On the Road: Kerouac's American Journey

In July 1947 Sal sets out from his aunt's house in Paterson with fifty dollars and a romantic plan: to follow one long red line on the map, Route 6, all the way across the country, starting where it crosses the Hudson at Bear Mountain. It pours with rain, hardly anyone stops, and he gives up, goes back to New York and buys a bus ticket to Chicago instead. The Bear Mountain Bridge, opened in 1924, still carries Route 6 over the river.

Location precision: The novel doesn't say exactly where Sal waited; the pin marks the Bear Mountain Bridge, where Route 6 crosses the Hudson.

The bus gets Sal to Chicago, where he wanders the Loop at night listening to bop in the clubs, at a moment in jazz history "somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis." Then he hitchhikes west across Illinois and Iowa. Chicago comes back in 1949, when Dean drives a 1947 Cadillac there from Denver for a travel bureau, often at over a hundred miles an hour, and delivers it in a wreck of a state.

Location precision: The novel names no specific club; the pin marks the Loop.

In Denver Sal finally catches up with Dean and with Carlo Marx — Kerouac's portrait of the poet Allen Ginsberg — and the gang of friends Dean has collected there. Dean, juggling two women and an all-night talking marathon with Carlo, has little time for him. The high point is a party trip into the mountains to Central City, an old gold-rush town founded in 1859 that was all but a ghost town by then. Casino gambling arrived in the early 1990s, and today the town lives on its casinos and its history.

After a spell as a night watchman at a camp for merchant sailors near San Francisco, Sal takes the bus south and meets Terry, a young Mexican woman, on the way to Los Angeles. They stay together, drift back to Bakersfield and then to the town the novel calls Sabinal, where her family works in the fields. Sal tries picking cotton and finds he is not made for that kind of work. In the end he leaves her behind and takes the bus home, and the first trip is over.

Location precision: Kerouac's "Sabinal" can't be placed with certainty; the pin marks Bakersfield, where the couple's life together begins.

After a wild Christmas Dean turns up in his Hudson, and in January 1949 he, Sal and Marylou race south to New Orleans. In Algiers, across the Mississippi from the French Quarter, they stay with Old Bull Lee and his wife Jane — Kerouac's portraits of the novelist William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer, who moved to New Orleans in 1948. Bull, a morphine addict with opinions on everything, is not thrilled to have them. Then the trio drives on west to San Francisco.

Location precision: The Burroughs house is a private home and isn't pinned; the pin marks Algiers Point.

Visitor guidance: The Algiers ferry still crosses from the foot of Canal Street to Algiers Point.

In San Francisco Dean drops Marylou to go back to his wife Camille, and Marylou soon leaves Sal for a nightclub owner. Broke and half-starved, Sal walks Market Street and has a kind of vision: of past lives, birth and rebirth, the whole of time flashing past. Dean finds him, takes him home and drags him around the jazz clubs to hear Slim Gaillard. On the next trip, in 1949, the two of them spend a night of jazz and drinking in the clubs of Folsom Street before setting off east together.

Location precision: The novel doesn't place the scene on a particular block; the pin marks Market Street downtown.

In spring 1950 Sal, Dean and their friend Stan Shephard drive a rickety 1937 Ford across Texas to Laredo and cross the Rio Grande into Mexico, feeling they have left "everything behind us". Everything delights them: beer at ten cents, easygoing police, friendly, curious people and a magnificent landscape. Their last great party comes in a small town Kerouac calls Gregoria, in a bordello where they dance to mambo and drink. Laredo is still one of the main crossings on the border.

Location precision: The novel doesn't name the bridge; the pin marks the international bridge in downtown Laredo.

Mexico City is the end of the road. Sal comes down with dysentery and lies "delirious and unconscious" in a room, and Dean, who has got the divorce papers he came for, simply drives off back to New York. Sal is bitter at first, then forgiving: he had to understand "the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there." It is the moment the friendship that drives the book starts to come apart, and the last of the long road trips.

Location precision: The novel doesn't say where Sal lay ill; the pin marks the Zócalo, the city's central square.

Back in New York, Sal has a girlfriend, Laura, and plans to move to San Francisco. Dean turns up more than five weeks early, and Sal has no money to go. On the way to a Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera House, a friend refuses to give Dean a lift even a few blocks, and they drive off leaving him on the corner. The novel ends with Sal on a river pier in New Jersey, thinking of Dean. The old Met on Broadway was demolished in 1967.

Location precision: The old opera house is gone; the pin marks its former site on Broadway at 39th Street.