked at as a modern study of how the youth of America today use travel as a method to self-creating pathways to manhood. My hope is that this study paves the way for a future study in that direction. The historical data on 128 tramping is very miniscule so further looks into the culture of tramping and backpacking today would definitively show tramping and travel as an ideal method for initiation into manhood.

129 APPENDIX 1

INTERVIEW WITH ZEBU RECCHIA

ANTHONY: Hi is this Zebu Recchia?

ZEBU: Yes.

ANTHONY: Hi this is Anthony how are you?

ZEBU: Good.

ANTHONY: I just want to thank you so much for doing this, I really appreciate it.

ZEBU: I get asked to do something like this often, but this is my first time having the time.

ANTHONY: Oh really? That’s awesome. I definitely appreciate it. Do you mind if I record this to make it easier to get notes?

ZEBU: Sure.

ANTHONY: I wanted to make this not too lengthy for you so, I only came up with about ten questions. They are mostly pertaining to after the book ends but some of them are more towards the beginning. So I’ll just start, I’ll just jump in. One of the things I really wanted to know was before you left Colorado, when you left work with your dad. Did you ever think about travelling in this manner on the road?

ZEBU: Oh that’s a good question. No I never really talked about travelling on trains. I don’t think it was really on my radar. I’m trying to think of what connection I had

130 with train riders. There was a little bit in the book about going to pool halls with my dad and there were people like that there. I don’t know if I really made a connection with train riding before that. I did pick up some books like that, I remember reading

Dharma Bums. But I don’t remember if there was train riding in that. And before my book, that was the only book by Jack Kerouac that I read. So I think there was a little influence there and then people I met with my Dad. Kind of the pool hall, I don’t know, my Dad was a traveller too though.

ANTHONY: I was going to say, you mention in the book that your Dad and Mom were both travellers. I was wondering if that had any effect.

ZEBU: Yea that definitely was an effect for sure having parents like that would help you travel like that. You know the rules were just different. As far as how you’re supposed to live, both my parents didn’t have a big thing about security, tying to create financial security, house and home. They both had it but it wasn’t a priority for them. Because of how they were they were both in search of their own freedoms.

They were both kind of free spirits somewhat in different ways. They were trying to break free from that. So I didn’t have a lot of fear around it.

ANTHONY: Okay, another question I had was the motivation, I know in the book you speak a lot about this postcard with Mexico, this dream of going to Mexico. Were there any other big motivating factors that got you going or helped when you got in a rut? Anything like that?

ZEBU: It seemed like to me every time I started to think about getting off the road because it was too hard or too lonely, because its not easy, it’s a really hard way to go between all the adventure there is a lot of downtime there just being out in the 131 elements and the exposure was really difficult. Plus I was really young but as far as motivating every time I thought about getting off the road I was about to get off the road and something would happen something serendipitous I would meet someone who would keep me going or I’d find some work. If I was starting to run out of money, or I never really had much money but then I would find some work. I’d meet another train rider who would be a good companion if I was getting lonely and they’d inspire me to keep going. A lot of that was just fate. Because it wasn’t easy for me but I’d meet the right people or the right circumstances that kind of kept me going.

ANTHONY: You just talked about the solitude and then the financial issues… what do you think was the hardest part about this journey?

ZEBU: Oh. If I had to narrow it down to one thing? I’d say it was the loneliness between you know the book is part of it but when I was writing there were a lot of times where I was alone or nothing was happening so I didn’t write about those times (laughs) So I would say that, the kind of monotony of it, being alone and not knowing people or not having that sense of community or that ability to call up a friend and just connect. For one there weren’t really cell phones at that time. Which is funny just to say that… (laughs) But it wasn’t a common thing. But now some train riders have cell phones.

ANTHONY: Oh that’s interesting, I never thought about that. I guess I just thought that even nowadays they wouldn’t have them even though they are available. But I guess it makes sense that they have the access to them.

132 ZEBU: Yea some people do, I think a lot of the older ones probably don’t. Some of the younger ones do but it’s an option now that they didn’t have before. And you’re going to new towns and you have to meet new people just to have a connection.

That was definitely the hardest part those times where I didn’t have that, but it also inspired me that deep loneliness inspired me to go to these towns and just talk to people. Just engage because I needed that connection.

ANTHONY: When the book ends you’re in Nevada and you get this feeling that you have this connection to Nevada and you get this idea that you’ll be staying there for a while. When the book ends, is that the last time that you ride rails or no?

ZEBU: Oh no, I rode after that quite a few times. Yea. I don’t know what the reason for a lot of reasons. Nevada was where I was writing. Vegas was where I was putting the book together for my agent and things were happening there. But after it was done I still rode quite a bit. Not a lot, but here and there.

ANTHONY: Oh okay, did you ever make it to Mexico?

ZEBU: I did yea, for sure.

ANTHONY: Oh okay, was that a big moment in your life when you got there?

ZEBU: I don’t know. I think we set those things up just to keep us going. Mexico was an amazing experience, it was beautiful, and it was a whole other experience. So it didn’t let me down it was of course, it was the journey was what it was all about. I needed that though to keep me going.

ANTHONY: Sure, sure.

ZEBU: Everybody has something like that in their life. Otherwise they are not inspired. I don’t know but its’ good to have that. 133 ANTHONY: That makes sense. In the book, quite often, you spoke a lot about proving things to yourself and you wanted to know that you could do these things. And a theme of my thesis is the passage from adolescence to adulthood? So do you feel that your journey was like that a journey into adulthood?

ZEBU: Absolutely it was major, major rite of passage. It was like learning how to build a fire, build a good fire, or to swing a hammer. For me it was a big rite of passage for me at the time to learn how to survive that way. Also one of the most liberating things was not having any money at the time and I just had to figure it out.

Okay I got to figure this out. How am I going to survive here? Am I going to go to a shelter to get food, that was like a last resort, in the states I could go to a homeless shelter but usually before that I would find some work, I’d meet someone, I’d offer my services or I’d figure it out. Just knowing how to do that when I had nothing was probably the biggest lesson in all that because it removed that fear from my life, thinking it was going to work out. So as far as a rite of passage I feel like it would be a really good rite of passage for most Americans. People are really wrapped up in creating security but if you take it all to the bottom-line and don’t have anything and you still make it, it builds confidence.

ANTHONY: After this journey ended you called your Dad and you went to the airport and you were thinking about going home. When was the next time you saw your father?

ZEBU: Oh gosh, I don’t think it was too long after that honestly. It was so long ago, I think it was actually I ended up making my way home before going south again. In

134 the book I left it wide open, my editor wanted me to go home but that’s not how it happened. I could have fudged it, but in the story I wanted to leave it wide open.

ANTHONY: I think for me that was an exciting part because to me it seems like tramping in itself is so unpredictable, so by leaving it you end up unsure of what is going to happen and that is possible.

ZEBU: My editor, being an editor in NY wanted closure, which I understand also but

I just wanted to leave it open that is more the nature of that type of existence.

ANTHONY: In the beginning Alabama took you under his wing and later on you took

Jefferson under your wing. Did you feel that tramping was a community?

ZEBU: It was a loose community; the reason was because everyone was so transient.

So you’d run into people at, you’d run into the same people sometimes but because it was such a big country, and half the riders, most people on trains don’t really know where they want to go, they have some idea but it does change a lot and a lot of train riders a re really into their drink and alcohol. For those types of guys to have enough, they aren’t organized that way. I’d call it a brotherhood of sorts, it’s a community too but its not like they commune intentionally a lot. They do have those hobo gatherings; maybe you’ve heard about those, those are definitely organized.

But they tend to be retired train riders or people that are really into the nostalgia of it, and there are those guys that ride too but that’s the minority. So they gather that way a lot but it’s not intentional. The guys that ride a lot end up in the same yard and maybe there is somebody you’ve been riding trains with before but you never know its transient.

135 ANTHONY: Sure, sure. So did you ever see either Alabama or Jefferson again after those the instances you wrote about?

ZEBU: No, no never saw them again. Alabama, the last I heard about him he had gotten stabbed and killed and I’m pretty sure that’s probably what happened. I heard it from another person I had known him another train rider traveller guy. He was supposedly staying on some land in NM, squatters land, one of those mesas a couple of them where people just live really off the grid like the wild west for squatters. They are all squatting there and he would stay there sometimes and he’d stay there and he got in a squabble with someone and he got killed which I wouldn’t doubt because he had a big mouth and got into a lot of trouble. It was another part of his character that didn’t come out in the book. Had to choose which stories to tell

ANTHONY: I think you do a good job of showing that there are some dangers but you don’t get too deep into them because you kind of showed the perils of the two

I’m trying to think of their names. Well the two hobos that had the Molotov cocktail and they were talking about how they had killed someone.

ZEBU: Yea they drowned someone in the river. I didn’t run into that a lot but there was more of it than I put in the book that’s for sure. I tended to stay away from guys like that really, after meeting a couple guys like that. When I saw that I just went away I’d walk away and find somewhere else to be. I wouldn’t camp by them and eventually I’d disappear. (laughs) That’s where you get into trouble when you think guys like that are your friends.

136 ANTHONY: With those kinds of dangers in mind, what do you think is some good advice to give? If you were to meet someone who is interested in either hitchhiking or riding rails, what do you think is the best advice to give to them?

ZEBU: I think I put it in the book at some point there as far as riding trains is to be patient, and not get on trains that are moving if you can. And not to drink. Same with hitchhiking to be patient, there is a lot of slow downtime in between. And to talk to people… more importantly to talk to people. When you are out and about go talk to someone meet people because that is where you are going to get the best experiences the people you ride trains with or the people you meet in town and the things you can learn from them. Because that is why I was doing it, I was definitely trying to get away from my hometown and my stuff with my dad but also I was trying to learn. That’s really the best thing, to meet people and learn about life and ask questions. The best thing is to learn from the people doing it.

ANTHONY: Yea that makes sense; I guess it was just fortuitous that you met

Alabama’s son and Alabama right when you were…. I don’t know if you might have skipped some things in the beginning of the book but it seems like you met a really good teacher in the beginning.

ZEBU: Yea, it did take longer than that in the book but it was, he was a good teacher in a lot of ways as far as learning the basics of riding trains and he was good teacher in that way. I definitely got lucky but, if someone is really working at it and really wants to have that experience they can and if they have the where with all to do it… but it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous if you’re not present, if you’re not aware, if you’re

137 not aware or in your body and aware of your surroundings that’s when you get in trouble when you aren’t aware of where you are and who your with.

ANTHONY: Just one last question just popped in my mind, was there any lesson that you kind of had to learn the hard way?

ZEBU: Riding trains? Yea I’ve learned plenty of lessons the hard way… let’s see… I think it was just the basics jumping off a train that was moving a little too fast and it’s hard to see its hard to gauge how fast their moving and they pick up speed pretty fast. Stuff like that, I jumped off a train once and my feet hit the pavement and my body nearly just slammed on the ground because of the momentum I had, I hurt my shoulder and I hit my head pretty good. I didn’t get knocked out. I was always really cautious but I kind of was in a clinch because one of my buddies missed the train and didn’t want to leave him there and once the train goes you’re not going to see that person (laughs) So I was in a little pinch and so I took a risk that was the closest

I had gotten to getting real hurt. It was in that critical situation when you have to make a quick decision is its always best in those situations to just err on the side of being safe… even if it means leaving a buddy behind. There are a lot of good ones but that was the first one to come to mind.

ANTHONY: Yea, that’s a good one. I think that’s one of the biggest dangers, just getting on and getting off and knowing when you should and when you shouldn’t/

That’s something that is echoed in other accounts, other stories from other tramps they say all the time that that’s the biggest thing.

ZEBU: Yea, for sure someone gets anxious to jump off and it’s going too fast or they get on too fast and get sucked under the train. That’s why in the book I say a 138 stopped train is a safe train. That’s with stories I heard a lot of them people getting on a train too fast they were too drunk fell off a train. That’s a big one too, stay sober… they don’t mix well. A lot of the guys I met who lost an arm or a leg or something a lot of time when the story gets deeper, they were drunk.

ANTHONY: That was the last question that I had, that was really great. I was definitely appreciative that you answered these and it gives me a lot to think about for my thesis.

ZEBU: Well I’m glad I can help.

ANTHONY: Yea thanks; I hope you have a great night.

ZEBU: All right you take care.

ANTHONY: Bye.

END INTERVIEW

139 APPENDIX 2: CHRONOLOGIES

JACK KEROUAC

March 12 1922: Jack Kerouac is born.

1940-1941: Kerouac attends Columbia on a football scholarship.

1942-1943: Kerouac enlists in the Merchant Marine and is later discharged from the

navy.

1944: Meets Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs for the first time.

July 1947: Shortly after meeting Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) Jack leaves for

Denver on the first part of his journey.

August 1947: Kerouac arrives in San Francisco and stays there for a short time.

September 1947: Kerouac leaves Sand Francisco for Los Angeles where he meets

Terry the “Mexican Girl”. He stays with her for two weeks before returning to

New York City.

December 1948: Cassady arrives at Jack’s brother’s home in Rocky Mount, North

Carolina and they begin the second part of his journey.

January 1948: Kerouac and Cassady leave New York City to Will Burrough’s home in

New Orleans.

February 1948: Kerouac and Cassady arrive in San Francisco.

April 1948: Kerouac returns to New York City.

Spring 1949: Kerouac moves to Denver.

140 May 1949: Kerouac visits Cassady in San Francisco. A few days later they begin a

drive back across towards New York City.

1950: Kerouac leaves New York City to visit friends in Denver on his way to Mexico.

May 1950: Cassady arrives in Denver to accompany Kerouac on his trip to Mexico.

1951: Arrives back in New York City and finished writing On the Road.

CHRIS MCCANDLESS

February 12 1968: Chris Johnson McCandless was born.

June 1986: After graduating from high school McCandless went on a trip to the west

coast going to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and finally California. In California

he learns of his father’s first marriage and children.

July 1990: After graduating from Emory Chris leaves Atlanta without telling any

family or friends and heads to Lake Mead, Nevada.

July 6 1990: Chris arrives at Lake Mead and sets up a camp. He hikes around the lake

and drives in the Detrital Wash area. He abandons his car there and buries

most of his possessions including his license plates.

August 10 1990: McCandless is given a ticket by the police in Willow Creek,

California. Shortly after he meets the Burres family for the first time.

September 10 1990: McCandless gets a ride from Wayne Westerberg who he will

later work with in Carthage, South Dakota.

October 28 1990: Chris arrives in Needles, California, on the border of Arizona. He

begins paddling south on the Colorado River.

November 1990: Chris camps on the Colorado River outside Yuma, Arizona. 141 December 2 1990: Chris crosses the Mexican border.

January 18 1991: McCandless is caught by border patrol crossing back into the

United States. He is held for one night for the offense.

February 3 1991: Chris attempts to find work in Los Angeles.

February 24 1991: Returns to Lake Mead and digs up some of his buried

possessions.

February 27 1991: Chris works for three months in Las Vegas.

May-August 1991: Chris tramps up and down the Pacific coast spending a great deal

of time in Oregon.

October 1991: McCandless gets a job at a McDonalds in Bullhead City, Arizona. He

lived in a trailer park with a man named Charlie.

December 13 1991: Chris reunited with Jan and Bob Burres in “The Slabs” outside

Niland, California.

January 1992: Chris meets Ron Franz while camping in Anza-Borrego Desert State

Park near Salton City, California. He stays with Franz for a short time.

February 1992: Chris looks for work in San Diego, California.

March 5 1992: Chris sends postcards to the Burres’s, Ron Franz and Wayne

Westerberg from Seattle where he was again looking for work. A week later

he shows up near Salton City, in Coachella, California and stays with Franz

again for a few days.

March 11 1992: Franz drives McCandless as far as Grand Junction, Colorado on his

way to work with Westerberg.

March 25 1992: Chris works with Westerberg in Carthage, South Dakota. 142 April 15 1992: Chris leaves Carthage on his way to Fairbanks, Alaska.

April 18 1992: Chris sends postcards from Whitefish, Montana.

April 21 1992: Chris spends a day in Liard River Hot Springs in the Yukon Territory.

April 27 1992: Chris sends his last postcards from Fairbanks, Alaska.

April 28 1992: Jim Gallien gives McCandless a ride to The Stampede Trail on the

northern side of Mount McKinley.

July 3 1992: McCandless attemps to leave his camp site at the bus on The Stampede

Trail but the Teklanika River is impassable from the area he came in from.

August 5 1992: Chris has been in the wild of Alaska for 100 days.

August 18 1992: This is, most likely, the day that Chris McCandless died.

EDDY JOE COTTON

October 24 1991: Zebu Recchia gets fired from his job by his father and begins

hitchhiking north from his job in Denver. He gets a ride from a truck driver

into northern Wyoming. This is where he meets Alabama and his son and

where he adopts the name Eddy Joe Cotton.

October 25 1991: Cotton takes his first train into Greybull, Wyoming.

October 29, 1991: Alabama and Eddy take a train through the Rocky Mountain pass

into Missoula, Montana.

October 31 1991: Eddy parts ways with Alabama and his friends and heads into

Idaho, stopping in Idaho Falls.

November 1 1991: Cotton arrives in Blackfoot, Idaho.

November 2 1991: Cotton arrives in Evanston, Wyoming. 143 November 7 1991: Eddy takes a train into Ogden, Utah towards Nevada.

November 9 1991: Eddy arrives in Winnemucca, Nevada. He likes Nevada and

thinks about staying there for a while.

November 12 1991: Cotton meets Misty in Reno, Nevada. They make plans to head

to Las Vegas.

November 14 1991: Misty and Eddy arrive in Las Vegas. Shortly after, they part

ways.

November 16 1991: Cotton walks into the Las Vegas airport and contemplates

returning home. He calls his father and at the last moment decides to remain

in Las Vegas. Cotton begins writing his story from notes he had taken along

the way.

January 1992: Cotton is reunited with his father. He will later form a travelling jug

band and travel the west coast playing live music events.

144 APPENDIX 3: MAPS

JACK KEROUAC

145 CHRIS MCCANDLESS

146 EDDY JOE COTTON

147 COMBINATION

148 REFERENCES CITED

Alexander, Bobby Chris

1991. Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change. Atlanta: Scholars

Press.

Amram, David

2008. Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Armstrong, Jeanne

2000. Demythologizing the Romance of Conquest. Westport, CT: Greenwood

Press.

Barker, Gary T.

2005. Dying to be Men: Youth, Masculinity, and Social Exclusion. New York

City: Routledge.

Belmont, Nicole

1974. Arnold Van Gennep: The Creator of French Ethnology. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Broadhurst, Susan

1999. Liminal Acts: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance and

Theory. New York City: Cassel Publishing.

149 Cassady, Carolyn

1990. Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. London:

Black Spring Press.

Christopher, Nancy Geer

1996. Service as a Rite of Passage. In Crossroads: The Quest for

Contemporary Rites of Passage. Loue Carus Mahd, ed. Chicago: Open Court.

(111-136).

Clark, Tom

1990. Jack Kerouac: A Biography. New York City: Paragon House.

Clatterbaugh, Kenneth

1990. Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity: Men, Women and Politics

in Modern Society. Boulder: Westview Press.

Climo, Jacob

1999. A Memory of Intimacy in Liminal Space. In Sex, Sexuality, and the

Anthropologist. Fran Markowitz and Michael Ashkenazi, eds. Chicago:

University of Illinois Press. (43-56)

Conover, Ted

1984. Rolling Nowhere. New York City. Viking Press.

2010. The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the

Way we Live Today. NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

Cook, Bruce

1971. The Beat Generation. New York City: Charles Scribber’s Sons.

150 Cotton, Eddy Joe

2002. Hobo: A Young Man’s Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in The

United States. New York: Harmony Books.

Cross, Gary

2008. Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity. New York City:

Columbia University Press.

Eighner, Lars

1993. Travels with Lizbeth. New York: Library of Congress Cataloguing.

Elkind, David

1984. All Grown up and no Place to Go: Teenagers in Crisis. Reading, MA:

Addison-Wesley Publications.

Foster, Lawrence

2002. Between Two Worlds: Community, Liminality, and the Development of

Alternative Marriage Systems. In Intentional Community. p. 67-82. New York

City: State University of New York Press.

Frankel, Robert

2007. Observing The United States. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

Fried, Martha Nemes and Morton H.

1980. Transitions: Four Rituals in Eight Cultures. New York: W.W Norton and

Co.

Grimes, Ronald L.

1995. Marrying and Burying: Rites of Passage in Life. Boulder: Westview

Press. 151 Grof, Christina

1996. Rites of Passage: A Necessary Step Toward Wholeness. In Crossroads:

The Quest for Contemporary Rites of Passage. Loue Carus Mahd, ed. Chicago:

Open Court. (3-15).

Harper, Douglas

2006. Good Company: A Tramp Life. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Hersch, Patricia

1999. A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American

Adolescence. NYC: The Ballantine Publishing Group.

Howitt, Alfred William

1904. The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. London: Macmillan Press.

Kelt, Joseph F.

1977. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in The United States 1790 to Present.

New York City: Basic Books, Inc. Publishers.

Kerouac, Jack

1988. Road Novels 1957-1960. New York: The Library of The United States.

2008. Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha. New York: Viking.

Kerouac-Parker, Edie

2007. You’ll be Okay: My Life with Jack Kerouac. San Francisco: City

Lights.

Krakauer, John

1996. Into the Wild. New York: Anchor Books.

152 Kusmer, Kenneth L.

2002. Down + Out, on the Road: Homelessness in American History.

Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

L’Amour, Louis

1988. The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels.

New York: Bantam Books

Large, Judith

1997. Disintegration Conflicts and the Restructuring of Masculinity.

Gender and Development. (5, 2) Oxfam: Taylor & Francis Ltd. (23-30).

Leeflang, Gerard

1984. American Travels of a Dutch Hobo: 1923-1926. Iowa: Iowa State

University Press.

Lelyveld, Joseph

1969. Jack Kerouac, Novelist, Dead; Father of the Beat Generation. The New

York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/07/home/kerouac-

obit.html. Accessed March, 2013.

Meade, Michael

1996. Rites of Passage at the End of the Millennium. In Crossroads:

The Quest for Contemporary Rites of Passage. Loue Carus Mahd, ed.

Chicago: Open Court. (15-34).

Moon, Gypsy

1996. Done & Been: Steel Rail Chronicles of American Hobos.

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 153 Myerhoff, Barbara

1982. Rites of Passage and Paradox. In Celebrations: Studies in Festivity and

Ritual. Victor Turner, ed. Washington DC: Smithsonian Press. (109-135).

Raphael, Ray

1988. The Men From the Boys: Rites of Passage in Make The United States.

Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.

Reich, Robert B.

1987. Tales of a New The United States. New York: Times Books.

Renfro-Sargent, Matthew

2002. The Borderlands of Community: Refugee Camps, Intentional

Communities, and Liminality. In Intentional Communities. Susan Love Brown,

ed. 83-105. New York City: State University of New York Press.

Staller, Karen M.

2006. Runaways: How the Sixties Counter Culture Shaped Today’s Practices

and Policies. New York City: Columbia University Press.

Theado, Matt

2000. Understanding Jack Kerouac. Columbia: University of South Carolina

Press.

154 Turner, Victor

1967. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago, IL: Aldine

Publishing Company.

1970. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

1975. Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University

Press.

1977. Symbols in African Ritual. In Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the

Study of Symbols and Meanings. Janet L. Dolgin, David S. Kemnitzer, and

David M. Schneider, eds. New York City: Columbia University Press. (183-

194).

1979. Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality. Japanese

Journal of Religious Studies. (6, 4): 465-499.

Turner, Victor and Edith

1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia

University Press.

Van Gennep, Arnold

1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Waters, Mary C., Patrick J. Carr, Maria J. Keflas and Jennifer Holdaway

2011. Coming of Age in The United States: The Transition to Adulthood in the

21st Century. Berkley: University of California Press.

155