Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

With a bag of blueberry tarts, I went up Main to a tin-sided, false-front tavern called Michel’s, just down the street from the Cease Funeral Home. The interior was log siding and yellowed knotty pine. In the backroom the Junior Chamber of Commerce talked about potatoes, pulpwood, dairy products, and somebody’s broken fishing rod. I sat at the bar. Behind me a pronghorn antelope head hung on the wall, and beside it a televised baseball game cast a cool light like a phosphorescent fungus. “Hear that?” a dwindled man asked. He was from the time when boys drew “Kilroy-Was-Here” faces on alley fences. “Did you hear the announcer?” “I wasn’t listening.” “He said ‘velocity.’” “Velocity?” “He’s talking about a fastball. A minute ago he said a runner had ‘good acceleration.’ This is a baseball game, not a NASA shot. And another thing: I haven’t heard anybody mention a ‘Texas leaguer’ in years.” “It’s a ‘bloop double’ now, I think.” “And the ‘banjo hitter’—where’s he? And what happened to the ‘slow ball’?” “It’s a ‘change-up.’” The man got me interested in the game. We watched and drank Grain Belt. He had taught high school civics in Minneapolis for thirty-two years, but his dream had been to become a sports announcer. “They put a radar gun on the kid’s fastball a few minutes ago,” he said. “Ninety-three point four miles per hour. That’s how they tell you speed now. They don’t try to show it to you: ‘smoke,’ ‘hummer,’ ‘the high hard one.’ I miss the old clichés. They had life. Who ...