Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

Product Information

Ralph Waldo Emerson advised that one should not go where the path may lead but instead should go where there is no path and leave a trail. The erstwhile Bill Trogdon, who transformed himself into William Least Heat-Moon in observation of his Native-American heritage did just that in his book, Blue Highways: A Journey Into America, using travel as a cleansing ritual after the breakup of his marriage & the loss of his college teaching position, always endeavoring to take the "roads less traveled by", as Robert Frost put it. An energetic and elderly woman on Smith Island in Chesapeake Bay "who makes getting old seem like something to look forward to"; Heat-Moon told me: “Probably not a life such as many people imagine. I, as do we all, come from cosmic dust which, sooner or later, will be my destination. But dust is also a temporary destination, one more way station in what may be eternal movement.” Maps are the only way we know our country is a country, a unified thing instead of a series of fields, forests and cities that go forever. Maps are mystery. You cannot look at the names of the towns and ranges without imagining yourself absorbed in experience — the jagged line of the Sawtooths, the peak of which you know is approached by roads lined with motor courts, or the vein of California’s Highway 1. Along that road, I see myself visiting San Simeon to see where William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies entertained Charlie Chaplin, or that fingernail of coast where William Finnegan still waits for the wave that will carry him to God. An hour with an atlas just makes me want to go.

Blue Highways and Forbes: Listed as number nine of fifteen travel books that "will change the way you see the world." [5] I later read in an obituary of Duffy that his priestly ordination was in 1981. Years after Heat-Moon’s visit, Duffy ended up leaving the monastery to become a diocesan priest, serving happily in Santa Fe, N.M., before dying in 2013 at 78. “I’m just curious,” I asked Heat-Moon, “did the two of you ever talk again after the book came out?” PrairyErth: A Deep Map (1991) is an account of the history and people of Chase County, Kansas. This work introduced the concept of a deep map. Blue Highways is an autobiographical travel book, published in 1982, by William Least Heat-Moon, born William Trogdon.If, at 80, sheltering in place isn’t as disruptive personally, he is concerned about the larger issue of isolation. This is about as good as road trip travelogues get. It is a series of daily vignettes remarkably absent of self-indulgence, a hard thing to steer clear of in a memoir. His stories feel a little dated not because of the writing but because the country has after all changed quite a bit in the past forty years. When Heat-Moon writes about the landscapes his writing is very captivating. The humor in the book comes infrequently so the book feels serious but rarely pretentious. The history of various towns when he chooses to write about them is also top-notch.

And I think that's the root of the issue with BH. Take the title alone -a certain sense of holier-than-thou I-won't-travel-on-your-interstates-ness. In discussing reading this book with other people, one person pointed out that what makes for interesting discovery-road-trip writings are when the character is forced to set out (I'm thinking the early parts of The Glass Castle), rather than "Look at me! I'm going on a journey! -and it's the journey not the destination!" The author of this book is part poet and part philosopher and part Indian. I have liked this book just a little bit less each time I have read it and that is not to say anything against the author. When I first read it I could imagine myself going on his physical journey and I am sure at the time I wished I could do it. Now about 40 years after he wrote the book and not quite that long since I first read the book I have traveled my share of blue highways although most of them were not made of asphalt. I have now come to a time in my life where listening to this book brought an incredible number of memories to mind.The morning after that kneeling prayer, Heat-Moon recorded this bit of conversation in Blue Highways, and I told him that I loved how he hears and remembers the ways that people speak: Albert Camus’ “The Plague,” read in quarantine for the first time, warns us to reset our own priorities It links thematically to the jangling guitars of ‘Land Of The Free’, again revolving around a parent-child dynamic, the setting transposed to America