Read Blue Highways and Fall in Love With People Again

When I was a senior in high school, I came up with an oddly specific career goal. I wanted to travel dusty back roads in New Mexico, searching for people with interesting stories. I’d interview those people and turn their stories into museum exhibits.

I have yet to do exactly that, although I came close enough to satisfy me when I profiled alumni for various magazines at the University of St. Thomas.

Part of the inspiration behind my dream was the book Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. The book was one of many I plucked off my parents’ bookshelves during my adolescence. It soon became one of my favorite works of nonfiction. While part of what moved me was the author’s description of places, his encounters with strangers meant the most to me.

Ever wanted to run away from it all?

As he notes in his 1999 Afterward, Least Heat-Moon had thought about traveling across the United States without using a federal highway a few years before his trip. The dream was delayed by obligations, but in 1978 a series of circumstances — he was separated from his wife and had lost his job — gave him the final push to pursue his project.

Although Least Heat-Moon was traveling both to pursue a dream and reboot his life, his story speaks to anyone with the urge to explore new places. Even if we can’t leave everything behind for a few months, we can at least ride along with the author.

Least Heat-Moon takes us to the hidden corners of the U.S.

By traveling the “blue highways” — the rambling routes that many drivers abandoned after federal freeways were created to move people quickly from place to place — he largely avoided the big cities, visiting small towns instead. Sometimes he stopped at a town because it was along his route. Other times he went out of his way to visit a town simply because he liked the name.

Dime Box, Texas, is not the funniest town name in America. Traditionally, that honor belongs to Intercourse, Pennsylvania. I prefer Scratch Ankle, Alabama, Gnawbone, Indiana, or even Humptulips, Washington. Nevertheless, Dime Box, as a name, caught my ear, so that’s where I headed the next morning out of College Station.

Much of Blue Highways is about place. Least Heat-Moon writes beautifully about the towns and landscapes he travels through. Some of it he loves, some of it he hates, but it all makes for good reading.

Wartburg, on the edge of the dark Cumberlands, dripped in a cold mist blowing down off the knobs. Cafes closed, I had no choice but to go back into the wet mountain gloom. Under massive walls of black shale hanging above the road like threats, the highway turned ugly past Frozen Head State Park; at each trash dumpster pullout, soggy sofas or chairs lay encircled by dismal, acrid smoke from smoldering junk. Golden Styrofoam from Big Mac containers blew about as if Zeus had just raped Danae. Shoot the Hamburglar on sight.

But it’s the people who really make the book

While the author says more about what he sees and thinks than who he talks to, his conversations with people from across the U.S. are the true heart of the book. I don’t think that’s just true for me as a reader. When Least Heat-Moon includes photos, they are always photos of people he talked to, not photos of landscapes he traveled through. That hints that the people were the heart of the journey in his eyes, too.

Least Heat-Moon is a realist; not everyone he talks to is a likable person, and he doesn’t pretend they are. Nevertheless, many of the people are so enjoyable to “hear” through his words that they will make you want to sit down and start up with a conversation with a complete strange. I say this as an introvert who usually needs a writing project to get me to talk to strangers, as much as I enjoy listening to them.

The people Least Heat-Moon converses with give him advice. (He meets a metallurgical engineer who tells him, “I notice that you use work and job interchangeably. Oughten to do that. A job’s what you force yourself to pay attention to for money. With work, you don’t have to force yourself.”) They teach him things, telling him about hang-gliding or, most memorably, taking him out on a fishing trawler. They tell him stories. (In Hachita, New Mexico, one man talks about being near Alamogordo when an atomic bomb was tested.)

For me, the best parts of the book are the times when Least Heat-Moon connects with people who are very different from himself — something many of us hope for in a time when we feel hopelessly divided. One of my favorite encounters is between the author and Arthur O. Bakke, a hitchhiking Seventh-Day Adventist who dedicated his life to telling other people about Jesus following a frightening car accident. His earnestness scares many people off, including, at first, the author, though he offers Bakke a ride and eventually engages him in conversation about his calling. On their second day together, Bakke and Least Heat-Moon have an exchange consisting largely of quotations from the Bible on Bakke’s side and from Walt Whitman on the author’s side. Neither changes his point of view, but the discussion is friendly. Least Heat-Moon writes:

He [Bakke] lived clean: mind, body, way of life. Hegel believed that freedom is knowledge of one’s necessity, and Arthur O. Bakke … was a free man hindered only by his love and conviction. And that was just as he wanted it. I don’t know whether he had been chosen to beat the highways and hedges, but clearly he had chosen to. Despite doctrinal differences, he reminded me of a Trappist monk or a Hopi shaman. I liked Arthur. I liked him very much.

Least Heat-Moon’s journey may have occurred more than 40 years ago, but it’s exactly the sort of thing we need to be reading now.