"I was going to stay on the three million miles of bent and narrow rural American two-lane, the roads to Podunk and Toonerville. Into the sticks, the boondocks, the burgs, backwaters, jerkwaters, the wide-spots-in-the-road, the don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it towns. Into those places where you say, 'My god! What if you lived here!' The Middle of Nowhere."
-William Least Heat-Moon, American travel writer
For many years I've had the urge to get in my car, leave the people and places that are familiar to me behind and undertake my own personal journey across this great country of ours. It would be a drive taken with no particular destination or pre-set route in mind, the only criteria being to stick to the backroads as much as practicable, avoid major population centers, and try to connect with as many of the people that I meet along the way as I possibly can.
While sharing this little dream with one of my old friends, he suggested that before I topped off my tank and rode off into the sunset I should read William Least Heat-Moon's book, Blue Highways: A Journey Into America. I'd never heard of it, but made myself a note and sometime later ordered a copy from Amazon. I just finished reading it this evening and would have to say it's the best travel book I've ever read.
Least Heat-Moon, who was born William Trogdon, had just lost his job and separated from his wife when he decided that he would hit the road and try to sort things out. His decision to travel only on blue highways, the secondary roads or "cow-paths" as we've come to call them, took him over 13,000 miles through hundreds of places where he met some of the most memorable characters you could ever imagine. There are black-and-white photos of many of them.
He writes in a way that makes you feel that you're there beside him as he encounters these ordinary Americans in the little worlds in which they live. With varying degrees of success, he talks with those he meets, and often walks away with life-changing insight they had no idea they'd imparted.
As he draws near the end of his travels, having neither regained his job nor gotten back together with his wife, he thinks about what he's learned during his three months of wandering:
"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."
It's really a great read. I would commend it to anyone who enjoys traveling, especially if you prefer the by-ways rather than the inter-states. For those who would like to learn more about the many Americans who make their homes in Really Small Town, USA, you won't find a better means of doing so without making the trip yourself.
As for me, I'm still thinking about my odyssey. At the present time, I've got a dozen reasons why I can't take a couple of months and make it happen. Well, maybe eleven, now that I've read Blue Highways. Happy traveling.
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