Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  “I like them. I like them very much.”

  “Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren’t just will and thoughts. We’re also sand and wind and thunder. Rain. The seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things. That’s why we have so many songs of creation to remind us where we came from. If the fourth world forgets that, we’ll disappear in the wilderness like the third world, where people decided they had created themselves.”

  “Pride’s the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins in old Christian theology.”

  “It’s kahopi to set yourself above things. It causes divisions.”

  Fritz had to go to class. As we walked across campus, I said, “I guess it’s hard to be a Hopi in Cedar City—especially if you’re studying biochemistry.”

  “It’s hard to be a Hopi anywhere.”

  “I mean, difficult to carry your Hopi heritage into a world as technological as medicine is.”

  “Heritage? My heritage is the Hopi Way, and that’s a way of the spirit. Spirit can go anywhere. In fact, it has to go places so it can change and emerge like in the migrations. That’s the whole idea.”

  5

  A THIRD of the land mass of earth is desert of one kind or another. After my bout with the mountain, I found that a comforting statistic as I started across the Escalante Desert west of Cedar City. Utah 56 went at the sagebrush flats seriously, taking up big stretches before turning away from anything.

  A car whipped past, the driver eating and a passenger clicking a camera. Moving without going anywhere, taking a trip instead of making one. I laughed at the absurdity of the photographs and then realized I, too, was rolling effortlessly along, turning the windshield into a movie screen in which I, the viewer, did the moving while the subject held still. That was the temptation of the American highway, of the American vacation (from the Latin vacare, “to be empty”). A woman in Texas had told me that she often threatened to write a book about her family vacations. Her title: Zoom! The drama of their trips, she said, occurred on the inside of the windshield with one family crisis after another. Her husband drove a thousand miles, much of it with his right arm over the backseat to hold down one of the children. She said, “Our vacations take us.”

  She longed for the true journey of an Odysseus or Ishmael or Gulliver or even a Dorothy of Kansas, wherein passage through space and time becomes only a metaphor of a movement through the interior of being. A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end. What’s more, as John le Carré, in speaking of the journey of death, said, “Nothing ever bridged the gulf between the man who went and the man who stayed behind.”

  Within a mile of the Nevada stateline, the rabbit brush and sage stopped and a juniper forest began as the road ascended into cooler air. I was struck, as I had been many times, by the way land changes its character within a mile or two of a stateline. I turned north on U.S. 93, an empty highway running from Canada nearly to Mexico. I’m just guessing, but, for its great length, it must have fewer towns per mile than any other federal highway in the country. It goes, for example, the length of Nevada, more than five hundred miles, passing through only seventeen towns—and that’s counting Jackpot and Contact.

  Pioche, one of the seventeen, was pure Nevada. Its elevation of six thousand feet was ten times its population; but during the peak of the mining boom a century ago, the people and the feet above sea level came to the same number. The story of Pioche repeats itself over Nevada: Indian shows prospector a mountain full of metal; prospector strikes bonanza; town booms for a couple of decades with the four “G’s”: grubstakes, gamblers, girls, gunmen (seventy-five people died in Pioche before anyone died a natural death); town withers. By 1900, Pioche was on its way to becoming a ghost town like Midas, Wonder, Bullion, Cornucopia. But, even with the silver and gold gone, technological changes in the forties made deposits of lead and zinc valuable, and cheap power from Boulder Dam (as it was then) kept Pioche alive.

  A citizen boasted to me about their “Million Dollar Courthouse”—a plain yet pleasing century-old fieldstone building sitting high on the mountainside—albeit a little cynically, since construction cost a fraction of that; but through compound interest and refinancing, the price finally hit a million. The courthouse was condemned three years before the mortgage was paid off.

  The highway went down into a narrow and immensely long, thunder-of-hooves valley, then, like a chalkline, headed north, running between two low mountain ranges, the higher eastern one still in snow. A sign: NEXT GAS 80 MILES. In the dusk, the valley showed no evidence of man other than wire fences, highway, and occasional deer-crossing signs that looked like medieval heraldic devices: on a field of ochre, a stag rampant, sable. The signs had been turned into colanders by gunners, almost none of whom hit the upreared bucks.

  Squat clumps of white sage, wet from a shower out of the western range, sweetened the air, and gulches had not yet emptied. Calm lay over the uncluttered openness, and a damp wind blew everything clean. I saw no one. I let my speed build to sixty, cut the ignition, shifted to neutral. Although Ghost Dancing had the aerodynamics of an orange crate, it coasted for more than a mile across the flats. When it came to a standstill, I put it back in gear and left it at roadside. There was no one. Listening, I walked into the scrub. The desert does its best talking at night, but on that spring evening it kept God’s whopping silence; and that too is a desert voice.

  I’ve read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn’t believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both. Galileo proved that the rotation and revolution of the earth give stars their apparent movements. But on that night his evidence wouldn’t hold. Any sensible man, lying on his back among new leaves of sage, in the warm sand that had already dried, even he could see Arcturus and Vega and Betelgeuse just above, not far at all, wheeling about the earth. Their paths cut arcs, and there was no doubt about it.

  The immensity of sky and desert, their vast absences, reduced me. It was as if I were evaporating, and it was calming and cleansing to be absorbed by that vacancy. Whitman says:

  O to realize space!

  The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,

  To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying clouds, as one with them.

  On the highway a car came and went, sounding a pitiful brief whoosh as it ran the dark valley. When I drove back onto the road, I saw in the headlights a small desert rodent spin across the pavement as if on wheels; from the mountains, my little machine must have looked much the same. Ahead hung the Big Dipper with a million galaxies, they say, inside its cup, and on my port side, atop the western range, the evening star held a fixed position for miles until it swung slowly around in front of me and then back to port. I had followed a curve so long I couldn’t see the bend. Only Vesper showed the truth. The highway joined U.S. 6—from Cape Cod to Long Beach, the longest federal route under one number in the days before interstates—then crossed the western mountains. Below lay the mining town of Ely.

  Not everything that happens in Ely happens at the Hotel Nevada, but it could. The old place is ready for it. But that night the blackjack tables were empty, the slots nearly so, and the marbleized mirrors reflected the bartender’s slump and a waitress swallowing a yawn. Yet I did see these things:

  Item: a woman, face as blank as a nickel slug, pulling dutifully on the slot handles. She had stood before the gears so many times she herself had become a mechanism for reaching, dropping, pulling. Her eyes were dark and unmoving as if unplugged. The periodic jangle of change in the winner’s cup moved her only to reach into the little coffer without looking and deposit the coins again.

  Item: a man moseyed in wearing leather from head to toe; attempting cowpuncher macho, he looked more like a two-legged first baseman’s mitt. With him a bored blonde. “I’m a very competitive person
. I’m in it to win,” he said, and the blonde yawned again.

  Item: in a glass case hung a cross-section of bristlecone pine. At its center a card said: 3000 B.C. BUILDING OF THE PYRAMIDS. A seedling today could be alive in the year 7000. That put a perspective on things.

  Over another beer I watched faces that would be lucky to see A.D. 2000. When I left, a man in a white goatee whispered, “No games of chance, cowboy?”

  “Haven’t finished losing the first one,” I said.

  6

  TRADITION persists in Nevada. You can see it, for example, in the whorehouses of Ely. Prostitution is legal in White Pine County because miners, in order to work efficiently in the ground digging for this and that, traditionally require whores.

  The next morning, I overfilled my gas tank, splattering no-lead around, because I was eavesdropping on a conversation about the going price of a trick. A man with a white beard (there are more per-capita white beards in Nevada than any state other than Alaska) said to a tourist with a prissy little mustache à la mode, “I don’t know all the prices, but I heard girls at the Big Four are getting twenty-five simoleons for a straight.”

  Another white-beard said, “Used to be ten.”

  “Hell, it used to be five. We got old just in time, didn’t we, Boyd? Could you do a dollar’s worth of damage now?”

  “Couldn’t do a lick of damage.”

  A young man replacing a wiper on the tourist’s Camaro said, “A lick’s all either of you could do. You coots keep your jeans zipped. Last night couple girls got to swinging knives because one had more hours on her check.”

  “Calling them ‘hours’ now, are they?” Boyd asked.

  The tourist, trying to be one of the men, said, “Got a friend in Denver whose wife charges him five bucks a jump. She’s buying furniture with it.”

  “Now that’s real whoring,” Boyd said. “These girls are just trying to make a living. Why don’t your friend take on the neighbors over the back fence. She could buy a Florida vacation too.”

  When I went to the road again, clouds obscured the sun and a damp wind came out of the north. The mountainsides along highway 50 west of Ely were shot through with abandoned mining tunnels, the low entrances propped open by sagging timbers; they were the kind of old-time mines that Walter Brennan might come limping out of, chortling his crazy laugh. Magpies, looking like crows dressed for a costume party, swooped from fencepost to post and flicked wings in the mist. The highway was a long, silver streak of wet. Up into the Pancake Mountains, driving, driving, wishing the day would dry off—after all, this was the desert. But the sky remained dark as dusk.

  I looked out the side window. For an instant, I thought the desert looked back. Against the glass a reflection of an opaque face. I couldn’t take my attention from that presence that was mostly an absence. Whitman:

  This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,

  This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

  Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he’s going or to understand what he sees? Hoping to catch onto things, at least for a moment, I was only following down the highways a succession of images that flashed like blue sparks. Nothing more.

  The experience of the desert anchorite Saint Anthony is typical of men who go off into deserts: hunger, solitude, and vastness engender not awareness or redemption so much as phantasmagoria. Under desert bushes Saint Anthony saw naked girls, behind stones dragons, and in shadows the deformed demons of Satan. My guess is that he was finding the consequence of his own imagination.

  I had only a vacancy of face on the window, so maybe a simple slice of salami would dispel it. At Hickison Summit, a long rise formerly called “Ford’s Defeat” because a Model T needed to be pulled up it by real horsepower, I stopped at a wayside set back in a box canyon of wet juniper and sage. The scent of plants saturated the mist. Alexander the Great, I’ve heard, was preserved in honey, Lord Nelson in brandy, and Jesus in aloe and myrrh. If I can choose, I’ll take my eternity in essence of sage and juniper.

  After a sandwich and some wine, I walked up the canyon. In the evergreens, a pipping of invisible birds and the slow drip of rain. The stones were wet through and through, but their blanched surfaces didn’t glisten; even the desert rocks seemed designed to hold moisture.

  Wind and water had cut the canyon wall into peculiarly sensuous shapes, and on rocks the elements had left blank, Indians of a thousand years ago carved sacred designs. The Bureau of Land Management had fenced off the petroglyphs, but stick figures, concentric circles, and rectangles stood out clearly from the damp stone. To the Indian, these cuttings were not pictures or objects so much as events: they carried life.

  At the west end, where the fence came close to a ritualistic chiseling, I reached over and traced my finger along an incised abstraction now polished by years of hands. A cryptic engraving. Then I saw that the design wasn’t at all abstract, but rather a graphic rendering of a female pudendum, a glyph even Cro-Magnons carved. In a time so long ago no descendant can remember any of it, an Indian had cut his desire, or coming of age, or hope for regeneration into the pink sandstone. It was as if I touched another dimension—a long skein of men, events, places. It was as if I had reused the image.

  I walked back to the Ghost and drove to the highway. The sky began to open and the mist to dissipate. On the map I noticed a thermal spring to the south. I wandered around side roads before Spencer’s Hot Springs appeared on a knoll under the snowy Toquima Mountains east of Austin. When I saw the blue pools steaming, there was no question in my mind. With only five Nevadans to the square mile (in actuality many fewer when you discount Las Vegas and Reno), I figured I could get by undisturbed. Behind a cover of thistle and spiny hopsage, I stripped and dished up the hot water, let it cool slightly, then poured buckets of it over me. I even slapped on hot, gritty, blue-gray mud to loosen the sinews. Then I rinsed clean as men before must have done, dumping over me water warmed by the molten heart of the earth.

  7

  THEY hanged a horsethief three times one day in Austin, Nevada, because the hangman couldn’t get the length of rope adjusted properly; but he was a conscientious public official and kept at it until he got it right. About the only thieving going on now was syphoning gasoline out of automobiles by people who came through at night and found the stations closed. After dark, the next gas was a couple of hours away.

  Austin, in a canyon on the west slope of the Toiyabe Mountains, was a living ghost town: forty percent living, fifty percent ghost, ten percent not yet decided. It was the seat of Connecticut-sized Lander County mainly because only one other place, Battle Mountain, could you honestly call a town. But now Battle Mountain, with six times the population, thanks to the interstate and new power plant, wanted the government up there, where old mines were starting to produce again as the price of silver rose. Time was working against Austin. Once the county seat went, so would Austin, they said. A man commented: “We’ll be all but finished down here. Twenty-five years ago a fella wrote a book about us called The Town That Died Laughing. Stick your head out the window and listen to all that laughing. You ask me, I don’t believe one damned bit in change.”

  On three sides of town, prospect holes riddled the mountains and dripped out mine tailings like ulcerated wounds; to the west, several hundred feet down, lay a flat desert valley disappearing into the Shoshone Mountains on the horizon. Main Street, also U.S. 50, made a straight and steep run through Austin, then down the mountain and off across the desert. The side streets were hard-packed, oily sand, some with gradients that would test a donkey, and the rutted sidewalks, washing down the slope, still had their Old West canopies. Because Austin is without level land, many of the houses had been built into terraced cutouts so that from their porches people looked down onto the roofs of buildings along Main Street.

  I liked Austin. The house chimneys slipped a wispy smoke from juniper hearth fires, and the cracked brick and stone of th
e storefronts, more or less, had been left alone. An 1890 photograph showed things little changed other than the defunct one-car railroad running up Main. Here, too, the Nevada story: 1862, a Pony Express rider looking for a lost horse finds a rock loaded with silver ore; 1865, six thousand people and as many mining and milling companies, hundreds of them fraudulent; 1878, the mines virtually played out; a century later, three hundred people—about the same number as in the old cemetery at the edge of the mountain, where the names were English, Polish, Italian.

  In a small backroom with walls, ceiling, and floor going off at a variety of angles, not one of which was ninety degrees, I had a hamburger. After dinner I walked the town over, but the damp night got to me, and I went into Clara’s Golden Club—one of six bars—to shake the chill. It was a fine, worn place with trophy heads (the dusty deer wore a tie); against the east wall stood a century-old backbar supported by four Corinthian columns of mahogany. The silver on the mirror had cracked apart, breaking the faces that watched from it, and sections of brass bar rail were scuffed through.

  Clara, toes snugged under a drowsing sheep dog, wore a shapeless lavender sweater and a clerk’s green visor to hold back her gray hair. She wrapped coins at the empty blackjack table. Behind her a sign:

  NO ONE UNDER 21 NEAR TABLE

  MIN $1.00 FINE MAX $5.00

  The way her shoulders bent over the clinking coins brought to mind Madame Defarge, knitting needles clicking ceaselessly, overseeing the fates of men.

  I ordered a draft. Everyone at the bar—cattlemen, sheepmen, miners—wore the Nevada uniform: a down vest. Periodically, someone threw a coin on top of the ten-foot backbar. I asked a man, whose brow opened and closed like a concertina as he talked, what was going on.

  “Crazy,” he said. “They been doing that to bring luck for years. No telling how many silver dollars behind that mirror. Who knows what else? One time, a double-eagle was the smallest piece of change you got in Austin.” He shifted around to talk. “Go out to the mountain edge and look at Stokes Castle. Everything’s falling down now, but you can get an idea of the money we used to have here. Took fifty million dollars in silver ore out of these mountains before they went empty.”