Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  I stopped for a sandwich at an old hotel in Cato, but the only food was pickled sausage at the bar, so I had sausage with a glass of beer, and that, as it turned out, was dinner. Through the wavy panes of old windows, I could see children standing along the main street, jerking their arms up and down at trucks. Each time a driver pulled on his air horns, the children jumped and cheered. That evening in Cato, it was the only game in town.

  Just after dusk I arrived in Central Square and couldn’t find a place to park for the night. I finally drove up a quiet side street. In ten minutes the police joined me. “What’s your business here?” one said.

  “Got sleepy on the highway.”

  He gave a lengthy explanation about recent burglaries in the neighborhood. “In other words, Missouri, better move tail along.”

  “I’m going to fall asleep at the wheel.”

  “Get a motel.”

  “I don’t want a motel. I live in the truck. I don’t like motels. You’ve got my license number. I’m not going to pull off a heist now.”

  “Can you prove ownership of this vehicle?”

  In irritation, I snapped open my wallet, sending credit cards flying. An older cop, a large pile of beef on the hoof, joined in.

  “What’s all the jawing about?” His hands were truncheons itching to clobber something.

  “He wants a place to sleep.”

  “Has he got money, or do we have a vagrant here?”

  “He’s got money,” I said, “but he’s not going to prove it unless you book him. He just proved his identity and ownership of his vehicle and that’s enough, considering he’s broken no law.”

  “Go down to the park next to the cemetery,” the beef said. “You’ll be all right there.”

  “Is the night shift going to come around and run me off?”

  “We are the night shift. We’ll keep an eye on you.”

  For whose protection I didn’t know, but I went to the tiny park and pulled up equidistant between homeplate and the tombstones. I’d traveled ten thousand miles and had not encountered a single hoodlum. But I’d been taken for one several times.

  6

  THE menu said: “Check Our Snowmobile Weekend Package Deal.” I skipped it and ordered a standard road breakfast. The shingled cafe, Ben and Bernies, afforded a broad view of Lake Oneida. The placemats were maps of Italy, and the man beside me ate bagels and cream cheese. No question: this was the Northeast.

  The Oneida shoreline road was warm—too warm—for May, although maples by the highway had opened to a cooling shade. The perpetual spring I’d been following around the country was about done. On a map Lake Oneida looks like a sperm whale, and my course that morning was down the spine, from the flukes to the snout. All along the shore, old houses, big houses, were losing to the North climate, and for miles it was a place of sag and dilapidation.

  The lake once formed a twenty-mile link in the Erie Canal, and just east of Oneida, excavation for the waterway began on the Fourth of July, 1817. I stopped near the spot at an abandoned section of canal and walked down the old towpath, now a snowmobile trail. The canal, only four feet deep in its early years, had become a rank, bosky, froggy trough. But it was that forty-eight inches of water that did so much to open western New York and the Midwest to settlement and commerce. “Clinton’s Folly,” the popular name for the canal as it was being built, followed the Mohawk Valley, the only natural break at this latitude in the Appalachians.

  From Lake Erie to the Hudson River (363 miles, 83 stone locks, 13 aqueducts) the canal moved people and things between the middle of the nation and the ocean; it was this watercourse, as much as anything else, that made New York City the leading Atlantic port. Travelers who had some money could take a packet boat with windows and berths, while poorer immigrants heading into the Midlands rode cheaper and drearier line boats. Ten years after Clinton’s Folly opened, the populations of Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo increased three hundred percent; the canal, having paid for itself in that decade, had changed the northwest quarter of America. No paltry accomplishment for a scheme that even the visionary Thomas Jefferson saw as a little short of madness.

  On down the highway to Rome, New York. From its appearance, it could have been London in 1946: the central section gutted but for a few old brownstone churches, a new shopping mall with triple-tier parking lot, and the National Park Service reconstruction of eighteenth-century Fort Stanwix covering several blocks on the east side. While the palisaded fort had been elaborately rebuilt, it did not turn Rome back into a city, and while ribbon development along the highways gave an economic life, it didn’t give Rome a center. The place looked as if it had died of heart rot—from the inside out.

  I went up into the Adirondacks at a point where they form a virtual wall, and Ghost Dancing labored making the ascent. No sun in the forest and twelve degrees cooler. The ancient Adirondack Mountains are much older than the old Appalachians they merge with; consequently, they tend toward roundness with few sharp outcroppings. Adirondack (“bark eaters”) was a contemptuous epithet Mohawks gave to some degenerated tribe so poor it had to eat trees.

  I bought gas in Alder Creek and asked the pumpman what winter was like in the mountains. “This,” he said and held up the stump of a little finger. “Frostbite. Snowfall of a hundred forty-two inches last year, forty-five below, wind chill seventy below. That’s what we call winter.”

  The forest became heavier, sky darker, mountains higher, settlements farther apart. What few people were here the black flies and weather kept indoors that day. Low clouds sailed around under a high overcast and broke up like schooners on the summits. Although moose and caribou disappeared long ago, I was at the heart of a great wilderness second only to the Northwoods of Maine in the eastern United States. An occasional woodsy gift shop or burger stand built like a chalet did not prevent the forest from being pervasive, ominous, and forbidding; nor did they quiet the strange cries of birds from the dark hemlock. Then a cold rain blew down, turned to hail, then eased to a drizzly fog. It was early afternoon, yet headlights vanished after twenty yards as if the damp extinguished the beams. Birch, alder, conifers—nothing but trees and water and fog for miles.

  East of the village of Blue Mountain Lake, dominated by a bluish hump of the Adirondacks, the road descended to a small building—part house, part tavern—snugged against a wooded hill and surrounded by vaporous mountains. The mist glowed orange from a neon beer sign. The building, white clapboard trimmed in red with a silvery corrugated tin roof, was the Forest House Lodge. In fact, it wasn’t a lodge, but something even better: an antique roadhouse. The roadhouse—institution and word—has nearly disappeared from America.

  I ate a ham and cheese sandwich and drank Genesee Cream Ale. The pallid barmaid talked quietly to an old woman; when there would come a deep rumble of thunder, the women paused in conversation. There were no other sounds, no others about. The room was almost entirely of pine—immaculately scrubbed, hand-polished pine gleaming like lacquerware. Each table top, each wall, every stool and bench shone warmly in the soft incandescent light, and bottles of rum and brandy and whiskey glowed from within. It was as if the faded woman had given her life to buffing everything to a soft lustre and, in doing so, lost her own. Across from a photograph of an awakened hibernating bear hung an 1885 picture of the first Forest House Lodge when it was a stage stop. The present building, dating from the thirties, seemed to have absorbed the continuum of history.

  Every so often a logging truck hissed wetly down the highway and rolled the mists before they settled in once more against the polished windows. I sat a long time in an event of no significance beyond simple joy. It lacked only the dimension of sharing.

  A young man and woman came in carrying a tension as though an unexploded grenade had just dropped between them. He was a swelling of veins across the forehead and his speech a gnashing of teeth, but she was a light and airy woman, one who would move easily in loving. I was grateful for the company and forced a convers
ation about the Adirondacks that I ended up turning into an Izaak Walton League lecture.

  The man said, “Wilderness! It’s all a crock now. I rafted the Blue Nile in Ethiopia three years ago. After a couple of days, we got into country where the natives dressed like the old pictures you see—men almost naked, carrying spears. Women bare from the waist up. You know, darkest Africa. I was taking pictures when a girl wearing a necklace made out of the cap of a BIC pen held out her arm. She had a broken Timex on. She said, ‘No teek-teek.’ That almost ruined the trip. It’s the same here—a bootprint on every square yard of Adirondacks.”

  “Wilderness doesn’t mean untouched.”

  “Then it doesn’t mean anything worth anything.”

  “If you knew a place that had never been walked over by civilized man, would you stay out of it?”

  “I would. Of course I would.”

  “You wouldn’t either,” the woman said. “You’d walk every foot of it and brag about your experience and refuse to tell anyone else where it was.”

  “That’s it,” he said. “Get your coat.”

  7

  OUR beginnings do not foreshadow our ends if one judges by the Hudson River. A few miles east of the Bad Luck Ponds, the Hudson came down between the ridges to race alongside route 28; it was a mountain stream: clear, cold, shallow, noisy. A few miles from its source in Lake Tear-in-the-Clouds a mile up on Mount Marcy (the Indian name for the mountain is better: Tahawus, “Cloud-splitter”) and three hundred river miles from the thousand oily piers of Hoboken, Weehawken, and Manhattan, here it was a canoer’s watercourse. Above the little Hudson, spumes of mist rose from the mountains like campfire smoke.

  Route 8 dropped out of the Adirondacks to Lake George, the way lined with resort homes and summer camps that advertise in the back pages of the New York Times Magazine. At Hague, I turned north and followed the water up a narrow valley to Ticonderoga and cut through town to the shore of Lake Champlain where, under the dark brow of the fort built by the British against French and Indian raids, I waited for the ferry.

  A ferry, interrupted off and on only during the Revolutionary War, had crossed the long lake at this narrow point since the 1740s. The boat of 1759, large enough to carry a stagecoach, had a sail, but on windless days, boatmen walked the length of it and pushed with a single, thirty-foot oar. After Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold captured Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, the crossing became a critical link in holding the northwestern portion of the colonies, even though Redcoats recaptured the fort and ferry two years later before it came again into American hands. When the British finally left after two wars, they returned as tourists. One, James Buckingham, wrote in 1838:

  We descended to the ferry across Lake Champlain, where we passed over in one of the rudest boats I had ever seen. It was little more than an oblong trough…. With single sail, the helmsman steering with a long oar, we soon crossed the lake, and landed at the station of Shoreham.

  Almost a century and a half later, I made the same crossing with only a few technological changes here and there: the sail and oarsman had given way to a modified, Navy-surplus landing craft attached to a cargo barge. On the other bank, the Old Stone House that Buckingham had passed, built in 1823 of big blocks dragged across the frozen lake from ruined Fort Ticonderoga, still stood, although now an antique shop.

  The storm blew on west, and a soft amber light fell over Vermont to give the rise of wet fields deep relief and color. Through the villages of Orwell, Sudbury, and Goshen Corners, past the old groceries with SALADA TEA lettered in gold on front windows, and into the Green Mountains (which, some say, Vermont means in French despite cynical literalists who insist on “Worm Mountain”).

  The White River led through highlands to route 12. Before realizing it, I was nearly across the narrow state. I drove past the Delectable Mountains (from Pilgrim’s Progress) to a village surrounded on all sides by still more mountains and opened only by two rocky brooks. It looked like the set for an Andy Hardy movie—things quaint in the manner of Norman Rockwell. A small green encircled by Georgian and Federal houses with white picket fences and hitching posts joined the town center of two- and three-story granite buildings, each with many muntined windows. Around the green, along the pickets, lilacs and apple trees blossomed. Maybe the town wasn’t the prettiest village in America, but if the townspeople wanted to make the claim, I wouldn’t have disputed them. It was Woodstock, Vermont.

  The streets spread from the green into wrenching twists that defied even compass reckoning as they played between Mount Tom and Mount Peg and between the Ottauquechee River and Kedron Brook. There wasn’t much level ground in the dell, so the old firehouse hung over the brook, and another building stuck a foundation corner into the water. In spite of its smallness, the town had seven bridges—one of them a fine, covered structure. Most of the big elms were gone, but by intermixing species the town still retained tall maples, which prevented the barrenness of other New England villages that have lost elms.

  Although the current population of twelve hundred was the largest ever, the town once had a medical school and five newspapers. In those early days, citizens manufactured combs, haut-boy reeds, Rumsford firedoors, pianofortes, brandy, and pottery. Today, except for a small ski-lift assembly plant, Woodstock was a citizenry of clerks: the shop windows displayed Vermont cheese, maple candy, maple syrup, hand-painted wallpaper, Williamsburg reproductions, Hickey-Freeman suits, period furniture, early ironwork, primitives, pewter ware, Chinese Export porcelain, English antiques, Izod pullovers, new wooden toys, antique dolls, tinware, kitchen collectibles, old prints of grouse, brass candlesticks, and copper pots. There were inns, restaurants, and a dozen real estate offices (outsiders own half of the residential and agricultural land in Vermont). About the mountains were ski slopes and hiking and horse trails, and in the south end of the valley, tennis courts, a skating rink, and a golf course. In other words, the village lived by the tourist—the well-heeled tourist. But few places in the country fused tourism and town life so well. In Woodstock, they were parts of the whole.

  Any New England town worth its colonial salt has at least one bell cast in Paul Revere’s foundry; like a DAR certificate, it’s a touchstone of authenticity. Here, they boasted of four.

  Yet things were not always so civilized in Woodstock. The first white man to see the site, Ensign Richardson, wrote in 1761 that the dingle was a “spruce hurricane” unfit for habitation other than by Indians. But settlers came anyway and cut out a green for grazing and put up stocks and a whipping post and cleared the lower hills for raising Merino sheep. Now the sheep were gone and the forest had taken back the mountains; gone too was any indication of where on the green lies buried the boiled heart of a child thought to be a vampire.

  Ensign Richardson’s view notwithstanding, the town had been blessed with its wooded setting and the resources around it. From Massachusetts and Connecticut, the first settlers brought along an established culture because the remoteness of the village forced them to grow and manufacture most of their necessities; but after the railroad came through, they began losing their self-sufficiency and depended more and more on goods made elsewhere, and the little independent industries disappeared. Then the railroad started carrying in people looking for spruce hurricanes: upland game-bird shooters, deer hunters, trout fishermen, horsemen, skiers (the first ski tow in the country was on old man Gilbert’s farm outside of town), and hikers following the Appalachian Trail, which passes just to the north. And still more: golfers, tennis players, summer camp children, students for the equestrian and photographic “country” schools. And shoppers.

  A chamber of commerce flier claimed that the citizens had “zealously guided Woodstock’s development and growth past the hazards of change that overtook much of the country”; perhaps, at least for now, that was true. Indeed, the town was free of golden-arch strip development and shopping centers (one nineteenth-century textile mill had been remodeled into a shopping arcade), and the core of the vi
llage remained where it has always been—on the green. At night, when automobiles left the streets, Woodstock had the appearance of another century because, in place of the old businesses that died—the hatter, baker, saddler, tinsmith, fuller, foundryman, wheelwright, miller, wainwright—new businesses had come to use the old buildings in new ways so that Woodstock wasn’t a restoration or even a renovation, but rather a town—like the best English villages—with a continuous and evident past.

  The careful Yankees, overseeing both their past and their future, managed to lure a class of vacationers who came to stay for a week or a month, and they came with money, although Woodstock wasn’t noticeably more expensive than a gimcrack tourist dive.

  If the village had a fault, it lay in both a hubris about its picturesqueness and in its visitors with new money and new facades. While I walked the streets, I had the sense that the men, still wearing their club ties, had sung in collegiate glee clubs and that the women attended colleges where one’s serviette was kept in a napkin cubby.

  8

  IF you keep a mental list of things in America that you can kiss goodbye, add the tourist home to it. As an institution it isn’t extinct, but nearly so, thanks to the insistence of the American vacationer for star-burst-in-the-sky motels. You might as well ask him to share his toothbrush as his bathroom. Yet a proper tourist home is a third the expense and twice as clean as any cellblock motel. It can be like staying with Grandmother.

  In Woodstock I took lodgings in the Bagley Tourist Home, a tall frame house on a hill with a high view of the Ottauquechee and the Green Mountains. An armoire and spool spindle bed filled most of the wallpapered room; at the window, an apple tree sprinkled petals against the screen. The bathroom, a clean and flowery pink place, was down the hall.