October 1947

October 1947 marks the homeward turn and close of Sal Paradise’s first westward journey: the American landscape that had drawn him out becomes a route back to Paterson, where home offers shelter but cannot restore the people and possibilities he has missed.

The Westward Journey Turns Home

The journey began months earlier with a map and a plan. Sal had traced Route 6 from Cape Cod toward Ely, Nevada, imagining Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco ahead. By October, he was returning east by bus, reading the country as it passed rather than pursuing the original road itinerary. At dawn the bus crossed the Arizona desert; it continued through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, carrying him toward home. The repeated movement through named states makes the return a crossing of the same continental scale as the outward trip, but now its direction and emotional pull have changed.

The bus stopped in St. Louis at noon, where Sal walked by the Mississippi River and watched logs drift down from Montana. He saw old steamboats sitting in the mud, then continued east through Indiana’s cornfields beneath a moonlit sky. Near Indianapolis he met a nearsighted young woman travelling from Washington State, listened to her account of a summer picking apples, and told her long stories in exchange for meals after his own sandwiches were gone. She got off at Columbus, Ohio; Sal slept on to Pittsburgh, still hundreds of miles from New York and nearly out of money.

The Cost of Getting Home

From Pittsburgh, Sal walked five miles to reach the road and caught rides toward Harrisburg in the rainy night. By the time he reached New York, he had no bus fare for the trip to Paterson. He searched for Hassel, only to discover that Hassel was on Riker’s Island, behind bars; the familiar points of contact that might have made the city welcoming were absent. Sal had to ask a Greek minister for a quarter, then hurried to the bus. The return was not a triumphant arrival but a final stretch made possible by a stranger’s small act of help.

At home, Sal ate everything in the icebox. His aunt saw how thin he had become, while the canvas bag carried the physical evidence of the road: torn cotton-field pants and the remnants of his huarache shoes. The money he had sent from California helped the two of them decide to buy the family’s first electric refrigerator. That practical purchase stands beside his bodily exhaustion and worn clothing: the journey has brought something home even as it has left him depleted.

Homecoming and Missed Connections

Sal’s unfinished manuscript was still on his desk, and October meant that work would begin again. The homecoming therefore returned him not to a completed life but to the task he had left behind. He smoked late into the night, unable to sleep, as the first cold winds rattled the windowpane. The season’s change gives the return a boundary: he had made it back just in time, before winter, but not before the journey’s unsettled questions followed him indoors.

Dean had been there while Sal was away. He had slept several nights at the house and spent afternoons talking with Sal’s aunt as she worked on a rag rug woven from the family’s old clothes. The rug, now spread across Sal’s bedroom floor, gathers years of household time into a single object. But Dean had left for San Francisco two days before Sal arrived, and their paths had probably crossed somewhere in Pennsylvania or Ohio without either meeting the other. Dean had a life of his own in California, where Camille had just taken an apartment. Sal had also missed the chance to look her up while he was in Mill City. Homecoming thus brings him close to the people he seeks while confirming that their lives have moved on without him.

Narrative Significance

October 1947 frames the return as both material recovery and emotional incompletion. Sal reaches the family house, shares in a new household purchase, and finds the manuscript waiting; yet Hassel is imprisoned and Dean has already gone west. The eastward passage across the country reverses the first journey’s direction without undoing its separations. In that contrast, home is a place to eat, sleep, and resume work, but not a point at which the road’s relationships can be recovered or its losses neatly settled.