IN THE FALL of 1967 I traded an album by Joe Cocker for a dog-eared book by a writer named Jack Kerouac — On the Road. Over a few sleepless nights I was transfixed, reading about a life that I would never live.

In On the Road, Kerouac is a lonesome traveler who explored the open highway, saw saints and ghosts, created mad poetry and prose, joined the Merchant Marine, worked as a forest ranger and train engineer, went to India to study religion, became a Buddhist, loved his mother (too much, perhaps) yet never left his working-class Catholicism. He wrote On the Road wired on caffeine, over a fortnight, taping together sheets of teletype paper in one continuous roll, now the possession of Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, who graciously lets it travel America in exhibitions.

Kerouac found wonderment in the world he explored and, in writing, said that all his words were really just one word; and the word was “Wow.”

He was, like all mortals, flawed. He drank too much (dying of alcoholism), was conflicted about his sexuality (before such conflict was fashionable) and recoiled at the excesses of a generation who later took his works as gospel. To the end a patriot, he fell out of favor with other Beats, who embraced the anti-war movement and anti-Americanism of the middle ’60s. “The flag is not a rag,” he admonished Allen Ginsberg, rescuing it from a potential burning, folding it neatly and showing proper respect. He admired Bill Buckley.

To me Kerouac embodied a timeless spirit of wanderlust, the quest for living life to the fullest, friendship, and an endless search for absolute freedom. Writing in the ’50s, an era of “gray-flannel suits” and into the nuclear age, Kerouac, like Peter Pan and Huck Finn, never aged, maintaining the wonder and joy of youth.

As the autumn leaves turned colors and then faded, a handful of hearty souls descended on a cemetery in Lowell, the mill town north of Boston, to gather last Tuesday at the gravesite of the author who died at 47 on Oct. 21, 1969. They brought bottles of bourbon, postcards in French (his original language), cigarettes, love notes and other items of homage. One of the participants, I left a poem:

ALL MY WORDS

Porch lights lit

End of summer

Cool hint of coming fall

In October, homecoming

Everyone goes home in October

Canadian French in alleyways

Bodegas;

The rhymes of rapping Spanish, Khmer and Hmong

The smell of burning leaves

Pumpkin skin sunset

Amber waves

School buses, school kids

Crossing guards

Highway hoboes

Homeless angels

All my words are one word

And the word is

WOW

Roy J. Nirschel is president of Roger Williams University.