Pennsylvania is a stage in Sal Paradise’s west-to-east journeys and, more importantly, the place where his idea of wilderness expands beyond the West. Its roads, rivers, and encounters with people living precariously on the margins turn a difficult trip toward New York into a recognition that wildness also inhabits the settled East.

Routes Through Pennsylvania

On his October return from Hollywood, Sal crosses the country by bus, then reaches Pittsburgh with 365 miles still to travel to New York and only a dime in his pocket. After walking five miles out of Pittsburgh, he gets rides east in an apple truck and a trailer truck, arriving in Harrisburg on a rainy night. The journey makes Pennsylvania a route of necessity rather than a destination: Sal is exhausted, short of money, and intent on getting home.

The state also enters the book through the larger geography of its roads and rivers. In Harrisburg, Sal walks seven miles beside the Susquehanna with a penniless older wanderer who says he is headed for Canada. The man believes they will find a bridge, but they never do. Later, after leaving him, Sal sleeps on a station bench in Harrisburg; at dawn the station staff send him away. A ride east eventually carries Sal out of the state and toward New York.

The Ghost of the Susquehanna

The wanderer becomes Sal’s companion for a night’s walk through eastern Pennsylvania. Carrying a paper satchel, he talks about meals, charity homes, a warm bath, a hat found by the roadside, and visits to Red Cross offices where he presents his First World War credentials. Sal understands him as a hobo who moves on foot through the East, sometimes seeking help or a small amount of money. The two share the precariousness of the road, though Sal has a destination and the older man’s account of his own direction is unreliable.

Their confusion becomes plain when a driver tells the man that he is heading west, toward Pittsburgh and Chicago, rather than north toward Canada. The wanderer rejects the correction and walks away; Sal’s last sight of him is his small white bag disappearing into the darkness. The episode does not resolve where the man will go. Instead, its ending leaves him as a figure of unresolved, continuing movement, while Sal proceeds toward home.

An Eastern Wilderness

The walk changes Sal’s map of the country. He had assumed that wilderness belonged to the West, but the Susquehanna and its surrounding terrain show him an eastern wilderness of back roads, dark highways, rivers, and wooded slopes. He connects that landscape to earlier American histories and figures, imagining it as a place shaped by travel and settlement long before his own journey. Pennsylvania is thus not merely a corridor between western adventure and New York: it is a landscape with its own depth and history.

Sal’s account holds two kinds of hardship together. The vast, unsettling river landscape makes the night walk feel remote, while the older man’s misdirection and the station’s refusal to let Sal sleep expose the practical vulnerability of travelers without money or shelter. In the morning, Sal is starving and has only old cough drops for sugar. A driver who believes in controlled starvation initially dismisses his hunger, but later gives him bread-and-butter sandwiches from the car. Sal laughs while waiting during the driver’s business calls, and the man eventually takes him to New York. Pennsylvania’s wilderness, in this episode, is both an imaginative geography and a material condition of exposure.

A Recurring Passage

Pennsylvania appears within a book structured by repeated movement across the country. Sal’s routes depend on whatever transportation and assistance he can find: a bus, hitchhiking, and rides from strangers. Elsewhere, Pennsylvania is crossed at speed in the other direction: during a furniture run, Dean Moriarty drives north from Virginia toward Washington and Philadelphia in a newly purchased Hudson, its heater and radio already not working. That hurried passage contrasts with Sal’s solitary, resource-poor return, showing how the same region can serve as either a fast corridor or a place where travel slows into walking, waiting, and uncertainty.

The state’s thematic importance rests especially on the Susquehanna episode. Sal’s journey home does not simply complete a westward adventure; it revises what that adventure has taught him to see. The East is not outside the novel’s wilderness, and its roads do not guarantee direction or safety. In Pennsylvania, the American road leads through an older landscape and brings Sal face to face with a fellow traveler whose destination remains as uncertain as the night around them.