Blue Highways

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Off the Interstates for the Backroads

One of my favorite things is to spend a few days roaming the backroads. There’s little traffic, usually gorgeous scenery, and often some fascinating people.  Although it’s always good to get back home, there’s also a little wistfulness that the trip is over.  That’s exactly what you get with William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways.

With his marriage dissolving and his job going south, the author jumped in his blue van called Ghost Dancer and made a complete circuit of the United States.  Avoiding the freeways as much as possible, the bulk of his travel took him on the backroads—that is, those highways depicted on many roadmaps in blue.

Travel Companions

Heat Moon’s personal problems are not the focus of his book.  While providing a subtle context for his travels, most emphasis is on the country he explores and the experience he has with the characters he encounters—people like the monks at the monastery where he rested for awhile; the itinerant Christian missionary who accompanied him for a couple days; and, the runaway teenage hitchhiker whom he delivered safely to her grandmother.

Also accompanying Heat Moon—at least in his thoughts—are poet Walt Whitman and the native American holy man Black Elk. Quotes from both are interspersed throughout the narrative during the author’s moments of introspection.

Heat Moon’s narrative flows naturally, enabling you to easily immerse yourself in his journey. He has an expansive vocabulary, and likes to throw in a good descriptive, but obscure, term occasionally that may have you reaching for a dictionary.  But unlike some of his later work, this style doesn’t interrupt that easy flow.

A Spiritual Update to Travels With Charley?

Blue Highways could serve as an update to Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley.  Published in 1982—twenty years after Steinbeck’s classic—you might spot some fundamental changes in the American countryside and culture.  Further, Heat Moon often provides people’s names and locations when he writes about them.  If you’re really curious, information on these people’s progress over the last 40 years is often available with a simple internet search.

Speaking of progress, Heat Moon didn’t fare badly himself. Although he didn’t save his marriage or job, Blue Highways spent almost 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.  Besides the boost to his income, the book launched a successful writing career that spanned decades.

Even if you’re not that interested in traveling the backroads, Heat Moon’s stories offer something for just about everyone. It’s a reminder that life is often sweeter when you exit the interstate, and spend quality time on the Blue Highways.

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Quotes

When memory is too much, turn to the eye.

I wondered why it’s always those who live on little who are the ones to ask you to dinner.

A rule of the blue road:  be careful going in search of adventure—it’s ridiculously easy to find.

North Dakota up here was a curveless place; not just the roads, but land, people too, and the flight of birds.  Things were angular:  fenceposts against the sky, the line of a jaw, the ways of mind, the lay of crops.

In a hotel room at the geographical center of North America, a neon sign blinking red through the cold curtains, I lay quietly like a small idea in a vacant mind.

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