“Blue Highways” by William Least Heat-Moon

Going around in circles

I was heading toward those little towns that get on the map – if they get on at all – only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi.

Some years ago I visited Mineral Point, Wisconsin – a well-preserved former tin-mining town originally settled by miners from Cornwall. In one of the cafes there, you can get a Cornish dessert called “figgy hobbin” (basically a sort of raisin pastry). You might even be served by a waitress wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “There’s always room for figgy hobbin!” I have been in a lot of places, but I have never seen this dish anywhere else. At least on this side of the ocean, it seems peculiar to this small dot on the map, Mineral Point.

In the course of the three-month journey that formed the basis for Blue Highways: A Journey into America (first published in 1982 and based on travels undertaken in the late 1970s), William Least Heat-Moon drove through Wisconsin, but he didn’t stop for figgy hobbin in Mineral Point. However, he did stop in a lot of other places, and found a lot of things that stood out by their distinctiveness: food items, customs, turns of phrase, ways of life. Blue Highways is, to a large extent, a record of these unique and distinctive things, as well as of the threats to their continuing existence.

Blue Highways is considered enough of a classic of the travel writing genre that it’s been reprinted multiple times and continues to find new readers. It also inspired at least one attempt, about ten years ago, to retrace Heat-Moon’s very long, circular trip around the Lower 48. This fact suggests that it has engendered some lasting devotion, at least among nomadic readers.

Travel writing can be done in a number of ways, but most examples of it seem to fall on a spectrum between two poles. At one pole are serious, heavily researched works by authors who are experts in the places where they travel; they speak the languages, know the history, have the right contacts, and so forth. At the other pole, we find clueless and naïve travelers whose shortcomings provide grist for (usually comical) entertainment. Let’s call the first subgenre “learned” and the second “naïve.” Let’s also allow that a lot of (perhaps most) writers combine aspects of these approaches, with one predominating over the other.

On this spectrum, Blue Highways falls somewhere in the middle, perhaps edging toward the more naïve pole, but with plenty of learned elements. That’s because the authorial camera is focused primarily on local habits and eccentricities previously unknown to the writer, as well as on the author’s personal adventures and misadventures. Heat-Moon might have taken to heart Chesterton’s dictum that “an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered,” which is good advice for travel writing generally.

The book’s title comes from a peculiarity of old road atlases. The most obscure backroads and rural routes were typically colored blue. Heat-Moon’s goal in making his great circular journey was to do it, as much as he could, on these out-of-the-way roads, avoiding freeways, cities, and suburbs to the greatest extent possible. In this way, his journey becomes a comprehensive tour of America’s Outback, which also details the struggle of these places to survive in a world where commercialization and homogenization threaten to wash away almost everything.

Heat-Moon’s initial reason for undertaking this journey was a domestic crisis: he lost his teaching job, and almost at the same time, his marriage broke up. He therefore decided to take the quintessential American step of hitting the road to forget his troubles, while trying to get his life back on track somehow:

A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.

William Least Heat-Moon himself is of English, Irish, and Osage descent.¹ This mixed ancestry proves to be important during his travels. He is particularly alert to signs of the indigenous presence that survived or preceded the European influx. There are two figures, two travelers of the spirit, whom he cites repeatedly: Walt Whitman and Black Elk. He travels in a van which he has named “Ghost Dancing.” Most of the time, he sleeps in the van, usually without incident; sometimes circumstances disrupt his plans.

Lying atop the sleeping bag in the hot night, I heard the first mosquito. I put the screens in place but it was too late. Under the pinching bites I lay sweating and cursing. Unable to stay awake driving, now I couldn’t sleep lying down. I was living someone’s nightmare. “These are the days that must happen to you,” Whitman says.

Blue Highways is a big book (small print, over 400 pages), and like the journey it records, it progresses slowly. However, after you’ve been immersed in it for a while, a pattern emerges. Most of the book consists of three elements:

• Physical descriptions of landscape or townscape

• The author’s culinary adventures in these off-the-beaten-path locations

• Conversations with whatever people he meets, often in local eating establishments

In addition, one sometimes gets other material, often of a historical nature. Heat-Moon goes into topography, economics, religion, and whatever else he needs to set the scene. The following paragraph is a fine encapsulation of the author’s method. We get landscape with a destination at the end; an eating establishment and what we might find there; and eccentric local people, all in a few sentences:

The top of the great scarp, elevation six thousand five hundred feet, lay flat and covered with big ponderosas standing between dirty snow drifts and black pools of snowmelt. I began anticipating Heber [Arizona], the next town. One of the best moments of any day on the road was, toward sunset, looking forward to the last stop. At Heber I hoped for an old hotel with a little bar off to the side where they would serve A-1 on draft under a stuffed moosehead; or maybe I’d find a grill dishing up steak and eggs on blue-rimmed platters. I hoped for people who had good stories, people who sometimes took you home to see their collection of carved peach pits.

As with Leopold Bloom, you find out an awful lot about what goes into William Least Heat-Moon’s stomach. Future historians may find this book to be a good source regarding what rural Americans were eating in various parts of the country around 1980. The great craft beer revolution was yet to take off, so the choices in that field are limited and mediocre. Most of the food is unexceptional – steak and eggs is an old standby; there are the usual pancakes, soups, sandwiches, and other predictables – but sometimes, a surprising bright light goes off:

She served a stack of unheated flour tortillas, butter, and a bowl of green, watery fire that would have put a light in the eyes of Quetzalcoatl. Texans can talk, but nowhere is there an American chile hot sauce, green or red, like the New Mexican versions, with no two recipes the same except for the pyrotechnical display they blow off under the nose. New Mexican salsas are mouth-watering, eye-watering, nose-watering; they clean the pipes, ducts, tracts, tubes; and like spider venom, they can turn innards to liquid.

Use of language – most often, the way local people talk – spices up the book’s style in its own way. It’s hard to forget a line like “We drinks water what come up of his own mind [i.e., naturally, without pumping].” On Chesapeake Bay, oyster fishermen talk “in a quick speech that was part Southern and part Cockney London. All their long i sounds came out as ‘oy,’ but oyster came out as ‘arster’.”

The apex of this quest for obscurity – the Mecca or Holy Grail of the bluest of American highways – is probably best embodied by the “village” of Frenchman, in Nevada. Frenchman sits in the middle of the desert, has a permanent population of four, and serves as a rest and refueling stop for travelers. It boasts a combo café and bar, which is run by a woman and her daughter-in-law. The woman confesses, “I love Frenchman, maybe because no one else does.” Nearby, the US Navy operates a bombing range, which provides free entertainment if you like explosions. (Wikipedia informs me that, a few years after this book came out, the Navy bought out the community and demolished its remaining buildings.)

One reason this book works well is that the human factor goes beyond gabbing with the locals. There is a spiritual and psychological depth to Heat-Moon’s journey, something that arises out of his communion with the landscapes he traverses. When he reaches the end of his travels, he sketches out his route on a map, and is struck by its appearance:

Then I saw a design. There on the map, crudely, was the labyrinth of migration the old Hopis once cut in their desert stone. For me, the migration had been to places and moments of glimpsed clarity. Splendid gifts all.

Just before arriving back home in Missouri, Heat-Moon visits New Harmony, Indiana, a place I visited just last year. This fascinating little town, with a full-time population of less than one thousand, was the scene of two utopian experiments in the nineteenth century. These communities failed, but they left an influence on the subsequent development of the country. One thing Heat-Moon finds in New Harmony is a labyrinth laid out – perhaps coincidentally – in the same shape as the Hopi labyrinth he references above. We don’t know if the author gets his job and/or wife back, but it looks like he does find some new harmony for himself in the end.

1. The author was born William Trogdon; he later adopted the last name Heat-Moon from the term for the seventh month of the year, according to the Siouan peoples. “My father calls himself Heat-Moon, my elder brother Little Heat-Moon. I, coming last, am therefore Least.”