Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

Orient Point, Long Island, was a few houses and a collapsed four-story inn built in 1810, so I went to Greenport for gas. At an old-style station, the owner himself came out and pumped the no-lead and actually wiped the windshield. I happened to refer to him as a New Yorker. “Don’t call me a New Yorker. This is Long Island.” “I meant the state, not the city.” “Manhattan’s a hundred miles from here. We’re closer to Boston than the city. Long Island hangs under Connecticut. Look at the houses here, the old ones. They’re New England–style because the people that built them came from Connecticut. Towns out here look like Connecticut. I don’t give a damn if the city’s turned half the island into a suburb—we should rightfully be Connecticut Yankees. Or we should be the seventh New England state. This island’s bigger than Rhode Island any way you measure it. The whole business gets my dander up. We used to berth part of the New England whaling fleet here, and that was a pure Yankee business. They called this part of the island ‘the flukes’ because Long Island even looks like a whale. But you go down to the wharf now and you’ll see city boats and a big windjammer that sells rides to people from Mamaroneck and Scarsdale.” He got himself so exercised he overfilled the tank, but he didn’t pipe down. “If the East River had’ve been ten miles wide, we’da been all right.” He jerked the nozzle out and clanked it into the pump. “We needed a bay and we got a bastard river no wider than a st...