This song recounts a short visit to Bixby Canyon in Big Sur, California. In the summer of 1960, nearing the end of his career as a Roman candle, Jack Kerouac, poet-hero of the Beat Generation, narrated an existential crisis as he succumbed to the alcoholism that had all at once inspired, plagued, and would in many ways come to spectacularly define him. 

That narrative became one of Kerouac's final books, entitled Big Sur, complete with vivid and horrifying accounts of alcohol withdrawal and its famed delirium tremens.Gibbard sings about following Kerouac's road from San Francisco to the craggy coast of Big Sur, where he retraces the legendary poet's penultimate steps, if not the behavior which would finally lead to his early demise.

Source: YouTube Video