I Am A Dharma Bum

It was winter of my senior year at UCSD, and my life was taking form. The problem? The form was much too formal-it wasn’t the life of the cavalier poet that I’d imagined. It was a life of responsibility to “the machine,” to “the man,” to a profession, to everything that, in my deadhead mind, was going to send me “down the road feeling bad…bad…bad.” Enter Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. A life not on the typical American road to the west, but a life on the road to a wilderness that I had thought was lost when the golden spike forever welded the coasts together in the 19th century. More than just living vicariously through the characters, I wanted to live the characters’ lives of backpacks and wine and adventures. So, I gave a couple of buddies a copy of the book, and we decided to track Kerouac’s ghosts up and over the eastern Sierras to the Matterhorn peak.