On the Road to Philadelphia
Historians dispute a great many things about the summer of 1787, but on one point there is quiet, near-total consensus: none of them wants to be the one who brings up Kerouac. The story is documented, footnoted, and, as far as anyone can tell, true, and it is discussed at scholarly conferences only in hallways, never on panels.
Jack arrives four days late, having taken the scenic route from Boston via a diner in Altoona where he has what he later describes, at length, to anyone within earshot, as a religious experience involving pie. He is not a delegate. Nobody invited him. He has simply heard that men are gathering to write something big and true about the country, and to Kerouac this constitutes a personal summons, the same way a lit window constitutes an invitation.
Madison's notes grow strange around June. There is a man in a flannel coat interrupting the debate on separation of powers to ask whether the whole document couldn't just be typed on one continuous scroll, unbroken, so it breathes the way the road does. Someone points out that a scroll forecloses the possibility of amendments. Kerouac says the country shouldn't need any. It should just keep moving.
He is, unhelpfully, right about several things. He argues for freedom of movement as a right on par with speech — the founding document should guarantee not only what a man can say but where he can go, how fast, and with whom. This does not make the Bill of Rights, though he maintains for the rest of his life that it's "in there, between the lines, if you read it right," a claim later adopted, uncredited, by several generations of undergraduates.
He drafts, uninvited, an alternate preamble, and the delegates make the mistake of letting him read it aloud:
We the people man the ones still moving the ones who got up before light and put a thumb out on 9 in the fog with nothing but a name for where they were headed and no name at all for why, we the people who are really just the road wearing shoes for a while, the Mississippi never asked nobody's permission to be the Mississippi, it just went, and that's the whole of it, that's the government right there, water going where water goes —
Franklin reads this twice, says nothing, and later tells Jefferson he found it "not un-moving." Jefferson takes this to mean Franklin has been drinking.
Only one Kerouac clause survives into the actual text, buried in Article I: Congress may, at its discretion, adjourn without notice and reconvene "further west, or further from itself." It is invoked exactly once, in 1848, producing a session of Congress held entirely in a rented barn outside Wheeling, an event that appears in no textbook and was once, briefly, almost commemorated with a plaque.
By ratification, Kerouac has alienated most of the delegates, borrowed money from three of them, and left the Constitution otherwise intact, save for a single clause wedged into the Preamble between "promote the general Welfare" and "and secure the Blessings of Liberty": and also to keep moving, always, because a country that stops is just a place. No one has successfully struck it. Every decade or so, some senator notices it's still there, drafts an amendment, and then, for reasons he can't quite name, gets in his car instead and drives until the feeling passes.
Kerouac does not stay for the ratification debates. He leaves a note — gone to see if Delaware's got anything to it — and turns up the following spring in a bar in New Orleans, telling anyone who'll listen that he helped found a country once. The bartender, not unreasonably, does not believe him.
