Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

In the end, though, Heat Moon sums up his journey with: And for some of them, Heat-Moon has great photographs to accompany their stories.

Al Bartholomew and his friends hang-gliding near Pitt, Washington.

Brother Patrick Duffy who used to be a Brooklyn cop before he joined a Trappist Monastery near Conyers, Georgia.

The Wattses of Nameless, Tennessee and their old-time Country Store.

Some of the characters he encountered include:

Along the way, he explored forgotten towns (often picked for their whimsical names) and struck up conversations with their inhabitants.įrom his starting place in Columbia, Missouri, he worked his way to the East Coast, then explored, the South, the South West, the North West, and continued clockwise across the northern border of the United States before returning home once again.

Heat-Moon chose an alternative course of therapy, a sort of extended vision quest, that would take him along the back roads (blue highways) of the United States for 13,000 miles. Many people in today’s world would seek counseling from a qualified therapist, spending oodles of dollars to lay on a psychiatrist’s couch and tell a stranger about their problems.

He’s been fired from his teaching position because of declining enrollment.

The book starts out on a horrible February day when Heat-Moon learns two things: Heat-Moon’s narrative shows us what we are losing and reminds us all what being American is truly all about. Things are becoming a little too the same. Lifestyles are becoming more homogenized. Commercial developments commodify and package what was once folksy and genuine. America is undergoing a cultural deforestation. You can still find some of the people and places Heat-Moon writes about, but it is getting harder. Today, the backroads of America have been dotted with the “Golden Arches” of McDonald’s franchises. This book is two parts travelogue and one part historical narrative, stirred, then liberally garnished with homespun philosophy that rings even more poignantly twenty years later. This book definitely qualifies.Īlthough 20 years old, William Least Heat-Moon’s account of his journey along the backroads of the United States is a must-read for everyone. This isn’t a new release, but every once in a great while I go back and re-read a classic.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon