Author:  William Least Heat-Moon.

Wheels:  Ghost Dancing.  1975 half-ton Ford Econoline van.  “It had two worn rear tires and an ominous knocking in the waterpump.  I had converted the van from a clangy tin box into a place at once a six-by-ten bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, parlor… It came equipped with power nothing and drove like what it was: a truck.  Your basic plumber’s model.” (pg. 9)

Companions:  Two books:  Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Joe Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks.

Why:His life had hit a reef.  Months after separating from his wife, the author unexpectedly lost his job teaching at a Missouri college.  He was thirty-eight years old.  He needed to get away.  “With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.” (pg. 5)

“Blue Highways” refers to the colors on old highway maps of America.  The main routes were red and the back roads, blue.  In some ways this book would have made the perfect travel blog.  The chapters are tiny (some only one page) and they read like vignettes, each telling their own self contained story inside the parameters of a man kind of wandering around seeing new places and talking to strangers. 

            This book’s greatest strengths may also be it’s greatest weaknesses.  Because each chapter stands alone I didn’t feel a common through line in the book.  It doesn’t mean it’s not there though, I may have just missed it.  I think the story could have had more of that through line if Heat-Moon had allowed himself to be more a part of the story.  In an early chapter a page long he tells a little about himself and promises to keep himself out of it thereafter.  While he is an eloquent writer whose sense of humor at times shines through I felt like the real story waiting to be told in this book was not the story of the people he met and the places he saw but rather it was the story of him meeting people and him going to new places.  Does that make sense?  In other words he was trying to get away from something in life for a while and he rarely lets on to whether or not he was succeeding in doing so.  When his trip ends I don’t know what has changed.  That said he does meet some interesting people and tell their stories well.  Shit, I may need to read it again.