Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  “Try spelling Brachiosaurus Bypass or Triceratops Terrace in the morning,” he said.

  Time for the road. People who equate travel with getting the miles behind them love U.S. 2 as it strikes a more or less flat, straight line for a thousand miles across the north. The great ice sheets cut the tops off the hills and dumped glacial debris in the valleys so that nothing interrupts the rush of wind off the east slopes of the Rockies.

  On that May morning the wind came strong at my back, and the square stern of Ghost Dancing served as sail; even resting easy on the accelerator, I blew past clusters of buildings that had got in the way of 2 so they could call themselves towns: Joplin, Rudyard, Hingham, Gildford, Kremlin. Russian settlers, half mad from the vast openness and the sway of prairie grass, thought they saw the Citadel of Moscow. Tractor-trailers, noses to the wind, hammers to the floor, highballed west, drivers rapt in the CB chatter of their cabs. The mountains would slow them, but they had the Great Plains behind.

  What little topographical relief there was came from creeks notching the tablelands. Cottonwoods, like cattle, followed the streambeds for water and escape from the wind. Indian children used to twirl leaves of the holy tree of life into toy tepees, and women made a brew from the inner bark to soothe stomach disorders; sprigs fed Indian ponies in winter, the catkins lured grouse in spring, and in summer everyone searched hollows of the trunks for wild honey. A white, inner pulp furnished a delicacy later called “cottonwood ice cream.” When settlers arrived, they cut the biggest cottonwoods for lumber although it was prone to warping; and Missouri rivermen fueled steamboats with it. White men learned they needed the tree too, so they set out thousands of seedlings, but today the cottonwood still keeps to the streams as if it knows the primogeniture of the grasses.

  Clear Creek, typically, ran full with an earthen goo the ducks could walk more easily than swim, but it was the only surface water for miles. Yet the language of the plains harks to the ocean: pioneers came in “prairie schooners” (some even rigged with sails) and spoke of the “sea of grass” and the “prairie ocean,” and they cured hangovers with calf ballocks they called “prairie oysters.” Maybe the sodbusters saw seascapes in the undulations of the grasses or in the immensity of sky or in the lack of refuge from wind and storm. Perhaps a sea crossing was still in the minds of the newest immigrants. And maybe also, their words expressed a prescient awareness of the tug between coming and going; for the buffalo grass, the wheat and rye spring from the limestone bones of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs lying under stony blankets of the ancient seabed where molecules turn to soil and cellulose. Perhaps those people of the land knew the cycle (Whitman’s “perpetual transfers”): that time mineral, this time vegetable, next time animal, sometime man.

  The grasses. Mile after mile after mile. Miles. Then mile marker 465. By afternoon, half of Montana still lay ahead, with the even flatter plains of North Dakota yet to come. For a state whose name is “mountain,” Montana shows thousands of miles of level prairie. I’ve read that if all the space within the atoms of the earth were pressed out, the planet would have a diameter of three hundred twenty-eight feet—not even the distance of a good major league homerun. I don’t know whether it’s possible to believe that figure, but I do know if you’re driving across Montana you’ll never believe it.

  Pock-pock went the tarred road cracks. Pock-pock. The day remained dark, showers fell and stopped and came again, the uneven roadway collected water, the van hydroplaned every few minutes. The clamor of wind numbed my ears; the fever made me woozy. Pock-pock. First the highway held me, then it entered me, then I was the highway. Pock-pock, pock-pock. Prairie hypnosis. I drove miles I couldn’t remember, and the land became a succession of wet highway stripes, and I wished for a roadfellow. I sat blindly, dumbly like a veiled stone sphinx. Finally, to dispel the miles, I stopped, got out, and held my face to the rain. I shook myself. But, once more on the road, I again became part of the machine: generator, accelerator, humanator. I knew nothing. A stupefied nub on the great prairie.

  East of where the muddy Milk River begins rubbing its back against the highway, I stopped again, climbed a fence, and walked out to a pair of rusty boulders that an ice sheet dropped on its northward retreat. Stones like these the Indians carved into billboards, scorecards, boundary markers, prayer books. I hoped for a message from the first people, but the stones sat as featureless as the land.

  Back in the truck, I fired my little stove to heat water for coffee. I threw in some cocoa for energy, and sat, and watched, and sipped. The prairie was blowing and gray, interrupted here and about by the white faces of Herefords. A century ago the Sioux tribes—Assiniboines (“stone boilers”) and Gros Ventres (“big bellies”)—who hunted bison on these plains, found in those descendants of the mastodons a four-legged grocery, hardware, and dry goods store. For generations the people stalked buffalo and dried and pulverized the meat and mixed it with bone-marrow grease and wild berries and packed it in buffalo skin bags. The pemmican lasted indefinitely and had ten times the nutrient value of fresh meat. Tanned bison hides gave the Sioux shelters and bedding, moccasins, leggings, shields, boats, buckets, even vessels to boil food in. Horn and bone gave spikes, drills, knives, scrapers, axes, and spoons. Ribs and jawbones provided children with snowsleds. The hooves furnished glue, the scat heat. When a Sioux finished with a buffalo, he had used all of it, even its spirit, for it was the bearded buffalo, alive and dangerous, weighing nearly a ton, snorting and short-tempered, that stood at the heart of the rituals and religion of the Plains Indians. Until the ghost dance generation—the one that kissed the old life goodbye to face an enemy future—the tribes that dominated these grasslands for eight thousand years fought most of their battles over hunting territory. The red man ate buffalo (transubstantiation in the Indian manner), he dressed in buffalo, he imitated and talked to it, and he died for and by the sacred buffalo.

  Then the future came wearing shoes cut out of cows and pants woven on a machine. It found bison a nuisance. The beasts took valuable grass from cattle, stampeded crops, interrupted trains, knocked over telegraph lines. And so the American bison, a symbol to both red and white, disappeared even faster than the way of life it engendered.

  I put my mug away as the unsexed Hereford steers chewed blankly in the grasses where once buffalo bulls, shaggy pizzles almost touching the ground, red eyes glaring over their females, had roamed. I remembered reading that one out of nine beef cows ends up in a McDonald’s hamburger. The sky had been cloudy all day, and now I’d just heard a discouraging word.

  Again to the pock-pocking. The road shook and pounded me, the seat slammed my spine, the steering wheel rattled my knuckles. I felt like a watch in a Timex commercial; I could hear John Cameron Swayze: “We strapped this man in a truck on a Montana highway for two days. He took a licking, but…” etc. I turned on the radio. Amidst the crackles, a revivalist was at work on a sermon shot through with real thunderbolts. Between heavenly interferences, I heard his amazing-grace voice: “Thou knowest, O Lord, we shall pass this way but once.” Amen.

  Darkness came early. At Wolf Point, a lightning storm struck the benchland, rain dropped in noisy assaults, and I took refuge in town. Dim houses, bound in by nothing but the Missouri River on the south, huddled each to the other, and streets were slick with mud and full of brown pools.

  I had to go back to the highway for dinner at a truck stop. Something moved in there—I couldn’t say what. Six people sat in the cafe, in the light and warmth, almost assured by the jukebox, and filled their stomachs; yet there was an edge to the voices, to the faces. From a thousand feet up, the prairie storm, pouring cold water on the little cafe glowing in the blackness, held us all. Even as we ate our soup and steak and eggs, we felt the sky.

  Again into town. A foot of oily water swirled in a railroad underpass where two cars had collided. A police light twisted, turning raindrops crimson, and a man’s still face pressed against the window. I slipped past and found a street for the ni
ght. The rain, hostile and forbidding, thundered on the steel roof. Unable to see anything in the deep black, I crawled into the sleeping bag and listened to the tumult.

  One November in another century, before Wolf Point had a name, the citizens complained of wolves. They got together and set out poison, and the varmints died all over the prairie, and townsmen stacked a thousand frozen carcasses into high mounds that stood all winter. When spring came, the mounds thawed and rotted. One man thought the stink drove away the remaining wolves. Whatever it was, nobody saw a wolf alive, and nobody since has seen one here. On my night in Wolf Point, Montana, I couldn’t imagine man or beast contending for the place.

  7

  IN Poplar, Montana, where Sitting Bull surrendered six years after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, I stopped for groceries. Having resisted a chewing hunger for five days—before meals, after meals, in moments of half-sleep—I gave in to it east of Wolf Point and bought a pound of raisins, a pound of peanuts, a pound of chocolate nibs and mixed them together. By the time I got across North Dakota, the bag was empty, the hunger gone.

  U.S. 2 followed the Missouri River for miles. At the High-line town of Culbertson I turned north toward treeless Plentywood, Montana, then went east again down forsaken blue highway 5, a road virtually on the forty-ninth parallel, which is the Canadian border in North Dakota. In a small flourish of hills, the last I was to see for hundreds of miles, on an upthrusted lump sat a cube of concrete with an Air Force radar antenna sweeping the long horizon for untoward blips. A Martello tower of the twentieth century. Below the installation, in the Ice Age land, lay a fine, clear lake. Fingerlings whisked the marsh weed, coots twittered on the surface, and at bankside a muskrat munched greens. It seemed as if I were standing between two worlds. But they were one: a few permutations of life going on about themselves, each thing trying to continue its way.

  East of Fortuna, North Dakota, just eight miles south of Saskatchewan, the high moraine wheat fields took up the whole landscape. There was nothing else, except piles of stones like Viking burial mounds at the verges of tracts and big rock-pickers running steely fingers through the glacial soil to glean stone that freezes had heaved to the surface; behind the machines, the fields looked vacuumed. At a filling station, a man who long had farmed the moraine said the great ice sheets had gone away only to get more rock. “They’ll be back. They always come back. What’s to stop them?”

  The country gave up the glacial hills and flattened to perfection. The road went on, on, on. Straight and straight. Ahead and behind, it ran through me like an arrow. North Dakota up here was a curveless place; not just roads but land, people too, and the flight of birds. Things were angular: fenceposts against the sky, the line of a jaw, the ways of mind, the lay of crops.

  The highway, oh, the highway. No place, in theory, is boring of itself. Boredom lies only with the traveler’s limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited. The Great Plains, showing so many miles in an immodest exposure of itself, wearied my eyes; the openness was overdrawn. The only mitigation came from potholes ice sheets had gouged out; there, margins and water were full of stilt-legged birds—godwits, sandpipers, plovers, dowitchers, avocets, yellowlegs—and paddling birds—coots, mallards, canvasbacks, redheads, blue-winged teals, pintails, shovelers, scaups, mergansers, eared grebes, widgeons, Canada geese. Whenever the drone of tread against pavement began to overcome me, I’d stop and shake the drowsiness among the birds.

  You’d think anything giving variety to this near blankness would be prized, yet when a Pleistocene pond got in the way, the road cut right through it, never yielding its straightness to nature. If you fired a rifle down the highway, a mile or so east you’d find the spent slug in the middle of the blacktop.

  Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.” The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside—a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.

  Onward across the appallingly featureless yonder of North Dakota where towns, like the poor verse of Burma-Shave signs, came and went quickly; on across fields where farmers planted wheat, rye, barley, and flax, their tractors sowing close to fences marking off missile silos that held Minutemen waiting in the dark underground like seeds of another sort. As daylight went, the men, racing rain and the short growing season, switched on headlights to keep the International Harvesters moving over cropland that the miracles of land-grant colleges (cross-pollinated hybrids resistant to everything but growth and petrochemicals) had changed forever. The farmer’s enemy wasn’t a radar blip—it was the wild oat.

  At last the horizon ruptured at the long hump of Turtle Mountain, obscurely scrubby against the sky, and a pair of silent owls (Indians called them “hush wings”) swooped the dusk to look for telltale movements in the fields.

  I needed a hot shower. In Rolla, on the edge of the Turtle Mountain reservation, I stopped at an old house rebuilt into a small hotel. Despite a snarl of a clerk, it looked pleasant; but the floors smelled of disinfectant and the shower was a rusting box at the end of the hall. The nozzle sent one stinging jet of water into my eye, another up my nose, two others over the shower curtain, while most of the water washed down the side to stand icily in the plugged bottom. I lost my temper and banged the shower head. The Neanderthal remedy.

  In a hotel room at the geographical center of North America, a neon sign blinking red through the cold curtains, I lay quietly like a small idea in a vacant mind.

  8

  EAST of Rolla. After breakfast in the city park at Langdon, a Nordic town of swept streets and tidy pastel houses with pastel shutters at the picture windows, a town with the crack of Little League bats in the clear Saturday air, a town of blond babies and mothers wearing one hundred percent acrylics and of husbands washing pastel cars to kill time before the major league Game of the Week, this happened:

  In the park, a man walking with a child saw me staring at a “retired” Spartan missile that now apparently served the same function as courthouse lawn fieldpieces with little pyramids of cannonballs once did. The white Spartan, a skeletal finger pointing into the beyond, was undefaced by initials, lovers’ notations, graduating class years, or spray-can anarchy. The only blemishes were a smudgy ring of handprints from children who had tested the reality of the thing and, penciled small near the bottom as if to hide it, this:

  WARNING: THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED

  THAT SMOKING ICBM’S ARE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH.

  “She’s a nuke,” the father said with proprietary pride. His shirt-sleeves were rolled to the elbows, and he carried a full complement of ballpoint pens in a plastic pocket protector above his heart. “We’re lucky to have her here. Came from a silo down at Nekoma. Air Force selected our town.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of missile installations along the highway.”

  “Make you feel good, don’t they? Proud and taken care of, like.”

  “Taken care of—that’s it.”

  “From a distance, in the right light, this bird looks like a church steeple. And I promise you, if these things ever start flying, she’ll be the mother we’ll be praying to.”

  “Our Lady of the Unholy Boom?”

  He ignored me. “I don’t mean these old Spartans, of course. I’m talking about the new Minutemen. Or the MX when it
gets approved—and it will. Ten nuke warheads on the MX.”

  His daughter fell in the grass. Without a drop of irony, he cautioned her to be careful.

  “Do you believe they’ll be used?” I asked.

  “This one’s deactivated, of course. But I promise you we’re ready for the Soviets up here. That border is only seventeen miles away. You ask if they’ll ever be fired. As long as Moscow is insane for conquest, don’t bet against it.” He waited for a response, then flagged his arm to the northeast. “Wahalla’s the next town over, and you know what that is.”

  “What is it?”

  “The home of warriors slain in battle. The place the Valkyrie carry heroes to. We’re ready here on the perimeter.”

  “The Air Force is ready, you mean.”

  “I don’t tell tales out of school, but some of us are personally equipped.”

  “With what?”

  “Let’s just say we have basements stocked for whoever crosses that border.”

  “I hope you don’t have the other cast-off ICBM’s in your rumpus rooms.”

  “Everybody worries about ICBM’s. We live on top of them up here. We grow the bread you and the Russians eat right over the missiles. You want to worry? Worry about IBM. Worry about bug bombs. But with what the generals got over there in the Ukraine—those ICBM’s that carry ten times the kilotons of our biggest—don’t fret yourself about this baby.” Parentally patting the Spartan, he dislodged the ballpoints in his pocket protector, then repositioned them precisely to make sure he would reach the aftermath free of ink stains.

  9

  THERE was something stretched about the landscape as if all dimension but length had been pulled from it. It seemed incapable of hiding anything. That may be why I was surprised when route 5 dropped sharply off the Drift Plains into another dimension of the tree-filled valley of the Tongue River. The buffy western soil was now the color of hazelnuts, and I knew I was nearly across the prairie.