Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

We talked and I sat waiting for the question. It got there before the olives and celery. “What do you do?” the husband asked.

Water percolating through the soft limestone leaches out the calcium and phosphorus that make for strong yet light-framed stake winners whose spine and leg bones have the close grain of ivory rather than the more porous grain of horses pastured in other areas. And it’s also limestone percolation that engenders good handmade bourbon; after all, hundred proof is half water. To make bourbon with purified water, as today the distilleries must to maintain consistent quality, is to take the Kentucky out of the whiskey.

There is one almost infallible way to find honest food at just prices in blue-highway America: count the wall calendars in a cafe. No calendar: Same as an interstate pit stop. One calendar: Preprocessed food assembled in New Jersey. Two calendars: Only if fish trophies present. Three calendars: Can’t miss on the farm-boy breakfasts. Four calendars: Try the ho-made pie too. Five calendars: Keep it under your hat, or they’ll franchise. One time I found a six-calendar cafe in the Ozarks, which served fried chicken, peach pie, and chocolate malts, that left me searching for another ever since. I’ve never seen a seven-calendar place. But old-time travelers—road men in a day when cars had running boards and lunchroom windows said AIR COOLED in blue letters with icicles dripping from the tops—those travelers have told me the golden legends of seven-calendar cafes.

He nodded. “Satisfaction is doin’ what’s important to yourself. A man ought to honor other people, but he’s got to honor what he believes in too.” As I started the engine, Wheeler said, “If you get back this way, stop in and see me. Always got beans and taters and a little piece of meat.” Down along the ridge, I wondered why it’s always those who live on little who are the ones to ask you to dinner.

“Where you headed from here?” “I don’t know.” “Cain’t get lost then.”

“It is waking that kills us,” Sir Thomas Browne said three centuries ago.

A red light at U.S. 11 East. Home was a left turn, right was who knows. “A man becomes what he does,” Madison Wheeler had said. I took who knows.

The highway once was a stage route of inns, but the buildings that had withstood the Civil War weren’t surviving the economics of this century.

THE fourteenth state in the Union, the first formed after the original thirteen, was Franklin and its capital Jonesboro. The state had a governor, legislature, courts, and militia. In 1784, after North Carolina ceded to the federal government its land in the west, thereby leaving the area without an administrative body, citizens held a constitutional convention to form a sovereign state. But history is a fickle thing, and now Jonesboro, two centuries old, is only the seat of Washington County, which also was once something else—the entire state of Tennessee. It’s all for the best. Chattanooga, Franklin, just doesn’t come off the tongue right.

Those days, it was hard livin’ and no easier dyin’. Took thirteen months a year to grow ’bacca.”

A person shows himself in the way he opens an orange. Some tear jaggedly with fingers, some slice with a thumbnail, some spiral latitudinally, while others go at the longitude. That man pulled out a pocketknife and precisely quartered the skin stem to navel so the fruit came out in sections. When he finished cutting, the peel, still attached at the base, lay on the pier like an open blossom.

Living in rural America without land is to be without strength.” He paused for a slice of orange. “May I suggest how it was that Jimmy Carter rose from what some have called ‘nowhere’ to the Presidency?” “You may.” “Because he showed us he came from the land. To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.”

Because of its setting in deep woods, its age, its Croatoan mystery, and because it is the lone remnant of the first English attempt at settlement in America, Fort Raleigh is fascinating. But it is also a monument to the disease of an old world, gone tired and corrupt, trying to exploit a newer land. The whole ugly European process is here in capsule history: England, wanting to emulate Spain’s financial success in pillaging the New World (but learning nothing from Spanish mistakes in dealing with Indians) and at the same time trying to circumscribe the expansion of colonial Spain out of Florida, sent a group of men, most nothing more than gentlemen pirates called “privateers,” to establish a colony and enrich England with marketable commodities.

The second expedition, the one of 1585 that returned Wanchese and Manteo, was led by Raleigh’s cousin, Sir Richard Grenville. Surely there were Englishmen less suited to found a colony than Grenville, but it’s hard to name them. As a seaman, he was hell on the high sea; as a colonist, he was a pirate. He manifested an outlook toward the Indians, a people whose help the new colony desperately needed, that the New World hasn’t yet gone entirely beyond. Never mind that Arthur Barlowe earlier reported to Raleigh that the Indians were a “very handsome and goodly people, and in their behaviour as mannerly and civil as any of Europe.” Never mind that Granganimeo, brother of Chief Wingina, greeted the English by making “signs of joy and welcome, striking his head and his breast and afterwards on ours to show we were all one, smiling, and making show the best he could of all love and familiarity.” Never mind that the natives greeted whites “with all love and kindness and with as much bounty, after their manner, they could possibly devise.” Columbus, too, had carried back reports about Indian gentleness—it helped him take sixteen hundred Indian slaves to Spain on the second voyage. In spite of the propitious Anglo-Indian relations of Raleigh’s first expedition, Grenville still saw Indians as savages and ignored their kindnesses. The Manitowocs planted crops and made fish traps for the colonists and Indian women washed English stockings; but when a native stole a silver cup, Grenvill...

Father Anthony asked me to join him at vespers. On the way to the chapel, we didn’t talk. I think he was preparing. I remembered my denim and suspenders. “My clothes,” I said. He didn’t break stride or turn his head. “How could that matter? But singing on key does. Can you?” “Never could.” “Don’t sing loud then. God doesn’t mind. I do.”

I began to see my problem was not trusting myself—being afraid of what I really wanted.”

“A friend’s father told me, ‘If you don’t do what you want when you’re young, you’ll never do it.’ So I quit waiting for certainty to come.”

AMIDST a clangor of bells in the middle of the night, the brothers began their day. I heard shuffling along the walks as they went to morning prayers. Admiring men who can give thanks for a day still two hours from first light, I again burrowed down into the bed in deep sloth.

“Maybe things haven’t changed because of apathy in the project.” “I ain’t lettin’ nobody off that easy. A man shouldn’t gotta care so much about gettin’ a fair game. You gotta worry every day about a fair game?” “Not usually.”

“Hey, we finally got a black Santa Claus at the mall. Only thing, he scared hell out of the little black kids. They be dreamin’ of a white Christmas.”

A uniformed man drove by in a Bell Telephone truck. Walker nudged Davis. “That’s four today. Two last night.” “What’s going on?” I said. “Sheriff’s deputy. That’s their undercover truck.” 7. James Walker and Charles Davis in Selma, Alabama “Great undercover to wear a uniform,” I said. “Why are they watching you?” “They ain’t watchin’ us, my man—they be watchin’ you.” “Me? Why me? They think I’m agitating?” Walker and Davis laughed derisively. “They doan give a shit about that. They think you the dope man.” “A dealer? How do they come up with that?” “Eyeballs, man. White dude in the project at night, drivin’ a van, Northern license. Yeah, man, you be dealin’ all right.” “If you ain’t, they gonna put some stuff on you if you look like trouble.” “A cop checked the truck over last night.” “Pickin’ information. Figurin’ how to handle you. When they pull you in, you goan be surprised they know the size of your jockstrap.” “You got any stuff, hide it good or dump it. Don’t try to sell now.” “I’ve got beer and some bourbon. Clean as a whistle.” “Until they stop you and look your ride over.” “Stay long enough, and they goan get you—two miles over the speed limit, forgettin’ to signal, somethin’.” “To them, you be worsen a nigger now.”

“By the way, junior,” he asked casually, “ever had yourself a Cajun woman?” His question silenced the bar. “Don’t think I have.” “Got some advice for you then—if you find you ever need it.” It was the quietest bar I’d ever been in. I answered so softly no sound came out, and I had to repeat. “What advice?” “Take off your belt before you climb on so you can strap your Yankee ass down because you’ll get taken for a ride. Up the walls and around.” Now the whole bar was staring, I guess to surmise whether my Yankee ass was worth strapping down. One rusty geezer said, “Junior ain’t got no belt.” Walt looked at my suspenders and pulled one, letting it snap back. “My man,” he said, “tie on with these and you’ll get zanged out the window like in a slingshot.” The men pounded the bar and choked on their Dixie beer. One began coughing and had to be slapped on the back. Two repeated the joke.

When I left she said good luck. The traveler should stand warned when he gets wished luck.

We sat and a young Cajun named Michael passed a long loaf of French bread. The woman put two bowls on the oil cloth and ladled up gumbo. Now, I’ve eaten my share of gumbo, but never had I tasted anything like that gumbo: the oysters were fresh and fat, the shrimp succulent, the spiced sausage meaty, okra sweet, rice soft, and the roux—the essence—the roux was right. We could almost stand our spoons on end in it. The roots of Cajun cookery come from Brittany and bear no resemblance to Parisian cuisine and not even much to the Creole cooking of New Orleans. Those are haute cuisines of the city, and Cajun food belongs to the country where things got mixed up over the generations. No one even knows the source of the word gumbo. Some say it derives from an African word for okra, chinggombo, while others believe it a corruption of a Choctaw word for sassafras, kombo, the key seasoning.

I didn’t know then, but in April in coastal Louisiana you don’t wait for the rain to stop unless you have all day and night. Which I did.

But later that afternoon, a tactic returned to me from night maneuver training in the Navy: to see in deep darkness you don’t look directly at an object—you look to the left; you look at something else to see what you really want to see. Skewed vision.

“Maybe I should leave. I don’t want to cause trouble for you.” “Too late. Besides, I live my own life here. I won’t be pushed. But it’ll come back in some little way. Smart remark, snub. One old white lady kicks me at the library. Swings her feet under the table because she doesn’t want my kind in there. I could break her in two, she’s so frail. She’ll be kicking like a heifer if she gets wind of this.” Barbara Pierre’s apartment was a tidy place but for books on the sofa. “You can see I still use the library even with the nuisances. The kicking bitch hides books I return so I get overdue notices and have to go prove I turned the book in. I explain what’s going on, but nothing changes. Simplest thing is trouble.”

On the way back to the agency, she said, “I’ll tell you something that took me a long time to figure out—but I know how to end race problems.” “Is this a joke?” “Might as well be. Find a way to make people get bored with hating instead of helping. Simple.” She laughed. “That’s what it boils down to.”

THE Corps of Engineers calls it the Atchafalaya Basin Floodway System. Some Acadians call it a boondoggle in the boondocks. The Atchafalaya River, only one hundred thirty-five miles long, has an average discharge more than twice as great as that of the Missouri River although the area it drains is less than a fifth of the Missouri’s and the Big Muddy is nearly twenty times as long. Yet, the Atchafalaya forms the biggest river basin swamp in North America, and before it became an overflow drain, its swamp was at least as biologically rich and varied as the Everglades. Maybe it still is, despite claims by older Cajuns that wildlife isn’t what it was a generation ago. Nevertheless, some ornithologists believe the swamp might hold the last ivory-billed woodpecker.

The Teche, at the western edge of the basin and paralleling the Atchafalaya, has been spared the salvation wreaked on the river, even though, before roads came, the little Teche—not the Atchafalaya—was the highway from the Gulf into the heart of Louisiana. Half of the eighteenth-century settlements in the state lay along or very near the Teche: St. Martinville, Lafayette, Opelousas, New Iberia. The Teche was navigable for more than a hundred miles. Indians put dugouts on it; Spanish adventurers and French explorers floated it in cypress-trunk pirogues (some displacing fifty tons); settlers rode it in keelboats pulled by mules or slaves; merchandise arrived by paddlewheelers; and during the Civil War, Union gunboats came up the Teche to commandeer the fertile cane fields along its banks. All of this on a waterway no wider than the length of a war canoe, no deeper than a man, no swifter than mud turtles that swim it.

U.S. 171 was traffic, fumes, heat, grim faces. I became a grim face and drove. Rosepine, Anacoco, Hornbeck, and Zwolle—alphabetically, the last town in the Rand McNally Road Atlas (Abbeville, just south, is the first).

I’ve heard Americans debate where the West begins: Texans say the Brazos River; in St. Louis it’s the Mississippi, and they built a very expensive “Gateway Arch” to prove it; Philadelphians say the Alleghenies; in Brooklyn it’s the Hudson; and on Beacon Hill the backside of the Common. But, of course, the true West begins with the western state lines of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. It’s a line, as close to straight as you could hope to find, that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada; fewer than a hundred miles from the geographical east-west division of the continental states, it lies close to the hundredth meridian, the twenty-inch rainfall line, and the two-thousand-foot contour line—all of which various geographers recognize as demarcations between East and West. When you stand east of those states you’re in the East; cross over and you’re in the West. It’s simple and clear. I’m an authority because my family lives two hundred feet from where this line passes through Kansas City. I’ve hit numerous backyard homeruns from the East into the West. Kansas City, Missouri, is the last Eastern city, and Kansas City, Kansas—the two divided only by hedges, a street, a piece of river—is the first Western one.

To drive blue highway 21 is to follow Texas history. Older than the mind of man, it started as a bison trail (buffalo walk in surprisingly straight lines); then Indians came up it to hunt the buffalo. In 1691, Spain established a thousand-mile camino real, a royal road, that would link San Antonio with Mexico, French Louisiana, and Spanish Florida; the Spaniards figured the Indians knew best and marked their course over the old track (often the camino was only a direction). Up it came adventurers, padres, traders, smugglers, armies, settlers. And so it was that wandering bison, in a time even before red men came to east Texas, laid down a route that a nation whose explorers steer tangents past the planetary arcs still follow.

“City people don’t think anything important happens in a place like Dime Box. And usually it doesn’t, unless you call conflict important. Or love or babies or dying.”

Listened to a million stories cutting those old squirrels’ heads. Barber’s the third most lied-to person, you know.” “Who’s first?” “Man’s wife is first anywhere in the world. Priest is second.”

While I stood, an uncommon amount of noise came invisibly through the brush. Whatever it was, I felt vulnerable and tried to hurry. The moonlight wasn’t much, but what I could make out looked like a tiptoeing army helmet. I was moving backwards when I realized it was an armadillo. I stopped, it waddled on, sniffed me out at the last moment, and shifted direction without hurry. The conquistadors named the armadillo (“little armored one”), but Texans call them “diggers” because of the animal’s penchant for scratching up larvae and worms, especially from soft soil of new graves. In spite of both the belief that armadillos feed on corpses and the animal’s susceptibility to leprosy, poor whites ate them with greens and cornbread during the Depression and called them “Hoover hogs” or “Texas turkeys” (on the Christmas table); even now, poor blacks, calling them just “dillas,” barbecue the soft meat. Ancient Mayas refused to eat them because they believed the carrion vulture did not die but rather shed wings and metamorphosed into an armadillo. But now, for a creature hardly changed from its Cenozoic ancestors, things are a little better. Texas law protects it from commercial exploitation, and that means it’s harder today to buy a lamp or purse made from an armadillo carapace. When I got back to my rig, the critter was nosing along the highway, looking for bugs popped by cars—that’s why in the warm season so many armadillos get pressed like fossils into the soft asphalt.

WAY out here they have a name for wind, the wind they call Maria. They could, more sensibly, call it a son-of-a-bitch.

The Rio Grande lay safely bedded in concrete and bound with a chainlink fence called the “Tortilla Curtain.” Mexicans know the Rio Grande as the Rio Bravo, the “wild river,” but it didn’t look either bravo or grande, sorry thing that it is now. The river has been “rectified” because it used to flood—and thereby nourish—the lowlands; that’s how you farm one patch three hundred years and still get a crop. But, worse than flooding, the Rio Grande, like a wandering burro, would change course without warning, cutting off a slice of Texas and giving it to the Mexicans or handing over a chunk of Chihuahua and its residents to the Americans. What could immigration do about a peón who entered the country in an adobe hovel that had never moved?

THAT a handcrank coffee mill helped kill off the Old West has not been widely appreciated. For five thousand miles I’d driven between fences, but along New Mexico 81, for the first time, there was none. At last I’d come to open range, a thing disappearing faster than the condor. In 1874, an Illinoisan, Joseph Glidden, received the first patent for a barbed fencing wire he made on a converted coffee mill. Ranchers called the stuff “the Devil’s hatband,” but they saw their economic future in it: the new fence gave means to control breeding and thereby upgrade stock, and it allowed a single well to water an entire herd. Before barbed wire, the West had few long fences because there wasn’t wood enough to build them, and cattle trampled wooden fences anyway. No alternative to open range and cowhands existed. But a barbed wire fence was cheap to buy, erect, and maintain over the big acreages required in the West, and cattle shied from it once they ran against it. In the 1870s some animals cut themselves to death on it, and one rancher said that at first he could hardly drive a cow between two posts. But Glidden’s invention offered something even more important: a means of staking property claims, particularly on plats belonging nominally to the federal government. Ranchers fenced claims to establish ownership, and entire towns ended up encircled or cut off from access to public land. Neighbors tore out each other’s fences, and President Cleveland ordered the Army to take down il...

Eastward, a dusty spume of wind created by thermal pressures spun wildly about the sage and thistle. People of the Old Testament heard the voice of God in desert whirlwinds, but Southwestern Indians saw evil spirits in the spumes and sang aloud if one crossed their path; that’s why, in New Mexico and Arizona today, the little thermals are “dust devils.”

“I’d have a beer,” I said, “but I guess it’s too early.” “Not in the desert.” Mrs. Been set out a bottle. “You have a fine old place.” “One time a National Geographic photographer came in and took pictures, but I never saw them in the magazine.” “How old is the bar?” “Older than statehood. Late eighteen nineties. We’ve got liquor license number twenty-seven. One of the oldest in the state. We were here before Pancho Villa raided the county. We’ve always guaranteed one thing—this is the best bar in town. Anybody doesn’t like it can drive fifty miles to the next one.”

Mrs. Been turned to me, “He’s a real cowboy. Horse, lasso, branding iron.” “Not many of us left except you count ones that tells you they’s cowboys. A lot them ones now. I been ridin’ since the war.” “Weren’t you up around Alamogordo when they tested the bomb?” the high-mileage man said. “Think I heard you were.” “Over west to Elephant Butte, up off the Rio Grande. Just a greenhorn, sleepin’ out where we was movin’ cattle. July of ’forty-five. They was a high wind that night and rain, and I didn’t get much sleep. Curled up against a big rock out of the wind. I was still in my bedroll at daybreak when come a god-terrible flash. I jumped up figurin’ one of the boys took a flashbulb pitcher of me sleepin’ on the job. Course nobody had a Kodak. Couple minutes later the ground started rumblin’. We heard plenty of TNT goin’ off to Almagordy before, but we never heard nothin’ like that noise. Sound just kept roarin’. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I says, ‘what’d they go and do now?’ Next month we saw wheres they bombed Heerosaykee, Japan. We never knowed what an A-tomic bomb was, but we knowed that one flash wasn’t no TNT blockbuster.” “The day the sun rose in the wrong direction,” the other man said. “They’ve been testing soldiers stationed at Alamogordo in ’forty-five for radiation poisoning. You know, Herefords up there turned white.”

Walking back to the highway, I saw a coil of sand loosen and bend itself into a grainy S and warp across the slope. I stood dead still. A sidewinder so matched to the grit only its undulating shadow gave it away. And that’s something else about the desert: deception. It can make heat look like water, living plants seem dead, mountains miles away appear close, and turn scaly tubes of venom into ropes of warm sand. So open, so concealed.

Nothing has done more to take a sense of civic identity, a feeling of community, from small-town America than the loss of old hotels to the motel business. The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains a haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.

I’ve read that Navajo, a language related to that of the Indians of Alaska and northwest Canada, has no curse words unless you consider “coyote” cursing. By comparison with other native tongues, it’s remarkably free of English and Spanish; a Navajo mechanic, for example, has more than two hundred purely Navajo terms to describe automobile parts. And it might be Navajo that will greet the first extraterrestrial ears to hear from planet Earth: on board each Voyager spacecraft traveling toward the edge of the solar system and beyond is a gold-plated, long-playing record; following an aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” is a Navajo night chant, music the conquistadors heard.

At any particular moment in a man’s life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he’s being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that’s a fulfilling notion. But if he’s in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.

I told him of my difficulty in rousing a conversation in Tuba City. He said, “I can’t speak for Navajos about prejudice, but I know Hopis who believe we survived Spaniards, missionaries, a thousand years of other Indians, even the BIA. But tourists?” He smiled. “Smallpox would be better.”

He picked up his tray to go. “I could give you a taste of the old Hopi Way. But maybe you’re too full after that breakfast. You always eat so much?” “The mountain caused that.” I got up. “What do you mean by ‘taste’?” “I’ll show you.” We went to his dormitory room. Other than several Kachina dolls he had carved from cottonwood and a picture of a Sioux warrior, it was just another collegiate dorm room—maybe cleaner than most. He pulled a shoebox from under his bed and opened it carefully. I must have been watching a little wide-eyed because he said, “It isn’t live rattlesnakes.” From the box he took a long cylinder wrapped in waxed paper and held it as if trying not to touch it. “Will you eat this? It’s very special.” He was smiling. “If you won’t, I can’t share the old Hopi Way with you.” “Okay, but if it’s dried scorpions, I’m going to speak with a forked tongue.” “Open your hands.” He unwrapped the cylinder and ever so gently laid across my palms an airy tube the color of a thunderhead. It was about ten inches long and an inch in diameter. “There you go,” he said. “You first.” “I’m not having any right now.” So I bit the end off the blue-gray tube. It was many intricately rolled layers of something with less substance than butterfly wings. The bite crumbled to flakes that stuck to my lips. “Now tell me what I’m eating.” “Do you like it?” “I think so. Except it disappears like cotton candy just as I get ready to chew. But I think I taste corn and maybe ashes.” “Hopis were...

The Hopi believes mankind has evolved through four worlds: the first a shadowy realm of contentment; the second a place so comfortable the people forgot where they had come from and began worshipping material goods. The third world was a pleasant land too, but the people, bewildered by their past and fearful for their future, thought only of their own earthly plans. At last, the Spider Grandmother, who oversees the emergences, told them: “You have forgotten what you should have remembered, and now you have to leave this place. Things will be harder.” In the fourth and present world, life is difficult for mankind, and he struggles to remember his source because materialism and selfishness block a greater vision. The newly born infant comes into the fourth world with the door of his mind open (evident in the cranial soft spot), but as he ages, the door closes and he must work at remaining receptive to the great forces. A human being’s grandest task is to keep from breaking with things outside himself.

“The religion doesn’t seem to have much of an ethical code.” “It’s there. We watch what the Kachinas say and do. But the Spider Grandmother did give two rules. To all men, not just Hopis. If you look at them, they cover everything. She said, ‘Don’t go around hurting each other,’ and she said, ‘Try to understand things.’” “I like them. I like them very much.” “Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren’t just will and thoughts. We’re also sand and wind and thunder. Rain. The seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things. That’s why we have so many songs of creation to remind us where we came from. If the fourth world forgets that, we’ll disappear in the wilderness like the third world, where people decided they had created themselves.” “Pride’s the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins in old Christian theology.” “It’s kahopi to set yourself above things. It causes divisions.”