On the Road: Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Sal took a bus through Pennsylvania and Ohio all the way to Chicago. He walked around the city, thinking about “all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about.”

Sal took a bus out of Chicago and then started to hitchhike again. A woman picked him up and took him all the way to Iowa, where Sal saw the Mississippi River for the first time in his life. Stopped in a small Iowa town, Sal ate apple pie and ice cream in a bus station. He notes that this was practically all he ate during his trip west.

Sal took another bus and then got picked up by a truck driver, who took him as far as Des Moines. He stayed in an inn near the railroad tracks and when he woke up the next morning, he says that he didn’t know who he was. He felt like a stranger, “at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”

Sal saw some beautiful girls in Iowa, but says he was in a hurry to get to Denver, where Carlo Marx, Dean, and Chad King were, as well as other friends. Sal continued hitchhiking, and soon met up with another traveling New Yorker, an Irish man named Eddie. Sal says he liked Eddie because “he was enthusiastic about things.”

Sal and Eddie got on a bus and made their way into Nebraska, where Sal saw his first real cowboy. They started hitchhiking again and met a cowboy who had two cars he was driving back to Montana, and needed help driving one of them about a hundred miles, where he would meet his wife. Eddie and Sal agreed to help. Eddie drove one car, while Sal and the cowboy were in the other, and Eddie sped around ninety miles per hour.

The cowboy told Sal that he hated Nebraska and told him to come see “God’s country,” Montana, sometime. They stopped and Sal and Eddie ate in a diner. A big, “old-timer Nebraska farmer,” came in and Sal was fascinated by him, calling him the personification of the West.

Sal and Eddie continued journeying with the cowboy and then found other people to hitchhike with. They got to a town called Shelton, which Eddie remembered he had been in once before. It started raining, and Sal gave Eddie a wool plaid shirt. As they waited for a ride, a man offered to give them both jobs in a carnival, but they declined, wanting to continue their respective journeys.

At last, a farmer’s trailer pulled up to Sal and Eddie, and its driver said that he could only take on one passenger. Without saying a word, Eddie hopped on and left Sal behind. Sal felt like he was just about to give up on getting a ride, when a car stopped and picked him up.