Blue Highways – William Least Heat-Moon, 1982 ★★★★★

America Off the Beaten Path

What makes America? In 1978 a laid-off teacher of Anglo-Sioux ancestry drove across the United States to discover a land that reflected the dynamic, sometimes schizoid, multiplicity of its people.

Named after the secondary highways so-marked on road maps, Blue Highways details the state-by-state experiences of the newly separated and unemployed teacher William Least Heat-Moon. He freely admits he had no clear reason for starting his journey, other than general restlessness. But the book that came from it shows how great things can sometimes come without a clear plan:

A man lives in things and things are moving. He stands apart in such a temporary way it is hardly worth speaking of. If that perception dims egocentrism, that illusion of what man is, then it also enlarges his self, that multiple yet whole part which he has been, will be, is.

Blue Highways is filled with probing insights, scenic descriptions, and intriguing profiles. First and last, it is a travel book, but one that strives to include the territory of the soul as well as the nation Least Heat-Moon travels across in his van, Ghost Dancing.

Some towns retain their history better than others, like Fredericksburg, Texas, above. "Things live on here in the only way the past ever lives – by not dying," he writes. "It wasn’t a town brought back from the edge of history; rather, it was just slow getting there."
Image from https://www.southernliving.com/travel/things-to-do-in-fredericksburg-texas

This works much better than I expected the first time I read it, almost twenty years ago. Re-reading it recently only made those insights hit deeper.

I think this was in large part due to the time gap. “Time is not the traveler’s fourth dimension – change is,” he writes at one point. Change is a constant theme of the book, a theme made more profound reading Blue Highways now, being as it takes place in the 1970s. So much of who and what you encounter in these pages are no more.

I remember Blue Highways popping up in colleges and high schools in the 1980s as a book of substance worth being taught. I think this was less from any cultural or historical purpose than how well it demonstrates the value of first-class literary composition. The chapters are short; each expertly encapsulates a particular person or location Least Heat-Moon encountered with a minimum of verbal fuss.

For example, the opening section takes the author from his Missouri home to Tennessee and Kentucky, where he meets a group of men restoring a centuries-old cabin; a couple turning their home into a boat; and a poor but cheerfully hospitable family who just gave up running a rundown general store in Nameless, Tennessee. 

“We’re hopin’ to sell it to a churchly couple,” Thurmond Watts explains. “Upright people. No athians.”

The route William Least Heat-Moon took across the United States, with some of his most memorable stops marked. He writes: "A rule of the blue road: Be careful going in search of adventure – it’s ridiculously easy to find."
Image from http://www.bluehighwaysrevisited.net/The-Route.html

Least Heat-Moon also offers the first of many lessons of the road:

There is one almost infallible way to find honest food at just prices in blue-highway America: count the wall calendars in a café. 

The book is divided into ten sections, each named after a direction followed in his cross-country circuit. Some of its many dozens of chapters run a few pages, but most are shorter. Stops include a monastery, a hang-glider team, a neglected Revolutionary War battlefield, a Hopi reservation, and the overgrown grave of an ancestor.

I have often wondered how the book came to be. It is presented as a simple trip, yet the lush details offered up, and the four-year gestation period until its 1982 publication, suggests a lot of post-trip research the author does not relate. It is amazing just how much detail Least Heat-Moon gets over about each of his various stops, in a way that seems entirely natural, like here as he crosses a desert highway in Arizona:

I don’t suppose that saguaros mean to give comic relief to the otherwise solemn face of the desert, but they do. Standing on the friable slopes they are quite persnickety about, saguaros mimic men as they salute, bow, dance, raise arms to wave, and grin with faces carved in by woodpeckers. Older plants, having survived odds against their reaching maturity of sixty million to one, have every right to smile.

Traveling through the desert brings out the author's contemplative side: "The desert does its best talking at night, but on that spring evening it kept God’s whopping silence; and that too is a desert voice."
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_Desert

Then there are the people, who provide Least Heat-Moon with amazing insights into their everyday lives and attitudes. A Minnesotan revels in the harsh winters and grueling summers, and in Least Heat-Moon’s discomfort in same:

“One hundred and fifty degrees of temperature is how we keep the riffraff out. When that doesn’t do it, then it’s up to the mosquitoes and leeches.”

As a part-Native American, or, as he puts it, Indian, Least Heat-Moon draws on that side of the American experience, too, though only occasionally. His ethnicity, like that of his country, is not all of one thing. It is thus a jolt when one white man calls him “Tonto,” not just for the casual racism, but for the reminder.

He does often bring up the legendary Lakota Sioux medicine man Black Elk, mostly to contrast the latter’s mystical visions with his own more grounded perspective.

“When the mystical young Black Elk went to the summit of Harney Peak to see the shape of things, he looked down on the great unifying hoop of peoples. I looked down and saw fragments.”

This is particularly so in the American South, which may be the most simultaneously unsettling and engaging section of the entire book. People he encounters there are angry, suspicious, warm, hospitable, effortlessly funny, and in touch with the country’s past in a way other parts of America are not.

The Bonneville Dam in Washington State, which harnesses the once-raging Columbia River. Least Heat-Moon writes: "I don’t think Lewis or Clark or the old Chinooks would care much for Bonneville. But then, like the wild river, they are dead."
Image from https://dlmark.net/gorgebon.htm

Least Heat-Moon writes: Memory is each man’s own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

By contrast, the rest of the United States can’t help but seem a bit empty. This is particularly true in the upper West:

For a state whose name is “mountain,” Montana shows thousands of miles of level prairie.

A state later, North Dakota is even more empty:

If you fired a rifle down the highway, a mile or so east you’d find the spent slug in the middle of the blacktop.

One of the distinctions of this book is in how each section communicates its own mood and attitude, which seems taken from the land and people. For example, the New England section is standoffish and very conscious of history, to the point of obsession.

A New Hampshire syrup farmer explains: “We look at it like this: a corn farmer can eat corn from the same fields his great-grandfather planted, but he can’t eat from the same stalk. But an old syrupin’ family eats from the same tree.”

The author's ride, an Econoline van called Ghost Dancer, is currently stored at the University of Missouri's Museum of Anthropology. "Driving through the washed land in my small self-propelled box...I felt clean and almost disentangled," he writes.
Image from https://liveworkdream.com/2012/10/28/ghost-dancing-in-columbia-missouri/

Over in Louisiana, Least Heat-Moon dines on succulent crawfish at a Cajun cookout and watches a cat and mouse patiently and peacefully wait beside each other for table scraps. He then relates the Cajuns’ complicated history, adding: “On the highway, I wished the British had exiled more Acadians in America if only for their cooking.”

The mood isn’t always so upbeat. Least Heat-Moon was about to get divorced, and a lingering bitterness is a companion of his journey. He talks about “the Indian wars,” his estranged wife being a Cherokee, and about his chronic loneliness and sense of being apart.

At times, he takes umbrage at the people he sees who radiate too much privilege or comfort. Especially the plumper ones, which makes for some uncomfortable laughs when read today:

Her flesh looked as if it had been dumped into her stripy dress the way grain gets dumped into a feed sack. She jarred the lean Shaker lines. I imagined her in the company of Mrs. Butterworth and Betty Crocker and Mr. Coffee, only now to find herself alone.

Minimalism is the rule for Least Heat-Moon, both in diet and writing. I was continually in awe at the craftmanship of his prose.

Though not a religious person, he finds an unspoken transcendence in the everyday lives of those he meets, which he communicates with fervent insistence.

“Some people sit around and wait for the world to poke them,” notes an old Maryland woman. “Well, you have to keep the challenges coming on. Make them up if necessary.”

In Frenchman, Nevada, Air Force bombing runs provide the only local entertainment. "Everything here is important because there isn’t much of it except weather and dust," resident Margaret Chealander tells the author. "Once you see that, you’re not lonely."
Image from https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/nevada/frenchman-mountain-trail

The reader finds something, too, a realization America still can renew the human spirit, by reminding us, in the beauty of her land, the hardness of her ways, and the endurance of her people, that life while not easy offers great things in the littlest moments.

Since Blue Highways, Least Heat-Moon has remained an active travel writer, building on his success with such books as PrairyErth, a deeper exploration of a part of a state (Kansas) he missed in Blue Highways. In the last few years, he has taken a stab at novel-writing, too.

I felt a lot of novelistic creativity in Blue Highways, enough to make me wonder about how much of it was taken from his actual experiences on the road versus recreation months later at a desk. But the authenticity is impossible to deny. There is a challenge and a talent to writing of things the way you experience them, rather than with just-the-facts prose, and Least Heat-Moon gets across the stuff of life in a way that lives still.