Journal of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

greater Boston. They’d drink beers and shoot pool at the local pubs, all the while busting on each other over work or girls. Raffi was the more talkative of the pair, the man of words, and Dave was content to let him take center stage.
    “Dave would sit there like he wasn’t even listening,” Rosen remembered. “He’d be nice and quiet, then he’d get ya.”
    Nobody who knew both men would ever recount a single argument, not even a petty spat.
    “They were a good match,” Craig Lewis, a friend of Raffi’s from college, said. “There was never any conflict between them when I was there; I never heard Raffi complain about Dave. Actually, sometimes
I
was a little upset, because Raffi would be going off four-wheeling, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, dude, can I come?’ And he’d be like, ‘I promised Dave that he could come.’”

    In 1947, a twenty-five-year-old printer’s son from Lowell, Massachusetts, slapped on a rucksack, turned up his thumb to a rainy eastern sky, and hitched his first ride west on a journey that changed his life. He wandered back and forth across America’s vast road network for almost two years, a postwar Huck Finn adrift on an asphalt Mississippi he affectionately called the “superslab.” He kept a journal of his adventures, writing down everything he saw, everyone he met, and everything he felt in a breathless, jazz-inspired prose that echoed with the rhythm of the road itself. When he published a novel based on it ten years later,
On the Road
became an American classic almost overnight. It forever changedthe way Americans thought of their highways, and, from then on, the road trip became more than the best way to see the country. It became a rite of passage.
    Raffi idolized Jack Kerouac. So much so that in 1997, after he graduated Northeastern with honors, he loaded up his Jeep and drove across the country himself, following the glittered exhaust that the father of the Beats had left behind fifty years earlier. Millions of graduates make the same wheeled vision quest every year—a final gift of freedom to themselves before returning to the real world and finding a job.
    Raffi, too, kept a journal, much of which he would later persuade some of the editors at the
Boston Globe
to publish in the Sunday travel section. In all, it amounted to over forty-five hundred words. His travelogue tended to be long-winded, a bit self-conscious, often focusing on the tedious details of his vehicle and the weather, but he was stretching his voice, and for a cub journalist fresh out of college they were an accomplishment—clips from a major metropolitan newspaper that he could use to get more assignments later.
    “My biggest fear when I began planning a two-month solo trip driving across the United States wasn’t that the journey would resemble a scene out of ‘Easy Rider’ or ‘Breakdown,’” his first dispatch began. “Nor was it that I’d get pulled over in Louisiana by a cop with a grudge, or that some crazy driver would run me off the road in Tennessee. My fear was this: that the road wouldn’t be everything Jack Kerouac had promised it would be.”
    To help him cash in on the promise, he had his black Jeep 4 × 4 and the addresses and phone numbers of Jeep enthusiasts he had befriended on the Internet. Kodikian speaks of off-roading six times in his
Globe
article, on some of the country’s most challenging trails.His very first stop was a Jeep gathering in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where he and one of his high school friends, Kevin Guckaven, spent three days four-wheeling. “… Our biggest concern was making it back from the trails in one piece—and in time for the cookout,” he wrote. “After five years of worrying about due dates, class schedules, and grades, the lack of responsibility was a godsend.”
    After dropping Guckaven off at the Knoxville airport, Kodikian was alone, and he got lost almost immediately: “I spent that night trying to correct all the mistakes that my