The San Francisco arrival becomes an episode of abandonment rather than the secure beginning the travelers might have expected. Dean Moriarty celebrates reaching the Pacific, then drives away almost at once to see Camille, leaving Sal Paradise and Marylou on the street with their belongings and no money. Their improvised struggle for shelter and food exposes the cost of Dean’s restless movement; when Marylou also disappears, Sal is left alone, hungry, and in a state of visionary extremity before Dean eventually returns for him.

Arrival and Abandonment

The city first appears as the triumphant terminus of a long drive. From the foothills before Oakland, Sal sees San Francisco spread across its hills beyond the Pacific fog. Dean cries out that they have made it, exclaims that there is no more land, and gives Marylou and Sal instructions: they are to find a hotel and wait while he contacts Camille, checks on his railroad watch, and looks for work. The arrival carries the exhilaration of a voyage completed, but Dean’s practical instructions already divide the party: he has arrangements of his own to pursue, while the others must manage their immediate needs. That division becomes abandonment when Dean says goodbye and drives away before making provision for them. Marylou calls him a bastard who will leave Sal out in the cold whenever it suits him; Sal acknowledges that Dean has said nothing about money. Carrying their bundles through the city, the pair must face the gap between the grand, shared journey and their exposed situation. The Pacific destination has been reached, but the journey’s promise of companionship has not secured them shelter or support.

Survival in the City

Marylou’s familiarity with people near the Tenderloin helps them obtain a room on credit from a gray-faced hotel clerk. Food remains a separate problem: they find none until midnight, when a nightclub singer in her room heats a can of pork and beans by balancing an iron upside down on a coat hanger in a wastebasket. Sal waits for Dean and wonders why he is not concerned about their welfare. He later describes losing faith in him that year, a judgment rooted not in an abstract disappointment but in the immediate experience of being left without money or a plan. Sal and Marylou remain in San Francisco for a week, walking for miles in search of money for food. They visit drunken sailors in a flophouse on Mission Street, where the sailors offer them whisky. For two days they live together in the hotel, but their closeness does not become a stable alliance. Sal realizes that Marylou has little interest in him apart from his connection to Dean, whom she is trying to reach through his friend. They argue, though they also spend entire nights in bed while Sal tells her his dreams. Need, sex, resentment, and storytelling coexist without resolving the question of what either of them wants from the other.

Marylou’s Departure and Sal’s Vision

One night Sal waits for Marylou by appointment in a doorway at Larkin and Geary, hungry. He sees her emerge from a fashionable apartment building with her friend, a nightclub owner, and an older man carrying a roll of money. Although she sees Sal, she is afraid to signal him; she gets into a Cadillac and leaves. Sal’s conclusion that he now has nobody and nothing marks the episode’s sharpest reversal: after Dean’s departure, Marylou had been his sole companion, but she too has gone, and their precarious arrangement ends without explanation or reconciliation. Walking through the streets, Sal picks cigarette butts from the pavement. A proprietress at a fish-and-chips shop looks at him with apparent fear, and the sight triggers an ecstatic vision in which he imagines himself as a criminal son returning to haunt his mother in another life. The scene moves from immediate hunger and rejection into a collapse of ordinary chronological perspective. Sal feels that he has crossed time into a realm of shadows and experiences death as close at hand; he then understands himself as having died and been reborn innumerable times, with life and death passing as easily as sleep and waking. The revelation does not feed or shelter him: after the vision, he walks four miles, gathers ten cigarette butts, and takes their tobacco back to Marylou’s hotel room to smoke in his pipe. The contrast between metaphysical intensity and material deprivation keeps the episode’s vision anchored in the conditions that precede it.

Dean’s Return and the Episode’s Consequence

Dean finally finds Sal and takes him to Camille’s house, asking where Marylou is. Sal says that she has run off. Camille offers a temporary refuge, and Sal knows that the eighteen dollars Dean sent her had been his money. He relaxes there for a few days, looking from the living-room window of the wooden tenement on Liberty Street at the city’s lights in the rainy night. Dean’s return restores Sal to his circle, but it does not undo the earlier abandonment or the hunger and uncertainty that followed it. The episode’s decisive movement is from arrival as collective triumph to isolation, then to a limited rescue. Dean’s exuberant declaration that the road has ended contrasts with his immediate departure; Marylou’s presence briefly supplies company, but not dependable solidarity; and Sal’s visionary passage through death and rebirth occurs amid an ordinary, unresolved struggle to eat. San Francisco is thus both destination and exposure: reaching the far edge of the continent does not end the travelers’ dependence on one another, and Dean’s return makes plain how much that dependence is shaped by his choices.