TUESDAY, JUNE 1

Lowell, Massachusetts, is 30 miles from Boston, but it seems like much more. Certainly, Boston already is a trip back in time in the North End or somewhere along the Freedom Trail, but Lowell has barely reached the second half of the 20th Century, let alone come into the 21st. It's not a completely bad thing, though I suspect the teenagers of Lowell might wish for a city that wasn't mostly old mills and faded painted billboards on the sides of brick buildings.

There are signs of Jack Kerouac everywhere in Lowell, if you look. Sure, the Kerouac Commemorative along one of the canals and the t-shirt in the window of the Barnes & Noble are among the more obvious. But the clock outside the high school, the Moody Street bridge over the Merrimack, the Grotto behind the former orphanage -- they stand out because Jack noticed them and wrote about them. They're all in Doctor Sax, for one.

Apparently I've read Doctor Sax before. I didn't think I had. I thought it was one of the two books -- along with Desolation Angels -- that I didn't get through during my Kerouac seminar the last semester at Notre Dame. I knew there was something about a man with a watermelon on a bridge, but I didn't know much else. But on reading it, I've noticed light-blue pen markings all the way through so far, a sign I made notations of my own while reading it. They're supplemented with the darker blue ballpoint markings I made from the professor's comments.

So I guess I've read it, but I haven't digested it until now. It's the perfect book to read after this trip, because it's all Lowell, and I've seen it. Or most of it.

We stopped at the National Park visitors center in the old Market Mills for a book and a map and embarked on our self-guided walking tour. Across quiet streets and past old buildings housing new businesses, we crossed main Merrimack St. and passed beneath the clock outside the high school on Kirk St., crossing French St. to the Boot Cotton Mills along the Merrimack itself.

We decided against paying to get into an exhibit that we weren't sure had the Kerouac backpack and typewriter we were looking for (I remembered it being in a nearby building that wasn't open until 1 p.m.), but we did get another pamphlet about Kerouac's Lowell, which proved useful. We walked down French St. to the Commemorative, reading the passages from his books etched into the granite blocks beneath the trees. Old storefronts and factory smokestacks dotted the background.

From there we walked down Merrimack St., past the Barnes & Noble, and found a sandwich shop on a sidestreet. We ate and killed time until 1 when the Working People exhibit opened and we forded the river of elementary school kids on a class trip to have the empty room to ourselves that included a small display case with Jack's artifacts. A photo by Ginsberg, his Merchant Marine-issued rucksack, his Underwood typewriter, and older copies of his books.

We walked back to the car at the visitors center and finished the tour on the road. We passed St. Jeanne de Baptiste on Merrimack, where Jack worshiped and was eulogized; we turned left onto Pawtucket St. passing "funeral row" and the mortuary that prepared his body; we reached the former Franco American Orphanage and the sign for the Grotto behind it.

The Grotto -- it Hugely Mooked ahead of us, to the right ... that baleful night. It belonged to the orphanage on the corner of Pawtucket Street and School Street at the head of the White Bridge -- a big Grotto is their backyard, mad, vast, religious, the Twelve Stations of the Cross, little individual twelve altars set in, you go in front, kneel, everything but incense in the air (the roar of the river, mysteries of nature, fireflies in the night flickering to the waxy stare of statues, I knew Doctor Sax was there flowing in the back darks with his wild and hincty cape) -- culminating, was the gigantic pyramid of steps upon which the Cross itself poked phallically up with its Poor Burden the Son of Man all skewered across it in his Agony and Fright -- undoubtedly this statue moved in the night -- ... after the ... last of the worshippers is gone, poor dog.-- Doctor Sax

From there we headed south out of town to the Edson Cemetery, to Lincoln Street on the cemetery roads, between Seventh and Eighth streets. Names on the cemetery streets? All for Jack? Perhaps.

His grave was clean, we were alone. The last time I came here, there was an empty bottle of Sam Adams Cherry Wheat and other mementos left behind. It had rained, his stone was blotched with water, the grass was wet. We stood there for 10 minutes, looking at the greenness around us.

Then we got back in the car, back on the road, driving north to Maine.