…or, as I am calling it to myself, “The Epic Book of Epic-ness.”
Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon, is the selection for the Travel Book Club that I Co-coordinate. This sucker is over 400 pages long, and this was my second reading of it.
First, to explain the title, on a road atlas, the main highways (I-40, I-15, etc.) are in red. The blue highways are those two-lane state roads that go through all the small towns, where you cringe if you get stuck behind a Sunday driver because you can’t pass them because the road is also twisty and hilly and there are lots of double yellow lines in the middle.
aka The Epic Book of Epic-ness
Heat-Moon wrote this book in the late 70s, after splitting from his wife, wryly called “The Cherokee,” and losing his job. He decides to take a year to explore the United States, using only the blue highways. It is a classic tale of the author using the journey to discover, not only his country, but more about himself.
I’m not sure how old I was when I read this the first time. All I remember is that I had a conception that the author was “older” than I was at the time, and that his age was in my distant future. (I can’t have been that young…I was living in Nevada for sure, and I’m guessing I was in my late 20s.) So, it came as a shock to learn on my second reading that the age of the author at the time was…38. Gulp. That’s a year younger than I am right now. My second thought, after that shock and realizing how I’ve aged since the first reading (really! not that much!) was that, hey, I would love to go on a year-long road trip! But that’s another story.
I would recommend this book. Heat-Moon is a gifted writer in the style of Mark Twain. His powers of describing people cannot be surpassed. I will paraphrase…”He had the kind of face that had a lot of miles on it.” “She was the kind of octogenarian that made you not want to miss it.” Really! Can’t you just picture those people, in one short sentence? And Heat-Moon did all kinds of research about the places he visited. He made a point of going to out-of-the-way places, and places with strange names, just because they had strange names. Or were ironically named Nameless. If you have any love of road trips, eating in diners, obeying no clock but your own, this is a wonderful story.
But be prepared. Do you remember I mentioned this book is 400+ pages? And that the print is small? I apologize, Mr. Heat-Moon, but as charming as I found this book, I also found it a wonderful cure for insomnia, of which I am a frequent victim. Read it during the day, sitting up! And be prepared to spend some time! This is a book to be savored, not gulped.
What I most wanted to do is to have a gigantic United States map to hang on a wall, so I could highlight the places he visited. It was also a thrill when he passed through North Carolina and I recognized place names from the coast, and when he passed through Northern Nevada, and I recognized places I’d visited. Nothing gives buy-in like writing about a place the reader has lived, and since he visited so very many places, this book can have a ring of familiarity with almost everyone.
The English major in me wants to write a paper comparing this book with the book the TBC read last year, Red Dust, by Ma Jian, that I was calling “I Hate China” in my head. Too much analysis for a simple blog post, but suffice it to say that the both feature men who travel their own country when their personal lives tank, but they are very, very different books in tone and manner.
And now, pardon me…I’m going looking for a big road map…
