TRAVEL: BEAT A PATH TO KE; ROUAC COUNTRY

In 1956 Jack Kerouac lived for 63 days in isolation, working as a fire-watcher, and seeking God on Desolation Peak. Forty years later John Suiter spent two weeks in his hero's now famous lookout

Forty years ago, Jack Kerouac came to Desolation Peak hoping to find God. Today, 27 years after his death, people are hiking Desolation in increasing numbers, hoping to find some trace of Jack - or at least a glimpse of the vision of freedom he proclaimed in books such as The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, both set here amid the spectacular North Cascades mountains of Washington State. Those willing and able to climb the steep four-and-a-half mile Desolation Trail to the top are not disappointed. From the rugged 6,000-foot summit, Kerouac's cabin from The Dharma Bums still beckons, only slightly worse for wear after 40 howling, north-west winters. From it, thanks to federal environmental protections, one can turn slowly in a circle and see the same unbroken "three-sixty" Kerouac saw in 1956 - pristine glaciers and blue mountains flowing to the horizons in every direction.

Last year I made arrangements with the National Park Service, which now oversees the vast wilderness around Desolation Peak, to spend two solitary weeks in Kerouac's old lookout at the beginning of the fire season, taking photographs and keeping an eye peeled for forest blazes until the regular fire watcher arrived in mid-July. Two hours north-east of Seattle, at the Marblemount ranger station where Kerouac went to "fire school" for two weeks in '56 (sipping wine and writing haiku on the banks of the Skagit River during his breaks), I was given an afternoon's instruction in the use of weather instruments, then taken the next morning by track, trail and finally speedboat, 45 miles to the Desolation trailhead on Ross Lake.

From there I hiked for three-and-a-half hours up through the dense forest, into open meadows of alpine wild flowers, and finally across snow and scree until I sighted the lookout through the parting fog of the last half mile. Perched on the bald, rounded summit, with its peaked roof and propped-out shutters, the cabin looked, at that distance, exactly as Kerouac had described it in The Dharma Bums - a charming mountain pagoda in a misty Chinese silk painting.

Closer up, it seems little more than a flimsy box of cedar and glass that a stiff wind might whisk right off the mountain, but on further inspection it is clear the lookout was built to last, and it has. Constructed in 1932, the cabin's pyramid roof and heavy storm shutters have kept out the rain, wind and snows of 64 winters, and it is well protected against summer lightning strikes, with grounding cables running down from the four corners of the roof and disappearing into the adjacent rocks and heather.

Inside, the look-out is basically the same as it was when Kerouac was here. It is 14ft square, slightly larger than Thoreau's cabin at Walden Woods, and nearly as spartan. Dominating the interior from a stand in the middle of the floor is the circular Osborne fire-finder, a wonderful device consisting of a round green topographical map with Desolation at the centre and a rotating sight allowing the lookout to target any feature on the horizon for identification. On his first morning here Kerouac squinted through these same cross-hairs, and, as he later wrote in The Dharma Bums, "identified landmarks with my panoramic and fire finder and named all the magic rocks and clefts, names Japhy had sung to me so often: Jack Mountain, Mount Terror, Mount Fury, Mount Challenger, Mount Despair, Golden Horn, Sourdough, Crater Peak, Ruby, Mount Baker bigger than all the world in the western distance, Jackass Mountain, Crooked Thumb Peak, and the fabulous names of the creeks: Three Fools, Cinnamon, Trouble, Lightning and Freezeout. And it was all mine, not another human pair of eyes in the world were looking at this immense cycloramic universe of matter..."

On my first Desolation morning I do the same, fixing the finder's delicate sights on some salient peak five-miles off, checking its name on the Osborne's quad, feeling myself more and more at the centre of this mountain world with each ID. The fire-finder, though it never found a fire during the course of my two-week watch, gave me a gratifying sense of power: the power to name things. I spent many mornings putting names to the surrounding creeks and glaciers, delighting in the pure act of identification as well as savouring the names already legendary from The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angel.

As in Kerouac's day, the lookout has no electricity, no running water, no inside toilet. At night it is illuminated by candle and lantern light. Water comes from the bracing mountain-top snow, hauled up from winter's last drifts on Desolation's north slope and melted down in a tin basin, perfect for your morning tea.

The privy is 40 yards or so from the cabin - it's nothing but a rough, unsheltered wooden roost, perched existentially on a 2,000- foot precipice overlooking Three Fools Creek, a truly moving view, yet under-appreciated somehow with your jeans down to your boots in a driving morning rain. Alas, I cannot boast to have shared this horseshoe throne with Jack - his lav was somewhere along this ridge, but it was a proper outhouse with a shingled roof and a little moon cut into the door. It's probably in pieces, far down the chasm by now.

Another change, and a more regrettable one to my mind, is the absence of the old iron wood stove Kerouac cooked on and fired to warm himself on the cold Desolation nights, which can get below freezing even in high summer. The wood stove was taken out some years ago and replaced with a gassy four-burner propane range - a switch that may have simplified cooking, but robbed the lookout of its only means of night-time heat, not to mention the crackle and fragrance of alpine fir flaming in the old pot belly.

At one time there were more than 5,000 Desolation-like fire lookouts on federal lands across the US. When Kerouac came to the North Cascades in 1956, at the height of the lookout era, there were 43 in the Mount Baker Forest alone. Then, in the late Fifties, the Forest Service began to rely more on aircraft for fire detection, and the number of lookouts started to dwindle. Non-essential outposts were gradually phased out and fell into disrepair. Many were vandalised. By the mid-Sixties, fire districts were tearing down their abandoned lookouts to avoid "attractive nuisance" lawsuits.

Today only two functioning fire-watch cabins remain in the North Cascades National Park: Kerouac's on Desolation, and Sourdough Mountain Lookout, manned in the early Fifties by Kerouac's poet friends Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen ("Japhy Ryder" and "Warren Coughlin" in The Dharma Bums).

It was Snyder and Whalen, both north-westerners who had done stints as fire lookouts in the early Fifties, who convinced Kerouac, the East Coast urban hipster, to come up to this mountain wilderness. They had all met in late 1955, at Allen Ginsberg's now famous first public reading of the poem Howl in San Francisco.

Once Snyder and Whalen got to know Kerouac a bit, they soon began to urge that he apply for a fire-watcher's job in the North Cascades. Jack was always saying that he needed to be alone, to get away from the city, to live the simple life in a little hut, like Thoreau, writing, reading, meditating, just being. Well, they explained, a job as a fire lookout would be the perfect thing - two months of high country solitude, lots of time to make poetry, sit, read, sing at the top of your lungs, if a man was lucky perhaps even have a vision.

Plus you got paid; not great money of course, but something - 700 1956 dollars for the season. If the pay was minimal, so were the responsibilities - call in the "fire weather" once a day on the two-way radio, sweep the shack and generally keep an eye on the horizon for suspicious "smokes". Aside from lightning strikes and black bears there was little risk involved, and no lookout had ever been killed by either. Mice, marmots and deer flies would be more of a problem, but nuisances rather than actual dangers.

The best thing about a lookout job for a writer was that it was a chance to experience the real wildness of life - howling wind and relentless rock, wood fire, lantern light, celestial dawns and stifling heat, and near hallucinogenic boredom. "The closer you get to real matter, rock, air, fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is," says Japhy in The Dharma Bums. It was a place to face up to yourself, to see how the mind really worked, what you would think and feel left completely to your own, and how well you could bear it.

Finally, it was a chance to connect with the tradition of what Snyder called the "dharma bums". The mountains of north-west Washington State, he explained, resembled the misty, timbered Oriental landscapes he had seen as a teenager in the long scrolled silk paintings in the Seattle Art Museum. Looking closely at those paintings one could see people wandering among the mountain crags - gnarly, hapless, comic-looking characters, like Chinese hoboes. They were "Zen Lunatics" - the poet sages of Tang Dynasty China, like Han Shan, who scrawled his "Cold Mountain Poems" on the rock faces and the walls of wrecked towns. Snyder called characters like Han Shan and his goofy sidekick Shih Teh "dharma bums" - "bums" because they were foot-loose and tough like American railroad stiffs; "dharma bums" because they were followers of the Buddhist "dharma", or truth.

Kerouac must have perked up when he heard the term. It had just the sort of numinous, hip ring to it that he liked to play with in his own writing. He jotted the expression in the little spiral-bound notebook he always kept in his shirt pocket. Eventually, Kerouac would dedicate The Dharma Bums to the poet Han Shan.

"Who can leap the world's ties," wrote Han Shan, "and sit with me among the white clouds?" Snyder could. So could Whalen. And, they said, so should Jack.

At the time, Kerouac was at the peak of his Buddhist fervour. He had come across his first Mahayanist scriptures in late 1953 in New York, led to them by references in Thoreau, and had become increasingly immersed over the next few years. He was drawn to Buddhism's First Noble Truth - "All life is suffering" - and to the esoteric Prajnaparamita scriptures, which eloquently corroborated his own long-held notion that the world of appearances is a dream.

Kerouac read the Prajnaparamita sutras daily, kept voluminous records of his meditation sessions, even wrote an excellent biography of Shakyamuni Buddha, Wake Up, compiled from his readings of Buddhist classics and supplemented with his own prose. By 1956 he felt ripe for a spiritual breakthrough. "If I don't get a vision on Desolation Peak," he wrote to a friend before hitting the road for Washington State, "then my name ain't William Blake."

Of all the places Kerouac lived or visited in his life - and I have photographed many of them, from his boyhood haunts in his Lowell, Massachusetts home- town to the adobe rooms in Mexico City where he scribbled his blues by candlelight - there is no place so visually unchanged from his time as this Desolation Peak country.

Scanning the horizon from the lookout today one sees exactly what Kerouac saw - snow on snow, rock on rock, glaciers in the same positions, draining into the same creeks that crash down into cerulean Ross Lake. And presiding over the whole incredible scene is Hozomeen Mountain, not the highest peak around, but the most distinctive and mesmerising certainly, with its twin 8,000ft summits and sprawling complex of supporting peaks and shoulders and branching ridges stretching over nine square miles.

Hozomeen is one of the oldest named mountains in the Upper Skagit, appearing on the earliest survey maps. In the native Salish language of the Lower Thompson Indians, Hozomeen translates as "sharp, like a knife" - a reference to its naked, up-jutting pinnacles.

When Kerouac first saw Hozomeen, in the middle of a clearing storm on his first night in the lookout, the sight of it lifted the hairs off the back of his neck. In The Dharma Bums he wrote that it seemed so huge he thought it was a bear looming at his cabin window.

I don't doubt this. Hozomeen absolutely feels sentient, and not always too friendly. In the course of my own sojourn on Desolation, I spent many hours before Hozomeen, trying to "do justice" to it with my camera at first (as though it, or I, needed to be justified), but after a while much more often just staring at it, watching the constantly shifting light- and-cloud show playing over its flanks and summits. Finally I understood why Kerouac called Hozomeen "the Void" - because Hozomeen is a mirror for whoever sits on Desolation. That is why it is so hard to remain very long in solitude.

"Yes, for I'd thought, in June, hitch-hiking up there to the Skagit Valley in northwest Washington for my fire lookout job: 'When I get ot the top of Desolation Peak and everybody leaves on mules and I'm alone I will come face to face with God or Tathagata and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering ...' but instead I'd come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it but face to face with ole Hateful Duluoz Me ... "

Though the view from the lookout is practically unchanged from Kerouac's day, it can't really be said that Desolation is the same. After all, the essence of Jack's experience here was not visual, despite the awesome beauty of the place, but was about solitude. Kerouac mentions no human visitors anywhere in his published writings about Desolation, nor in his private journals. It is probable that he didn't see another living soul his entire 63 days on the mountain.

That kind of absolute solitude can only be tasted occasionally on Desolation these days, in part, ironically, because of Kerouac. In summer now, hardly more than three or four days pass without at least one hiker trudging up the trail to the lookout. Weekends can bring dozens, many of them on their own Kerouackian pilgrimages. The lookout register is scribbled full with comments from these inspired fans and Kerouac wannabees from all over the world - "Hi Jack! Came by to see ya, but ya musta been out. Hope the Void didn't get ya!" and "Dear Kerouac, Yes, yes, there is a God, Thank you for guiding me to Her! What a view!"

One afternoon, returning from a short hike, I met a 30-ish looking man from the Czech Republic rummaging rather desperately for a souvenir among the weathered scraps of lumber beneath the lookout, as though searching for a plank of the True Cross. "When I was growing up," he very emotionally explained, "Kerouac was banned, but we all read him. He gave us hope that freedom still existed. And now look at me, here I am on his Dharma Bum mountain!" I congratulated him and pumped his hand, but told him there were no scraps of Jack for him to take. I brought him inside the lookout, where he silently and reverently ran his hands over the fire-finder and old yellowed quad maps and table and chair. Finally, I pointed out the rope-webs of Jack's bunk in the corner and invited him to lie down. "My God," he said, "Kerouac's bed." And he eased himself on to his back, folding his arms beneath his head with a contented expression that said "Take me now, Lord!"

Unquestionably, Jack is far more popular today than he ever was in his own lifetime. Of course, On the Road and The Dharma Bums have never gone out of print, but even Kerouac books which had long been remaindered at the time of his death have all now been reissued and are considered standard back-list titles. Other works, such as Visions of Cody, which never found a publisher in his lifetime are now steady sellers, and Kerouac is finally gaining recognition as one of America's most influential modern authors. To the century's last generation he has become a cultural icon as well, on Gap posters, television car commercials, coffee mugs, T-shirts, in rock lyrics, videos, CDs, CD-Roms, and soon in Francis Ford Coppola's film version of On the Road. (Will America's highway ramps be lined again, as in the late-Sixties, with an army of young hitchhikers?)

"Jack Kerouac lived here? Wow, I know about him, he's way cool," said one nose-and-lip-pierced Seattleite teen who'd hiked to the lookout with her father one afternoon. "I heard him at the mall, he's got this poetry CD, it's, like, really random." When she'd gone back down the mountain, I checked the logbook to see what she'd written. These words: "I want to come back and live here someday too, like you did, Jack. Love, Marla."

As for myself, I wouldn't want to be Jack; after all, when Kerouac was my age - exactly 47-and-a-half, to the month - he was dead in St Petersburg, Florida, the old-folks' capital of the world. Even at 34, when he lived in this cabin, he already felt like an old man much of the time, and was often profoundly miserable. Kerouac's books, as manuals, read best on the passages of youth, not mid-life voyages. His writings contain no itinerary, no cool scenes, no groovy quotes to spur the middle-aged or elders around the next bend. Kerouac's own later life, if exemplary at all, is so only as a bleakly cautionary tale.

Yet, here on his mountain it is impossible not to be inspired by the man. After a mere 12 days alone in the lookout I am in awe of Kerouac's 63. His feat looms over Desolation like a colossal athletic mark - Babe Ruth's, or Roger Maris's 61 home runs. In literature, Thoreau at Walden was never thrown back on himself to the degree Kerouac was here. With all due respect, even the Buddha and Jesus in their wilderness trials had only to endure the scriptural 40 days.

From his journal entries it is clear that Kerouac suffered frequent and quite severe mood swings on Desolation. Not surprisingly, these ups and downs were usually keyed to his literary output. All his life Kerouac was a writing machine; his sense of well-being seems to have depended on maintaining a certain physical pulse of words-to-paper. If the rush was ample enough, he could be almost orgasmically self-believing, telling himself that he was truly a yet-to-be-discovered American Balzac or a Dostoevsky; on a bad day, he might be plunged into a sulking counter-fantasy of returning to New York in defeat to hack as a sports-writer for The Daily News.

Kerouac did a great deal more writing on Desolation than has been supposed by his biographers. In his first 10 days in the lookout, he wrote 15,000 words of an envisioned novel about his pre-road days in New York in the mid-Forties and added to a manuscript he was calling The Martin Family, a planned sequel to his first published novel, The Town and the City. He worked continuously on a piece he called Desolation Adventure, which later made its way into Desolation Angels. He also composed scores of haiku - "Desolation Pops" he called them, for the little "pop" of Zen packed in the three short poetic lines - and worked on a "transliteration" of his favourite Buddhist scripture, the Diamond Sutra. None of these writing projects satisfied him, however; and he even fretted that he was losing touch with the sources of his own inspiration.

"One thing's sure, I better start living adventurously again so I'll have something to write about," he told himself without apparent irony, not realising that he was in the very middle of one of the adventures for which he would most be remembered, and even emulated.

Finally on 25 August 1956 the fall rains began, drenching the valleys up and down the Skagit all day long. At night the two-way radio crackled with the news that the fire season was officially over. Kerouac's initial response was to cheer from his bunk like a grade-school kid - "Yippie! I yelled and sang in my sack to hear it." But it would be another 12 days before he could close up the lookout and leave, and he soon turned introspective.

His last days on Desolation were some of his best, as he reaffirmed the spiritual quest that had brought him there. He filled his notebook with his own version of the Diamond Sutra, from Dwight Godard's A Buddhist Bible. The Diamondcutter of Perfect Knowing, he titled it, "Divided for Daily Reading by John Kerouac."

As he packed his gear for his departure, Kerouac took stock of himself. At night, checking out his lantern-lit reflection in the dark lookout windows, he told himself that 34 was really not that old, and reassured himself by recalling Dostoevsky's final creative surge, of five great novels (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, A Raw Youth, and Karamazov) - all written after the age of 45. Kerouac wanted to believe that he was on the verge of a similar outpouring. "Now I'll go forward into truly mighty work," he vowed grandly to himself: "This will be my Desolation Testament."

In reality, his fire-watcher's stint on Desolation Peak would prove to be Kerouac's last great adventure, even though he would live another 13 years. With the publication of On the Road the following year, there would be plenty of excitement, and he would have experiences, in New York, Tangier, Big Sur and other places, but nothing again would be as worthy of his great literary exuberance. Desolation was also the high-water mark of his Buddhism. "Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation," says Kerouac's character Ray Smith at the conclusion of The Dharma Bums.

Certainly the mountain furnished Kerouac plenty of good literary grist. In addition to providing the spiritual culmination of The Dharma Bums, it also supplied the title and best chapters of Desolation Angels, a long chapter in Lonesome Traveler, and 12 poetic "choruses" of his posthumous Book of Blues. Though he would write valiantly, albeit drunkenly, until the day of his death in 1969, he would never surpass, or even come close to The Dharma Bums, written in 1957 the year after he came down from Desolation.

Writing in his Desolation journal, Kerouac had no inkling of the money he would make from On the Road or the ravenous fame awaiting him in the short run, but he was prescient and assured about his long-term prospects for literary and cultural recognition. Leaving Desolation 40 years ago, he only hoped to be able to purchase a new refrigerator for his mother and perhaps move her into a more comfortable flat in Greenwich Village with the proceeds from On the Road; but concerning Desolation his vision was prophetic.

The night before he left the lookout, he read his beloved Diamond Sutra, and borrowing from one of its passages, transcribed into his pocket notebook these words: "Such places (where the Scripture is observed) however wretched they may be, will be loved as though they were famous memorial parks and monuments, to which countless pilgrims and sages will come (to Desolation Peak!) to offer homage and speeches and dedications. And over them the angels of the unborn and the angels of the dead will hover like a cloud."

! All exerpts from Kerouac's unpublished 'Desolation Journal' are copyrighted and used by permission of John Sampas, executor, the Estate of Jack and Stella Sampas Kerouac.