Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

The ferry, an old oily tub holding a few cars, bucketed down the deep river that had seen Indian canoes, Revolutionary War privateers, whaling ships, Coast Guard rum-chasers, and three generations of submarines. At the railing, I tried to watch both sides of the river: the west bank with grassy homes and an old lighthouse and on the east bank the Groton shipyards. An engineer for Singer Company (once only makers of sewing machines, but now also manufacturers of undersea warfare “systems”) stood next to me. His face was a whorl of lines like a fingerprint. I asked where they built the submarines, and he pointed to a dagger of a shadow. “That black thing is the Ohio. She’s the first Trident. The orange bull on blocks is the Michigan.” “How can anything that big move under water?” “They’re longer than the Washington Monument. The Ohio will carry twenty-four missiles, each one with a dozen warheads: two hundred eighty-eight atomic explosions. One hell of a bitch with twelve sisters coming along behind at a billion dollars each.” He offered a Chiclet. “They used to name battleships after states because they were the dreadnaughts of the sea, but there’s your dreadnaughts of the next war.” “What next war?” “You think war is finished? Whatever peace we’ll know will come because of things like those devils. Let me tell you about my uncle who collected handguns and worked up at Colt in Hartford. He had an eighteen-seventy Colt revolver called ‘The Peacemaker’ because it was so deadl...