On a rainy San Francisco evening in late November 1959, Albert Saijo, a thirty-three-year-old Japanese American poet, climbed into the back of an eastbound Willys Jeep station wagon. The wagon belonged to the red-haired poet Lew Welch, also thirty-three; in the passenger seat was the author Jack Kerouac, thirty-seven, fresh from an appearance on the Steve Allen Show, and eager to be home on Long Island, New York, for Thanksgiving. Welch held the Willys steady at 75 mph, winding southeast through the Mojave and onto Route 66 toward Kerouac’s home in Northport. He and Kerouac talked non-stop, shuttling a bottle of Scotch between them. All three men spitballed open-form poems and haiku, which they scribbled into their notebooks and later published in a book, Trip Trap.
The road trip would become a minor footnote in Beat folklore. But it should be remembered as much for backpacking as for literature. Saijo—a Nisei poet, jikijitsu of poet Gary Snyder’s Mill Valley zendo, and recently out of an Oakland tuberculosis ward—sat crosslegged on a mattress, watching an America he’d never seen. He knew deprivation firsthand of liberty, health, possessions—and understood not only its humiliations but its strange freedom. Applied to the mountains, that logic became what he later called “ultralight”: not a gear system, but a way of thinking.
He knew deprivation firsthand of liberty, health, possessions—and understood not only its humiliations but its strange freedom…