"No Turning Back"

December 21, 2010.

Before his untimely death in 1969, Jack Kerouac, one of my favorite escapist writers, wrote several novels whose unpredicable characters and story lines are based on his real-life exploits, especially with his fellow bohemian poets, abroad and Stateside.  One of those novels, a story of an uninspired, but aspiring young writer and his wayward friend traveling across the United States and to Mexico in search of adventure and a new identity apart from the repressive status quo, would eventually become not only a representation of Beat culture for a hungry new generation of thinkers, artists, and writers on the East and West Coasts in the 1950s and 1960s, but also the inspiration and paradigm for my San Francisco (1998), New Orleans (2001), and Paris (2010) notebooks.  That novel, my friend, is On The Road.

Keeping Kerouac...and my dad, an adventurer at heart...in mind, I gathered my passport, boarding pass, and tools of the trade (including a digital camera and three small Moleskine notebooks), left the apartment, and walked confidently out into the brutally cold morning air under the overcast skies, excited to go to Europe.  To France.  To Paris.  To see the world again! But this time, alone.  Just as Sal Paradise and his buddy Drifter Dean Moriarty do, I had to step out on faith, learn the customs, etiquette, and language of my host country, and keep my wits about me at all times because I was going to be thousands of miles away from everything I've ever known and grown comfortable with.  Alone.  Equipped with a command of French words and phrases to help me get by and a little more than a hundred euros for the adventure of a lifetime.  Didn't know a single soul in the city, friend. 

The reservations have already been made and confirmed and you've got your passport on you.  Paris awaits! Once you reach O'Hare and take the evening flight to the city, there's no turning back.  And once you take off and vanish into the dark blue night sky, you're free, I thought, brimming with the vision of an inspired and grand getaway!  

And once you take off and vanish into the dark blue night sky, you're free.  Free.  Free to explore and enjoy Paris at any pace and in any fashion I want.  Free to be myself, especially with other people.  Free to meet other people.  Free to indulge in new experiences.  Free to take chances.  Free to stay up as long as I like.  Free to do my own thing.  Free not to answer to anyone else, to be encumbered with someone else's demands and concerns.  For those reasons, friend, free...is a good four-letter word!

Boarding the next morning Metra to the La Salle Street Station, I lugged my American Tourister to my seat,
shivering with excitement...and it wasn't just from the cold and the hardening, powdery snow.  Edward, let's Paris, I told myself. 

Silently.