Desolation Angels

 North Cascades National Park, Washington

Not that many people still remember Jack Kerouac, the "Beat Generation" or Beatniks (How many even remember Sputnik?).

 
Jack spent a winter here up at Desolation Point in a fire tower writing "Desolation Angels". We could only handle two nights with no internet, telephone, television, FM radio, satellite radio, GPS, electricity, running water or sewer connection. The trees pressed in so closely overhead that even our satellite technologies failed to work (GPS, TV, Sirius Radio). It was kind of like the 1980s when all the National Parks had pay phones from which you could call your stockbroker...if you had a pocketful of quarters...

"No maps, packs, firefinders, batteries, airplanes, warnings on radios, just mosquitoes humming in harmony, and the trickle of the streamlet – But no, Lord has made this movie in his mind and I’m a part of it (the part of it known as me) and it’s for me to understand this world and so go among it preaching the Diamond Steadfastness that says: “You’re here and you’re not here, both, for the same reason,” – “it’s Eternal Power munging along” – So I up I get and lunge along with pack, thumbed, and wince on ankled pains and turn and turn the trail faster and faster under my growing trot and pretty soon I’m running, bent, like a Chinese woman with a pack of faggots on her neck, jingle jingle drumming and pumping stiff knees thru rock underbrush and around corners, sometimes I crash off the trail and bellow back on’t, somehow, never lose, the way was made to be followed – Down the hill I’ll meet thin young boy starting out on his climb, I’m fat with butchers, and it’s Springtime in the Void – Sometimes I fall, on haunches, slipt, the pack is my back bumper, I burnst right along bumbling for fair, what words to describe hoopely tootely pumling down a parpity trail, prapooty ........."...Desolation Angels"

Jack ended up living with his mom in Indian Rocks near Tampa. At the end he was best known for projectile vomiting cheap red wine.



The North Cascades National Park is a huge place that is a strange combination of dams to generate power for Seattle and hundreds of miles of lovely hiking trails.



There are three big lakes up in the Cascades. They are named Gorge, Diablo and Ross. Each lake terminates in an electrical generating dam that feeds into the next lake.


We did find two tennis courts. I played well against Mrs. Phred, but I prefer not to disclose the scores. It was sort of a sports movie and I was part of it (the part known as me).

“Pretty soon...do you realize there'll be so many additional childhoods and pasts with everybody writing about them everybody'll give up reading in despair-There'll be an Explosion of childhoods and pasts, they'll have to have a giant Brain print them out microscopically on film to be stored in a warehouse on Mars to give Heaven Seventy Kotis to catch up on all that reading- Seventy Million Million Kotis! - Whoopee! - Everything is free!” -Desolation Angels