Natural Playgrounds
The Road to Leisure
What you could call my life on the road began when I first met Dean Moriarty, not long after my wife and I separated. Before that, I often dreamed of going West to see the country, always planning but never going. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he was actually born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King. Chad showed me some letters from Dean, written in a New Mexico jail for kids. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was just a mysterious jail-kid. Then news came that Dean was out of jail and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.
Finding hidden corners at Avalanche Lake, MT.
Montana
Big Sky Country, but big mountain country as well. Perfect for beginner, intermediate, and expert mountaineers, though don’t let its residency in the lower 48 trick you. Montana is wild, rugged, and full of both peril and adventure.
Utah
The rock-climbing Mecca—when and where you can escape the tourists. Fortunately most of the site-seeing crowds are concentrated in specific areas of National and State Parks. This is the place… where you will feel like your on a different planet.
Alaska
The edge of the map, edge of civilization, edge of everything where everything is bigger, meaner, and more robust. Don’t go wandering unprepared. What stupidity you might be able to get away with in lower latitudes will certainly kill you up here.
Top of Mount Suyeh
“Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.”
SUBHEADING
A LARGER HEADING
One day in college Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean was staying in rooms in East Harlem. He had arrived the night before with beautiful little Marylou. They got off the Greyhound bus at 50th Street, went around the corner to Hector’s cafe and bought beautiful big cream cakes.
All the time, Dean was telling Marylou things like: “Now, darling, here we are in New York and although I haven’t quite told you everything I was thinking when we crossed the Missouri River, it’s absolutely necessary now to postpone all those things concerning our personal love, and at once begin thinking of work-life plans … ” That was the way he talked in those early days.
I went to their little apartment with the boys, and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Dean had blue eyes, and a real Oklahoma accent. He had worked on Ed Wall’s farm in Colorado before he married Marylou. She was a pretty blonde, with long curly hair. She sat on the couch, her smoky blue eyes staring. But although she was a sweet little girl, she was stupid and could do horrible things.
That night we drank beer and talked until dawn, and in the morning while we sat around smoking in the gray light of a gloomy day, Dean got up nervously, and walked around, thinking. Then he decided Marylou could get some breakfast. Later, I went away.
During the next week, he told Chad King that he absolutely had to learn how to write; Chad said that I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Then Dean had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment just across the Hudson River from New York and she was so angry that she went to the police and accused Dean of some false, crazy thing so that Dean had to run away from Hoboken. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one night while I was studying there was a knock on the door. And there was Dean in the dark hall, saying, “Hello, you remember me — Dean Moriarty? I’ve come to ask you to show me how to write.”
Location
VagueRant Magazine
1234 Grid Way
Salt Lake City, UT 84044
Hours
We are open Monday to Friday, from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.
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