Sal’s return journey from California to New York

Sal’s return journey from California to New York is the exhausted, precarious homeward counterpart to his earlier westward flight. Leaving Terry and the California fields behind, he crosses the continent by car, bus, and hitchhiking, moving from the imagined promise of the West into hunger, isolation, and the eastern wilderness. He reaches his aunt’s home in October, but Dean Moriarty has already come and gone; the journey’s arrival is therefore also a missed reunion.

Departure from California

After leaving Terry, Sal walks from the vineyard toward Sabinal, eating black walnuts along the way. His planned departure depends on money sent from New York: at the railroad telegraph office he waits for a money order, and the ticket master eventually confirms that his aunt has saved him by sending it. The exchange marks a practical turning point. It is fall, and he recognizes that he is going back east. From Sabinal, Sal catches an unusually fast ride to Los Angeles with a fiddler in a California cowboy band. The driver travels at high speed and shares a drink with him; they cover roughly 250 miles in four hours. The ride ends at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, where Sal retrieves his rejected manuscript. With too little money for the full trip home, he buys a bus ticket to Pittsburgh and spends his remaining time preparing food for the crossing: ten sandwiches made from a loaf of bread and salami, with only a dollar left. Hollywood offers no professional triumph to offset the departure. While Sal makes his sandwiches behind a parking lot, premiere lights shine above the city. The contrast between that public spectacle and his improvised meal gives his last night in Hollywood its particular irony: he is leaving with his rejected manuscript, limited funds, and no settled career, rather than the success associated with the place.

Eastbound across the continent

At dawn the bus carries Sal across the Arizona desert and north through the mountains, then across New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. He carries a stolen copy of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, but chooses to read the American landscape instead. The changing terrain supplies the journey’s measure: he is going home in October, moving through successive regions rather than following the westward dream that had first sent him onto the road. In St. Louis, Sal walks beside the Mississippi River and watches logs drift downstream, an image that brings the continent’s scale into his homeward passage. Later, after his sandwiches are gone, he meets a nearsighted young woman on the bus. She buys his meals; he repays her by telling stories. She has spent the summer picking apples in Washington State and is returning to a farm in upstate New York. Their conversation briefly offers a possible connection beyond the bus ride: she invites him to visit her farm, and they arrange to meet at a New York hotel before she gets off at Columbus, Ohio. At Pittsburgh, the remaining distance to New York is 365 miles, and Sal has only a dime. He walks five miles to leave the city, then reaches Harrisburg in two rides, first with an apple truck and then with a large trailer truck. The journey has become a sequence of small exchanges and dwindling resources: the bus fare has carried him east, but the last stretch depends on walking, chance rides, and whatever money or food he can secure.

The eastern wilderness

On the night beyond Harrisburg, Sal encounters an elderly hobo he later calls the Ghost of the Susquehanna. The man says he is walking to Canada and leads Sal along the river in search of a bridge. He talks about meals received at charitable homes, a hat found by the road, and visits to Red Cross offices using his First World War credentials. Sal walks seven miles with him, sharing the road but not his confidence about where it leads. The man repeatedly confuses Frederick, Maryland, with Fredericksburg, Virginia, and walks in the path of traffic; Sal stays in the ditch, fearing the old man may be struck. They never find the bridge. After Sal leaves him near a railroad underpass, a driver gives Sal a ride back toward Harrisburg and tells him he is going the wrong way. Sal then sees the old man standing under a streetlamp with his thumb out. When the driver stops to correct him, the man rejects the warning and insists that he knows the area. The last glimpse is of his small white bag disappearing into the darkness. The encounter revises Sal’s picture of the country. He had assumed that America’s wilderness lay in the West, but the old walker makes the back roads of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia appear equally wild. Sal connects that landscape to earlier American histories and figures, while the Susquehanna’s cliffs, dark roads, and river crossings become the setting for a different kind of frontier: not open western distance, but an eastern world of wandering, poverty, and uncertain direction.

Hunger and arrival in New York

Sal spends the night on a bench in the Harrisburg railroad station and is thrown out at dawn. Nearly starving, he has only old cough drops for sugar and little strength to reach the city limits. A driver who believes in controlled starvation initially treats Sal’s hunger as beneficial; after about a hundred miles, however, he gives him bread-and-butter sandwiches from among his sales samples. Sal eats them while the driver makes business calls in Allentown, then breaks into laughter. The ride brings him to New York, but it does not erase the physical and financial strain of getting there. Sal finds himself on Times Square during rush hour after traveling about eight thousand miles around the continent. The crowds and towers strike him through what he calls his innocent road-eyes: the city’s relentless pursuit of money contrasts with the roads and small communities he has just crossed. He has no bus fare to Paterson and briefly considers the long walk home, but a Greek minister gives him a quarter, allowing him to take the bus. At home, Sal eats everything in the icebox. His aunt sees how thin he has become; he is wearing two shirts and two sweaters, and his canvas bag contains torn cotton-field trousers and the remains of his huarache shoes. He and his aunt decide to buy the family’s first electric refrigerator with money he had sent from California. His half-finished manuscript is still on the desk, and the return closes one circuit of the journey: October, home, and work again.

A homecoming that misses Dean

The return does not reunite Sal with Dean. Dean had stayed several nights at Sal’s house while waiting for him, speaking with Sal’s aunt as she worked on a family rag rug. Two days before Sal arrived, Dean left for San Francisco, where Camille had taken an apartment. Their routes may have crossed somewhere in Pennsylvania or Ohio, but neither found the other. Sal returns to a home and a place to work, yet the anticipated meeting has already slipped past him; the open-endedness of the road persists even at the point of arrival.