I went into winter break imaging something of a hibernation, curling up into my cave and staying there until I had forgotten what school and the world felt like, filling my head with whimsical and totally impractical ideas, and reading books that, while avoiding hedonism, would in no way be applicable to the generation of income.

Practical is something I thankfully managed to avoid, but in the course of flirting with inefficient, most-definitely-not-on-time thinking, I stumbled upon Jack Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums,” fittingly borrowed a year ago and stashed in a backpack.

I had been warned about the dangers of this book – that it is impossible to read it without breaking your quotidian routine, or at least feeling guilty about not doing so – and so I figured that break would be, as far as college goes, a safe time to experiment.

Kerouac’s autobiographical book chronicles his transformation from a contradictorily hard-line Hinayana (conservative, in a sense) Buddhist, nature-ignorant, port-saturated city boy to, through his friendship with Zen practitioner and nature poet Gary Snyder, a more minimalist, meditative figure. Snyder, Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg live in shacks in the backyards of willing San Francisco hosts, composing poetry, studying Eastern philosophy and religions, drinking tea, and throwing arty parties, but, as the occasional disgust with the pollution of urban life builds up, they foray into nature, embracing silence and the empty space inside their own heads, the immense satisfaction of simple foods processed by an exhausted body, and the thawing off of the cosmopolitan sloth/stress continuum.

What appealed to me about the book is probably what appealed to the generation of followers Kerouac’s writings developed – the thought of hitchhiking off into nothingness and everythingness, spurning the traditional American path and searching for something deeply personal, or the abolition of personhood (enter the Zen).

But for all Kerouac’s “Zen,” he still died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 47, and many of the hippies who followed his lead withered off into partially conscious leftovers of the party that, despite an overwhelming sense of positivity, accomplished little more than the degradation of their neuron networks.

So I decided to set my goals a bit lower, but nonetheless, as I had been warned, this book was not one to permit complacency.

I remembered a casual offer to backpack through Baja with as little foresight and planning as possible, and with Kerouac sitting ambiguously on my shoulder (not sure whether it was the left or right) and wagging his finger at my plans of hibernation, I called my friend and we set off for the unknown.

Kerouac wanted to escape the typical American life path, which he saw as not only boring but furthering the suffering inherent in life (Buddhists, and he in his book, refer to the network of desire and suffering as “samsara.”) While this idea – that is, the search for alternative lifestyles – was revolutionary and magnetic at the time, this generation is more about involvement with the world we wish to change rather than the creation of a separate one.

Regardless, this world is anything but perfect, and what I wanted from my much more temporary escape was to avoid the hyperstimulated, hypo-meaningful morass of mass-produced and predigested television-propelled thoughts that cloud clear thinking and the occasional Zen-like silence.

So after a 24-hour bus ride to La Paz, capital of southern Baja, we met a Canadian couple that drew a map on a napkin of how to get to the 400-person village of Cabo Pulmo. Armed only with the quickly fading map, we hitchhiked into our own tamer version of the unknown.

We met Alvino, a 70-year-old ex-federale who sleeps with his cook because his fifth wife is too drunk to make it home most of the time, and who took great joy in teaching us dirty words. We were taken in by a family whose daughter played us songs she wrote on guitar, taxing our broken Spanish. We got travel advice from people warm enough to care about strangers, let alone ones looking lost and strapped to backpacks. We woke up in a tent on beaches with pelicans floating in the water 10 feet from where we passed out.

I needed to restore some of my faith in humanity and the possibility of freedom from media, Kerouac wanted revelations of the soul. But whatever it is that you need to escape, or just see from a different angle, the one thing that hasn’t changed is the way to do it. ... As he says, “Go boy, go.”