Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

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.