Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: "In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is." The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. The squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside--a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.

One day in 1978, William Least Heat-Moon found himself without a job and without a wife. He gets into his truck and heads east from his home of Columbia, Missouri, to see the United States, and write about what he sees. His goal is to stick to the "Blue Highways," the small roads on the Atlas that are colored blue, in contrast to the red interstates. His route is roughly circular, heading down the eastern seaboard and then across the southernmost regions of America's desert country, then up through the Sierra Nevadas, over the topmost edge of the Great Plains, into New England--and back home. This route, he explains, borrows something from Native American traditions about journeys, like all things, being shaped as wheels. (Perhaps it's best that we pass over the speciously Native name William Trogdon has passed down to him from his grandfather, the original Heat-Moon, or that he names the truck 'Ghost-Dancing.')

Or maybe it's just the way things shake out. At the end of his journey, Heat-Moon travels through a hedge maze planted by utopianists in New Harmony, Indiana, but the "true" path is worn so thoroughly into the dirt that "knowing the way made traveling perfectly meaningless." The wonder inherent in the journey's program is that there is no program at all, unless it is to investigate the places in the Atlas whose names token strangeness and mystery: Nameless, Tennessee; Othello, New Jersey; Dime Box, Texas. Heat-Moon's gift as a traveler is the way he gets people in these places to open up to him, as if they have been waiting their whole lives for someone to come by and ask how it is a place gets a name like "Nameless." Over and over again, an inquiry at a diner leads Heat-Moon to some superannuated resident who represents the repository of a place's history, which along the Blue Highways, always seems to be a diminishing resource. And once he's granted access, Heat-Moon has a gift for capturing the small, specific things that turn a person into a character, like the woman who listens to the radio hospital report each day, faithfully recording a register of the region's deaths, or the woman who trades between her glasses marked NEAR and the ones marked FAR. As Heat-Moon remarks at one point, "A person shows himself in the way he opens an orange."

I loved, loved, loved this book. I felt like it was the kind of book I had been looking for for a long time: a travelogue about America--next time you're in a bookstore, count how many of the travel books are about Italy or the French Riviera and how many are about Missouri--that tries to take in the whole of this massive, messy, melodramatic country. Heat-Moon can't see all of it, of course, but his circular route circumscribes it, and somehow contains it; when it's over, there's no doubt that he has "seen America," or come as close to a true fulfillment as possible of the phrase. What he finds is sometimes hostile, sometimes violent, sometimes troubled--see the way he asks everyone he comes across near Selma, Alabama, white or black, what's changed in the decade since the famous march--but it's impossible to come away with anything but love and wonder for the nation as project, in which we are all collaborators. I was hooked, of course, from the first section, when Heat-Moon travels through my own home state of North Carolina. He goes from the mountains to Manteo (where I can tell you first-hand that the locals are still arguing about how high a hotel should be permitted to be), and in between, the sleepy, clay-baked towns of the Piedmont where I grew up. Some of these places, the thought of spending an hour in them makes my skin crawl--and yet, Heat-Moon's account brought up stores of bittersweet affection I barely knew I possessed.

Heat-Moon can write. A lot of people can, even those who write travelogues. Perhaps the writing here feels different than, say, the writing of Paul Theroux because Heat-Moon is not interested in treating this journey sociologically. In Theroux's book about the South, he comes off like an alien on Earth. But Heat-Moon is implicated in his own journey; by searching America he searches for himself, and so his prose benefits not just from talent but from wisdom as well. Of a group of children playing on a Civil War battlefield, he observes, "Even though Titans and Tridents and MX's have not made 'the red business,' as Whitman called it, a thing of the past, they have eliminated future battlefield parks where boys can play at war--unless scientist find means to hang monuments in the sky." Taking water from a reservoir that has covered up a cemetery, he writes, "In my splashing, I broke the starlight. And then I too drank from the grave." And here is a sentence that captures the heart of the road trip, in words that stopped me cold: "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."

As with every journey, Heat-Moon finds that he comes back to himself in the end: "If the circle had come full turn, I hadn't. I can't say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn't known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know." Traveling doesn't fix you; maybe it doesn't even change you. But the experience of travel stands alone, an act of unparalleled seeing: In a season on the blue roads, what had I accomplished? I hadn't sailed to the Atlantic in a washtub, or crossed the Gobi by goat cart, or bicycled to Cape Horn. In my own country, I had gone out, had met, had shared. I had stood as witness."