Book Review: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

With his marriage, work, and life in shambles in the late 1970s, William Least Heat-Moon decided to go on a road trip across America. Starting from his home in Columbia, Missouri, he headed east to the North Carolina coast, then south to Louisiana, west across Texas and New Mexico, north through Utah and California to Oregon, then east along the Canadian border through the Great Lakes region and back to the east coast in Maine. He continued south to Maryland and headed west back to Missouri. 

The plan for the trip was to take only the "blue highways," i.e. not the interstates that were marked in red on his atlas, but the lesser by-ways marked in blue. He had a converted van with a bed in the back and some storage. He called it Ghost Dancing and it was his portable home. On the smaller byways he met local people with their life stories, their welcoming and/or prejudice against outsiders, and their interest in history. Some of those histories were nationally famous, like his conversations about Martin Luther King's freedom march in Selma, Alabama. Others were of local interest, like how some small towns wound up with strange names like Nameless, Tennessee, or Dime Box, Texas. He often went to local bars for conversation and to local diners (how many paper calendars they had on the wall was an indication of how local/good they were) for a taste of local cooking. He often had run-ins with police who were concerned about his intentions and his semi-vagrant status (also, he parked unintentionally in some odd spots). 

Like many road trips, some parts of this book were very interesting and other parts were somewhat boring. His writing style is very easygoing and he loves to quote Walt Whitman. He has plenty of other literary and cultural knowledge that liven up the text and his encounters with others, especially the occasional school teacher. With the episodic encounters, some are naturally more interesting than others. I found some parts of the text dragged, like an extended description of him going deep-sea fishing on the New England coast (I had flashbacks of the whaling details and cetacean biology from Moby Dick).

Mildly recommended.

For more commentary, check out A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast #261.