Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

First published: 1982

Type of work: Travel writing

Principal Personages:

• William Least Heat-Moon, the author, who is traveling around the United States
• Brother Patrick, ,
• Thurmond and “Miss Ginny ”Watts, ,
• Porfirio Sanchez, ,
• Kendrick Fritz, and
• Arthur O. Bakke, some of the people whom Heat-Moon meets during his travels

Form and Content

One day in the winter of 1978, William Trogdon learned that his part-time job teaching English at Stevens College in Columbia, Missouri, was to end because of declining enrollment. The same day after speaking on the phone with his wife, from whom he had been separated for nine months, he sensed that the chances of a reconciliation with her were unlikely. Lying awake that night, the author recounts, the idea came to him of making a circuit of the back roads of the United States, as much to preserve his dignity as to survey the country’s land and people. Blue Highways is Trogdon’s account of his journey, which began on March 19 and lasted into the summer.

Trogdon was then thirty-eight years old, and he had held various teaching jobs while pursuing a Ph.D. in literature and a bachelor’s degree in photojournalism at the University of Missouri. Although he was not yet a published author, Trogdon’s background in American history and literature, combined with his photographic skills, prepared him to approach contemporary American life from both literary and journalistic perspectives.

Another aspect of Trogdon’s background has particular significance in Blue Highways: his Native American ancestry, which is the source of his authorial name, William Least Heat-Moon. The name is not a pseudonym, since he derives it from a name his father uses, “Heat-Moon,” a Sioux Indian phrase for the month of July. William’s elder brother claimed the name Little Heat-Moon; thus, “Least Heat-Moon” is a complete name to which the author has added his legal first name. Heat-Moon writes in Blue Highways that history has judged a “mixed blood” to be a “contaminated man” who has always had to choose against one of his bloodlines. Although the author rejects this attitude, the history and memory of the conflict of red and white men in America are recurring concerns of his journey in all regions of the country.

The author’s projected itinerary is circular, beginning and ending on his home ground in Missouri. In a modestly equipped van he named “Ghost Dancing”—an allusion to the Plains Indian ceremonies of the 1890’s which sought the return of the old ways of life—Heat-Moon follows the back roads of the United States in search of characteristic and enduring qualities of the land and its people. These roads, once shown as blue lines on highway maps, amount to about three million miles of “bent and narrow rural American two-lane” on which, the author notes, Americans each year spend $626 million in extra fuel dodging potholes. The “blue highways” are for Heat-Moon a seemingly inexhaustible source of historical, topographical, and cartographic anecdotes, but more important, they are places where the author finds that people still have time to talk, to tell stories, and to share their meals with a stranger such as himself.

Each section of Blue Highways is designated by a compass direction giving the general direction of travel. Proceeding clockwise from Missouri, Heat-Moon first heads east, as if in defiance of the country’s linear and westward historical development. His meandering route, shown in a map at the end of the book, takes him first to the North Carolina coast, then south and west to the Gulf coast. In comparison with the westward sections which follow, these are filled more with people and history than with landscape. As Heat-Moon’s journey takes him into the Southwest, his familiarity with character and topography diminish inversely to his need to question his purpose in traveling; these sections blend the author’s moods and his perception of landscape more distinctively than the others do.

As he travels north into Oregon and then eastward over the Rocky Mountains onto the northern plains, a series of encounters on the road leaves the author with a provisional clarification of his self-doubts, and the last third of Blue Highways returns to more objective matters, ranging from the failing water pump in Ghost Dancing to the future of the Atlantic fisheries. For this northern segment of the book the drama of landscape is mostly absent, and Heat-Moon allows his characters more scope to explain themselves in purely biographical terms.

More than sixty visual and textual interjections—including twenty-three of the author’s photographs of some of his most engaging characters—punctuate the flow of Blue Highways. The book is something of a marathon of driving, talking, and looking, and these welcome pauses, which include everything from fragments of poems to lists of wildlife and imaginary headlines reporting the author’s demise in some mishap, are an effective component of Heat-Moon’s storytelling.

Critical Context

Blue Highways is ostensibly a travel diary born of a need for the “tonic of curiosity,” but it is also meditated history and a vehicle for the author’s dissent from some of the norms of American society. Heat-Moon’s principal accomplishment is to have given to his audience a broad and appealingly idiosyncratic perspective of the social landscape of a particular era. At the same time, in explicitly merging the “inner” journey of self-discovery and the “outer” journey of geographical investigation, he has produced a literary work related to ancient as well as modern sources. The journey of Odysseus, who ventures abroad to find his essential self in the challenges of experience, is the prototype in Western culture for this hybrid journey; as Heat-Moon observes of ordinary travel, “passages through space and time becomes only a metaphor for a movement through the interior of being.”

If Heat-Moon’s wit, humor, and irony were less abundant in Blue Highways, one might be tempted to imagine that its subjective, philosophical element was more a literary convention than a documentation of a season in his life, though in interviews following the book’s publication he gives ample reason to accept the authenticity of this aspect of the work. In any case, the textures of social history are perhaps more vividly rendered from the critical perspective of an unresolved personal situation. As in Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), a highly embellished account of a westward journey comparable to part of Heat-Moon’s, the author’s voice must have an edge of skepticism, even of irritability, to which his basically agreeable nature can be contrasted.

With respect to Heat-Moon’s descriptions of natural history, the land, and the people, reference can be made to John Muir’s A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) and to Charles F. Lummis’ A Tramp Across the Continent (1892). For Muir, an introspective naturalist, the observation of flora and fauna was the paramount aspect of his journey, while for Lummis—as one might expect of a journalist— people and local history were more memorable. In more recent fiction and nonfiction writing, William Least Heat-Moon has been compared to figures as diverse as Jack Kerouac, author of the novel On the Road (1957), and Studs Terkel, the writer-broadcaster responsible for several classics of modern American journalism, including Division Street: America (1968), and to John Steinbeck, whose Travels with Charley (1962) is an account of a journey similar to Heat-Moon’s.

In the range and quantity of its historical, social, and natural detail, Blue Highways may be a kind of popular success that can happen only once in a decade or even less often. On a mundane as well as a broadly metaphoric scale, the book addresses concerns that many Americans find compelling. It confirms the sentiment voiced by Robert Frost in a famous poem which ends with the words “the road less traveled by.” Though some critics faulted the style if not the content of Heat-Moon’s social consciousness, none maintained that it was headed in the wrong direction.

Bibliography

America. CXLVIII, April 9, 1983, p. 284.

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Christian Science Monitor. February 11, 1983, p. B1.

Crace, Jim. “Sticking to the Backroads,” in The Times Literary Supplement. No. 4195 (August 26, 1983), p. 902.

Library Journal. CVII, November 1, 1982, p. 2097.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 30, 1983, p. 3.

Lyons, Gene. Review in Newsweek. CI (February 7, 1983), p. 63.

McDowell, Robert. “In Pursuit of the Life Itself,” in The Hudson Review. XXXVI (Summer, 1983), pp. 420-424.

National Review. XXXV, May 13, 1983, p. 580.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII, February 6, 1983, p. 1.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXII, November 5, 1982, p. 64.

Reed, J. D. Review in Time. CXXI (January 24, 1983), p. 63.

Updike, John. “A Long Way Home,” in The New Yorker. LIX (May 2, 1983), pp. 121-126.

Yardley, Jonathan. “Seeing America from the Roads Less Traveled,” in The Washington Post Book World. December 26, 1982, p. 3.