Longmont Gas Station

Here is the gas station in Longmont where Kerouac is provided a little siesta in On the Road: " It was beautiful in Longmont. Under a tremendous old tree was a bed of green lawn-grass belonging to a gas station. I asked the attendant if I could sleep there, and he said sure; so I stretched out a wool shirt, laid my face flat on it, with an elbow out, and with one eye cocked at the snowy Rockies in the hot sun for just a moment. I fell asleep for two delicious hours, the only discomfort being an occasional Colorado ant."

The day before, I met Junior Burke, chairman of the School of the Disembodied Poetics. In his old Saab, he drove me to Prospect, a town where this gas station in ruins was located. There, we find Dan Boord, producer and professor at the Univ. of Colorado, and Luis Valdovino, his assistant. They are producing a film, Kerouac's On the Road Now: Artists and Writers respond to Kerouac in the 21st Century.