Jack Kerouac's Pile of Shit, or St Jack in the Wilderness

Sixty-three days after his solitary stay on Desolation Peak, Jack Kerouac came down the mountain leaving behind him a “column of feces about the height and size of a baby.”  Though Kerouac may not be everyman – at times he’s jubilant, at times morose, verbose, braggardly, brilliant, invariably drunk, incessantly dissecting, sullen, always writing, experimenting, vagabonding, observing minutely, oedipally strange, holy, obnoxious, and not infrequently full of shit – nonetheless, Jack’s ordinary failure in the wilderness is perhaps a more honest reckoning on the meaning of wilderness for us everyfolk than all the successful accounts written by the hard men of the great American Wilderness tradition.

In the summer of 1956, at the suggestion of beat-poet and Zen Buddhist Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac worked as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in Washington State’s North Cascades.  It’s a story he tells inDesolation Angels, a “chapter” of The Duluoz Legend, his sequence of thinly veiled autobiographical novels.  Jack went to the mountain with big ambitions.  Coming out of the wilderness a couple of months later he left behind that great mound of shit, and the carcass of a murdered mouse, Kerouac’s first kill (“it looked at me with ‘human’ fearful eyes”[1]).  But what had Kerouac taken away with him; taken down from the solitude to the cites and to his now famously garrulous writer friends?  That is, what was the value of Jack’s time in the wilderness, to him or to us? 

Read on at 3quarksdaily