Blue Highways (67 page)

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 forced 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.)

Two months after I returned from the road, my Cherokee and I amicably parted, and I met someone else. Although we too later went different ways, again amicably, she stood by me during those lean years and helped carry me and the book to the end. Yet one day even she, repeating the phrase I frequently used when talking of my manuscript that still had no definite title, said quietly, “It’s too hard on me—please don’t talk anymore about ‘a certain forthcoming book.’ It’s not forthcoming.” I had just received another rejection slip, and, thinking she might be right, I despaired. Was this project one more of my damned ideas going nowhere?

By the end of that fourth year I was beginning to believe publishers: there probably wasn’t an audience for such a “travelog.” I thought about abandoning my endless rewrites to take on what friends considered “real work.” Then, one morning I read in the
New York Times Book Review
that Robert Pirsig, whose about-to-become famous
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
a challenging and curious philosophical tract built around a “travelog,” had received 122 rejections. At that moment I realized my quitting would not be sensible but merely weakness, and on the spot I vowed I would not give up until I had collected 123.

Thank Earth, as my atheistic editor Jack LaZebnik says, I didn’t have to go that far. Some weeks later I found an acceptance, and in January of 1983,
Blue Highways
appeared. By then I had rewritten it eight times and cut it from an eight-hundred-page manuscript to five hundred pages.

The book sold slowly at first, then went onto the
New York Times
bestseller list, where it stayed off and on for nearly a year, but it was not until spring that I felt secure enough to quit my job on the loading dock. Blue Highways—roads and book—remade my life, perhaps even keeping me from appearing in the obituary column too early.

Of the many people I’m deeply indebted to, you are one, for a book without a reader is nothing more than bound-up paper. Like the honored courthouse or the invigorating loading dock, you have made it possible for me to keep writing and continue my American travel, explorations that have led me into
PrairyErth
and
River-Horse
. As you can see now, I did not at first envision a trilogy, but that’s what has happened: a small corpus of journeys—one by wheels, one by foot, the last by boat. What mode is left? The back of an animal, the wings of a machine? No, from here I shall try another genre of writing. I’ve heard and stumbled into some pretty good stories along the way, which only the cover of fiction can permit me to recount truthfully, or, at least, fully. Right now I’m jestfully calling that project, using the parlance of some Missouri hill-folk,
A Whole Nother Story
.

And so you, whom I can only imagine even though I think of you often as I write, I thank for your accompaniment, and I can at last answer two questions that may have arisen as you read
Blue Highways
.
What did the people I met along the way, the ones I show in the book, think of it? Well, I was in touch with all of them after publication (except Porfirio Sanchez, whom I could never again find, and Claud Tyler, the barber in Dime Box, Texas, who died before I could finish writing), and I can tell you their responses were virtually one. Although they were hardly enchanted with my depiction of them (I left too much out, emphasized this over that), they liked being a “character.” To me, from the beginning, they were full of character in all its meanings, and I regret that it’s only now I realize I should have told them they were the best professors I ever knew, for they opened the way, the high way.

PS: Your second question, you thought I forgot? I didn’t.
I never found the banana slug.

Not only, but principally, my heart thanks to these people: Jack LaZebnik, playwright, whose eye and tooth for language is here everywhere; Edwin S. Miller, a careful reader and early believer; the late John Neihardt (Flaming Rainbow), who offered his students at the University of Missouri a high piece of the old light; the Stephens College library and its librarians; Paul and Doris Milberger, Ken and Lyn Steele, Larry Deck and Nancy Rimsek, all of whom gave table and shelter; Peter Davison and Natalie Greenberg, editors of fine vision, and their assistant at the Atlantic Monthly Press, Jennifer Reed; and Peggy Freudenthal of Little, Brown; and very much also to Lezlie, who helped the journey begin, and to Linda, who helped bring it home.

William Least Heat-Moon is the author of the bestselling classics
Roads to Quoz,
River-Horse,
and
PrairyErth.
He lives near Columbia, Missouri.