Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  The road, a thing to wrench an eel’s spine, went at the mountains in all the ways: up, down, around, over, through, under, between. I’ve heard—who knows the truth?—that if you rolled West Virginia out like a flapjack, it would be as large as Texas. Where possible in the mountainous interruptions, towns opened briefly: Judy Gap, Mouth of Seneca, Elkins.

  At Buckhannon, I drove southwest on state 4. Beautiful country despite hills clobbered with broken appliances and automobile fragments, which children turned into Jungle gyms. Should you ever go looking for some of the six hundred million tons of ferrous scrap rusting away in America, start with West Virginia.

  Then Sutton, hidden in the slant of mountains at the heart of the state, a town that began in 1805 when John O’Brien took up residence in a hollow sycamore along the Elk River. Now Sutton was an old place of grizzled and maimed men who could have been the last survivors of the Union Army: one missing a right hand, one the left, another with a patched eye, one minus a nose, one an ear; as for limps and bent spines, I couldn’t count them all. And the teeth! Broken, rotted, snaggled, bucked, splintered. An orthodonist’s paradise. But that wasn’t what struck me about Sutton. What struck me was the similarity in the faces, as though a man’s father were his brother and his uncle his first cousin. A town of more kin than kith. Sutton, I think, may be the place where those people you see waiting in bus stations for the 1:30 A.M. express are going.

  In the frayed, cluttery hamlet everything—people, streets, buildings—seemed to be nearing an end. In one old survivor, Elliott’s Fountain (CIGARS CANDY SUNDRIES around the window, Ex-Lax thermometer by the tall door, YOUR WATE AND FATE scale there also, and inside a ceramic tile floor in the pattern of a diamond-back rattler), I drank a Hamilton-Beach chocolate milkshake, the kind served alongside the stainless steel mixing cup.

  The owner, Hugh Elliott, laid out a 1910 photograph of the drugstore when you could buy a freshly concocted purge or balm, or a fountain Bromo-Seltzer, or a dulcimer; although the pharmaceuticals were gone, you could still get a Bromo or a dulcimer (next to the Texas Instruments 1025 Memory Calculator). The photograph showed one other change: what had been a spacious room of several bent-steel chairs and tables was now top to bottom with merchandise. What had been a place of community was now a stuffed retail outlet. Across the nation, that change was the history of the soda fountain pharmacy.

  A crisp little lavender-and-lace lady, wearing her expansion-band wristwatch almost to the elbow to keep it in place, sipped a cherry phosphate and pointed out in the photograph the table where her husband—dead these twenty years—had proposed to her. She said, “You won’t find me at the grave. Always feel closer to him in here with a phosphate.”

  When I drove out of Sutton, clouds moved in and the heavy sky sagged with drizzle. It was part of the sixty inches of yearly rainfall here. I fought it a few miles, then gave up and stopped in the old railroad town of Gassaway at the Elk Lunch, formerly the Farmers and Merchants Bank. Handpainted vertically down the worn Doric granite columns: LUNCH BEER. I had one of each.

  Next to me a man, whose stomach started at his neck and stopped below his groin, said, “Ain’t from around here, I see.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Wiped that beer bottle off fore you swigged on it.”

  As I ate my hamburger, the fellow explained the best means of taking a catfish. During the long explanation rivaling Izaak Walton’s for detail, the man periodically formed a funnel with his index finger and thumb and poured salt into his bottle of Falls City. “Used to could taste the beer in our country,” he said. The angling method was this: first “bait” a catfish hole with alfalfa and pork fat for three weeks; then, the night before a rain, put a nine-lived Eveready in a sealed Mason jar and lower it into the water to hang just in front of the baited hook.

  “And it works well?” I asked.

  “It works sometimes.”

  When I left, the day had turned to mist, and a red grit came off the highway and glazed the windshield. Like looking through a great bloodshot eye. State 4 followed the Elk River, an occluded green thickness that might have been split pea purée. The Elk provided a narrow bench, the only level land, and on it people had built homes, although the river lay between them and the road and necessitated hundreds of little handmade bridges—many of them suspension footbridges, the emblem of Appalachia. From rock ledges broken open by the highway cut, where seeps dripped, hung five-gallon galvanized buckets to collect the spring water.

  Again came the feeling I’d had all morning, that somehow I’d made a turn in time rather than in space and driven into the thirties. The only things that showed a later decade were the pickup trucks: clean and new, unlike the rattling, broken automobiles.

  West Virginia 36, a quirk of a road, went into even more remote land, the highway so narrow my right tires repeatedly dropped off the pavement. Towns: Valleyfork, Wallback, and Left Hand (a school, church, post office, and large hole once the Exxon station). On west lay the Pennzoil country of small valleys barbed with rusting derricks, the great flywheels turning slowly, inexorably like the mills of God that grind exceeding fine.

  I hunched over the steering wheel as if to peer under the clouds, to see beyond. I couldn’t shake the sense I was driving in another era. Maybe it was the place or maybe a slow turning in the mind about how a man cannot entirely disconnect from the past. To try to is the American impulse, but to look at the steady continuance of the past is to watch time get emptied of its bluster because time bears down less on the continuum than on the components. To be only a nub in the eternal temporary is still to have a chance to see, a chance to pry at the mystery. What is the blue road anyway but an opportunity to poke at the unseen and a hoping the unseen will poke back?

  At Spencer, I turned west onto U.S. 33. The Appalachians flattened themselves to hills, and barnsides again gave the Midwest imperative: CHEW MAIL POUCH. With what was left of day, I crossed the Ohio River into old Gallipolis, a town of a dozen pronunciations, a gazebo-on-the-square town settled by eighteenth-century Frenchmen. Although a priest once placed a curse on Gallipolis—I don’t know why—residents today claim it’s the loveliest French village on the Ohio.

  4

  “INQUIRE Locally,” the road should have been marked. Of the thirteen thousand miles of highway I’d driven in the last months, Ohio 218 through Gallia County set a standard to measure bad road by with pavement so rough I looked forward to sections where the blacktop was gone completely. Along the shoulders lay stripped cars, presumably from drivers who had given up. Yet the sunny county was a fine piece of washed grasses, gleams in hounds’ eyes, constructions of spiders, rocks broken and rounded—all those things and fully more.

  At Ironton I took the river road down a stretch of power lines, rail lines, water lines, and telephone lines (the birds sleep across the water on the wooded Kentucky bluffs, they say). The old riverbank towns—Franklin Furnace, New Boston, Portsmouth, Friendship, Manchester, Utopia—now found the Ohio more a menace than a means of livelihood, and they had shifted northward to string out along the highway like kinks in a hawser. I had no mind for stopping. God’s speed, people once wished the traveler.

  At Cincinnati, I looped the city fast on the interstate and came to Indiana 56, where corn, tobacco, and blue-sailor grew to the knee, and also wild carrot, fleabane, golden Alexander. Apples were coming into a high green, butterflies stitched across the road, and all the way the whip of mowers filled Ghost Dancing sweetly with the waft of cut grass. Each town had its feed and grain store, each farm its grain bin and corncrib. Rolling, rolling, the land, the road, the truck.

  I dropped south to New Harmony, Indiana, twelve miles downstream from Grayville, Illinois, where I’d spent that first grim night. New Harmony in June piles up with the sprinkle from golden rain trees, here called “gate trees.” The town is known for two experiments in social engineering, both of which failed. Yet those failures put in motion currents that changed the course of what came af
ter: the abolition of slavery, equal opportunity for women, progressive education, emancipation from poverty. The futuristic village was once even the headquarters for the U.S. Geologic Survey.

  Rappites from Pennsylvania created the town of Harmonie out of bosky Wabash River bottomland in 1814. They grew wheat, vegetables, grapes, apples, and hops; they produced wine, woolens, tinware, shoes, and whiskey. The Rappite Golden Rose trademark, like the Shaker name, became an assurance of quality. A decade later, however, as the struggle of primitive life eased, members began finding more time for reflection; to blunt a growing discontent, the leader, George Rapp, sold the village to Robert Owen and moved the colony back to Pennsylvania, where the people could again start from scratch and live the peace of full occupation. Seventy-five years later, their Shaker-like refusal to have any truck with the future brought about their disappearance.

  Owen, the British industrialist, utopian, and egalitarian, who worked to create a society free of ignorance and selfishness by eliminating the “causes of contest among individuals” (his basic tenet was “circumstances form character”), renamed the town New Harmony and built a cooperative community that developed into a center for creative social and scientific thought in antebellum America. Yet, before the first settler died, egotism and greed did the experiment in. New Harmony survived, but only as a monument to idealism and innovation.

  Not far from a burial ground of unmarked graves that the old Harmonists share with a millennium of Indians, the mystical Rappites in 1820 planted a circular privet-hedge labyrinth, “symbolic” (a sign said) “of the Harmonist concept of the devious and difficult approach to a state of true harmony.” After the Rappites, the hedges disappeared, but a generation ago, citizens replanted the maze, its contours strikingly like the Hopi map of emergence. I walked through it to stretch from the long highway. Even though I avoided the shortcut holes broken in the hedges, I still went down the rungs and curves without a single wrong turn. The “right” way was worn so deeply in the earth as to be unmistakable. But without the errors, wrong turns, and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth. And worse: knowing the way made traveling it perfectly meaningless.

  Before I crossed the Wabash (Algonquian for “white shining”), I filled the gas tank—enough for the last leg. From the station I could see the blue highway curving golden into the western afternoon. I’d make Columbia by nightfall.

  The circle almost complete, the truck ran the road like the old horse that knows the way. If the circle had come full turn, I hadn’t. I can’t say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn’t known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.

  The highway before, under, behind. Through the Green-River-ordinance-enforced towns. Past barnlot windmills that said AERMOTOR CHICAGO. On and on. The Mississippi River. Then the oak risings of Missouri.

  The pump attendant, looking at my license plate when he had filled the tank, asked, “Where you coming from, Show Me?”

  “Where I’ve been.”

  “Where else?” he said.

  Lines from a Navajo Wind Chant

  Then he was told:

  Remember what you have seen,

  because everything forgotten

  returns to the circling winds.

  Afterword

  PERHAPS it’s in our blood, maybe it’s just in our history, but surely it’s in the American vein to head out for some other place when home becomes intolerable, or merely even when the distant side of the beyond seems a lure we can’t resist. After all, every American has come or is a descendant of people who came from another part of the globe. Certain Indian myths notwithstanding, the human species began its journey far from either of the bounding oceans of the Western Hemisphere. Aside from slaves, most of the others first setting foot in America, whether in A.D. 2000 or 20,000 B.C., arrived looking in some way for a life better than what the Old World offered; and surely, a few came along just to see the territory. As a nation, we are the children of those who tried to solve old problems with a new place, and that may be why the first writing about America comes from explorers and why other travelers’ accounts have flourished for half a millennium. On my shelves at home I have more than twelve hundred narratives of travel through the United States.

  In the spring of 1978, following not just the urge of several months but probably also an even deeper inclination set into my veins by grandparents generations gone, I threw over what was then passing for my life, a thing I had botched considerably, in quest of better days. Virtually broke both in wallet and heart, I struck out for the open road. It took no special courage, except to withstand the entreaties of family and friends not to “run away.” Leaving was one of the easiest big decisions I’ve ever made. But once I left home, continuing the journey until it either reached some kind of sensible conclusion or fully played itself out, was another matter—one of the hardest things I’ve attempted.

  The trip—and that means Blue Highways too—began four years earlier when I started wondering whether I could cross the United States by auto without ever using a federal highway. Could I go coast to coast on those state and county roads lined out in blue in my old atlas? I sat down one evening and looked for a route. It would not be easy in the Far West, but after an hour I’d found a couple of potential courses between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and what’s more, I had an idea for a photo-story I thought the National Geographic would take an interest in: “Across America on the Blue Roads.”

  But circumstances turned sour and didn’t permit me to leave, a situation that changed in the frigid winter of 1977. Those events you know from reading Blue Highways. Even before the long freeze began thawing, I had set my course not simply to cross America but to encircle her, to travel as long as money, gumption, and the capacity to fend off desolation held up.

  And so on the first day of spring in 1978 I lit out with—instead of a National Geographic story in mind—only the wish for the road to lead me into some kind of new life, one that didn’t daily promise me more fruit of my failures. While I went prepared to record events my travel would turn up, and I had hopes of writing a few small stories someone might publish, I primarily wanted to put myself on a new path toward wherever it turned out to lead. I had no idea whether people in rural America would open up to an itinerant, a fellow more lost than otherwise. Wouldn’t their suspicions of a bearded stranger stifle any attempt to talk with them about their lives? I had not then heard novelist John Irving’s assertion that there are, at the heart of things, only two plots, two stories: a stranger rides into town, a stranger rides out of town. Without knowing it, I had a chance for both.

  After a week or so on the road, I began to see that people would indeed share their tables, their homes, their lives, and I slowly realized I might hear enough stories to make a book. By the time I crossed the Appalachians, I’d remembered the image in the proposed “Blue Road” idea, a term that over the ensuing miles changed into “Blue Highways.” Partly because those words had for me several levels of meaning, I never imagined then that the phrase would eventually enter the American lexicon as a synonym for “backroads.”

  The shape of the journey came from both the Plains Indians’ notion that a circle represents the direction of natural forces and also from John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, a book of some charm but scarcely one of his best and certainly not his deepest journey; that’s Grapes of Wrath. I had not read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—a story with even less travel in it than, say, Huckleberry Finn or Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—so that, despite what some readers have assumed, Kerouac was in no way an influence.

  It would not be inaccurate to say I was woefully ignorant of travel writing, unless you think of Tom Jones, The Odyssey, the book of Exodus, Robinson Crusoe, the peregrinations of Lemuel Gulliver, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Moby-Dick as travel writing. My innocence for
ced me to reinvent the bow and arrow, or perhaps I should say quill and ink, but that greenness animated my attempts to express what I was hearing and seeing, and it gave me a rookie’s passion that would have to carry me through the following four years.

  As I rambled into the countryside, I tried, rather haphazardly at first, to take notes and make pictures, but preeminent always during the three months I traveled was the ancient wish to leave an old world and enter a new one.

  When I returned home about the first day of summer, I immediately went looking for a job—any job—that would underwrite my attempt to turn a bundle of notes into a book. I found work as a drudge in the Boone County Courthouse in Columbia, Missouri, and—purely by chance—managed to write the first few pages of Blue Highways on the Fourth of July. I figured I’d finish by Christmas. I didn’t, but by then I guessed I could complete it before the next Christmas. After a year in the courthouse, I had put aside enough money to carry me along to the end, or so I thought, and I left the last wills and testaments to write seven days a week in hopes of finishing before my savings were again gone. I managed to complete two unsatisfactory drafts; then I had to find another job, this one on the loading dock of the Columbia Daily Tribune, work that required me only on weekends but paid a pittance more than two thousand dollars a year. (I must admit here that I have little sympathy for would-be writers who say they could get their novel written if only they could find a grant. When a book really wants out, it will force itself into the light—regardless.) Writing and researching eight to nine hours a day let me reach the third Christmas with yet another draft, but it too was lacking. My family had long before ceased asking me about my efforts because they believed a book gets written in six months, a year at most. And many do. (It shows.)