Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

A car whipped past, the driver eating and a passenger clicking a camera. Moving without going anywhere, taking a trip instead of making one. I laughed at the absurdity of the photographs and then realized I, too, was rolling effortlessly along, turning the windshield into a movie screen in which I, the viewer, did the moving while the subject held still. That was the temptation of the American highway, of the American vacation (from the Latin vacare, “to be empty”). A woman in Texas had told me that she often threatened to write a book about her family vacations. Her title: Zoom! The drama of their trips, she said, occurred on the inside of the windshield with one family crisis after another. Her husband drove a thousand miles, much of it with his right arm over the backseat to hold down one of the children. She said, “Our vacations take us.”

In the dusk, the valley showed no evidence of man other than wire fences, highway, and occasional deer-crossing signs that looked like medieval heraldic devices: on a field of ochre, a stag rampant, sable. The signs had been turned into colanders by gunners, almost none of whom hit the upreared bucks.

We ordered another round. Johnny said, “Bag of flour sold here once for a quarter million dollars. That’s why the town seal’s got a bag of flour on it.” “What?” He repeated it very slowly. In my mind I saw a furred, aquatic animal balancing a sack of daisies on its nose. “I don’t follow you.” “In bonanza days, after the Civil War, a grocer made a bet with a fella on an election. Whoever lost had to carry a fifty-pound bag of wheat flour up Main Street. Now just walking that street taxes a man. Grocer lost. So he carried fifty pounds up Main to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body.’ He was a Southerner. After he got to the top, he auctioned the bag off and gave the money to charity. Man who bought it auctioned it off and gave the money to charity. And so on. Made ten thousand dollars that day off the same bag. Later, another town got wind of it, and they wanted in. Last time that flour got auctioned was at the nineteen oh four World’s Fair in St. Louis. That dang bag raised better than a quarter million dollars, and that’s why the official town seal is a bag of flour. It’s over in Reno now.” “You mean with all the great natural wonders around Austin, the town symbol is a sack of stale flour?” “Tell me, mister, what’s more unusual: a pine tree or flour at five thousand dollars a pound?”

We bought each other a third round, and Johnny said, “Think a smart New Yorker like you can tell a religion by the way people pay for their church?” “Don’t know what you mean.” “Three new churches built in Austin after the Civil War when the town had money. Methodist, Episcopalian, Catholic. This is a true fact. One church pays for the building with one pass of the collection plate on Easter Sunday. One pays with donated mining stock, which it sells in the East. And one makes the first mortgage payment by charging admission. Who did what?” “All right,” I said, “the Catholics charged admission.” “Okay.” “Episcopalians had the stock.” “Wrong. I said the church was given the stock. Episcopalians had the cash. Methodists had the investments. Businessman’s religion. You oughta know that.”

The Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express (the actual name of the Pony Express) used to run notices that are models for truth in advertising. An 1860 San Francisco newspaper printed this one: WANTED Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Despite or because of such ads, never was there a shortage of riders.

“The isolation—” I was starting to say. “You like it or you don’t,” Laurie said. “Callie, our daughter, is a fourth-generation Nevadan. That’s something in a state where most people are from somewhere else. I wanted to have the baby on the pool table, but nobody would listen. So we had to make a ninety-mile-an-hour drive to Reno at three in the morning. God, what a ride!” “On the pool table?” “I don’t think anyone’s ever been born in Frenchman in a hundred and thirty-five years.” “A pool table on a bombing range?” “It would have been something for her to remember.”

If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.

Drawn as always to the glow of neon in the dusk, I stopped at a wooden cafe. No calendars, otherwise perfect. In front sat an Argosy landcruiser (the kind you see in motel parking lots) with an Airstream trailer attached; on top of the Argosy was a motorboat and on the front and back matched mopeds. Often I’d seen the American propensity to take to the highway with as many possessions as a vehicle could carry—that inclination to get away from it all while hauling it all along—but I stood amazed at this achievement of transport called a vacation. Although the Argosy side windows were one-way glass (to look and not get looked at back), in the trailer I saw pine paneling, Swiss cupboards, and a self-cleaning oven. What the owner really wanted was to drive his 3-BR-split-foyer so he wouldn’t have to leave the garage and basement behind.

St. Helens, Oregon, high above the river, was remarkable that day for splendidly clear views of the white summits of four great volcanoes: Rainier, St. Helens, and Adams northward across the river in Washington, and Mount Hood southeast in Oregon. Each has its distinction: Hood is the most notable American mountain named after an enemy military leader (Admiral Samuel Hood, second in command of the British fleet during the Revolutionary War); Mount Rainier, even after blasting away two thousand feet of summit, is still the highest volcano in the country; Mount St. Helens (Lord St. Helens was an English ambassador to Spain), youngest of the peaks, was quiet again but perking; Klickitat Indians have a better name for St. Helens: Tawonlatkla, “Fire Mountain.” And there’s Mount Adams; poor Adams, second in height only to Rainier. Easily as imposing as the others the way it rises so separately from the land, it remains the greatest unknown American mountain. The anonymity, if you ask me, results from the name (after the second President). They might as well have called it Mount Jones or Schwartz Peak. To citizens of St. Helens, the names were insignificant anyway. I asked three people to confirm which mountain was which; while all agreed on the location of Hood, they argued over the peaks in Washington. To live so uninformed before such grandeur is the hallmark of a true native son.

BUT for the flip of a coin, Portland, Oregon, would be Boston, Oregon. Asa Lovejoy of Massachusetts and Francis Pettygrove of Maine, owners of land along the Willamette River, each wanted the name of their new town to honor the leading city of their home states, so they tossed a coin. A man told me: “Two Portlands cause confusion, yes, but nobody here complains. We could have ended up living in Lovejoy, Oregon.”

In Kelly’s time, the wharf area of Portland was known as Skidroad, a logger’s term for a timber track to drag logs over. Forgetting the history and thinking the word referred to rundown buildings and men on the skids, people began calling the squalid section “skid row.”

At The Dalles another dam—this one wedged between high walls of basalt. Before the rapids here disappeared, Indians caught salmon for a couple of thousand years by spearing them in midair as the fish exploded leaps up the falls; Klickitats smoked the salmon over coals, pulverized the dried flesh, and either packed it in wicker baskets lined with fishskins for use during the winter or they tied the cooked salmon in bundles for trading to other tribes. The fish kept for months and some even ended up with Indians living east of the Rockies. The cascades provided such a rich fishing site that Lewis and Clark called The Dalles “the great mart of all this country.” Natives found a new source of income in the falls when white traders came with boats to be portaged. One fur trader complained, as did many early travelers, that the Indians were friendly but “habitual thieves”; yet he paid fifty braves only a quid of tobacco each to carry his heavy boats a mile upriver.

A traveling salesman once told me that if you tense butt muscles tight enough, you can run on an empty tank for miles.

The future passed eastward to Walla Walla (“little swift water”) with its many small streams instead of navigable rivers. Outsiders may laugh at the name until they consider the original one: Steptoeville. Walla Walla, a pleasant little city of ivied college buildings, wasn’t at all what you’d expect of a town with a name that sounds like baby babble.

The road went around the Blue Mountains into the Palouse, one of the most visually striking topographical regions in America. The treeless, rounded hills, shaped by ice and wind and water to a sensuous nudity, were sprouting an intensely green fuzz of winter wheat. These fertile highlands, the steepest American cropland, are so vast and rich, special machinery has been built to work them: twelve-wheel, self-leveling tractors and combines that can ride the thirty percent gradients.

Shelby used to be on the old Whoop-up Trail, a route followed by Missouri River whiskey traders who sold to Indians. What the U.S. Army could not accomplish—the destruction of tribal organization—whiskey traders did with help from Christian missionaries who suppressed the old rituals. The white settlers, moving in after tribal disintegration opened this land, should have erected a monument to the whiskey bottle. The Blackfoot, for example, once hunted an area about twice the size of Montana; now their reservation of steel crosses and Whoopie Burgers doesn’t occupy even all of Glacier County. It isn’t that Indians lost their land because of whiskey—that stuff they called the Great Father’s Milk—they just lost it faster because of whiskey.

I blame what was about to happen to him on the traditional design of the American bar: a straight counter facing a mirrored wall, which forces the customer to stare at himself or put a crick in his neck looking at someone else. The English build their bars in circles or horseshoes or right angles—anything to get another face in your line of sight. Their bars, as a result, are more sociable. For the American, he stares into his own face, or at bottles of golden liquors, or at whatever hangs above the bar; conversation declines and drinking increases. If the picture above the bar is a nude, as is common in old Western bars, you have an iconography for creating unfulfilled desire: the reality of a man’s own six o’clock face below the dream of perfect flesh.

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 ...

The name “Itasca,” despite its Indian sound, came from two Latin words, veritas caput (“true head”), that Henry Rowe Schoolcraft assembled. Schoolcraft—led by the Chippewa, Yellow Head—traced the Mississippi to Itasca in order to settle an old dispute about the source of the river (the fact is, several ponds feed Itasca). He recorded in his log that the area was full of “voracious, long-billed, dyspeptic mosquitoes,” and another explorer wrote that a swarm extinguished his lantern flame. A century and a half later, the dark timber still sounded with their whine, their proboscises were still alarmingly large and powerful. With every swat, I splattered a dozen bloody bugs over pants and shirt. An ordinary mosquito can penetrate the tough scutum of a rattlesnake, but Northwoods species can pierce the rind of stones.

The largest fresh water lake in the world (its volume is considerably greater than all the other Great Lakes combined), Superior is so big it has a three-inch tide.

Before I left home, I had told someone that part of my purpose for the trip was to be inconvenienced so I might see what would come from dislocation and disrupted custom. Answer: severe irritability.

I knew the road name where my friend lived and nothing more, so I stopped at a farm on route 21 for directions. The farmer got me to the road and the road took me to the house, which was lighted from top to bottom with no one around but the dogs. I went back to my bunk. Later, when trees obscured the moon, there was an uproar of metallic banging against the Ghost. “Hey in there! Dammit! Open up this sardine can!” It was my friend. Scott Chisholm said, “I’m not going to wake you up by asking why you’re sleeping in my woods. I’m only going to ask if you want to sleep inside.” “Too tired to move.” “All right, breakfast it is then. I’ll tell you only this: I won’t be able to sleep knowing you’re here.” “I’m quite harmless.” 2 AT breakfast, Linda, Chisholm’s wife, told me he had slept like a fallen log. “I knew he would,” I said, “but I liked thinking he thought he wouldn’t.”

Scott Chisholm, a Canadian citizen of Ojibway and Scotch descent, had lived in this country longer than in Canada and liked the United States but wouldn’t admit it for fear of having to pay off bets he made years earlier when he first “came over” that the U.S. is a place no Canadian could ever love.

“Now, Pa was a champeen winemaker. He learned in Naples, Italy, the old-country way. Back in Rochester he made wine in the basement out of Little Black Joes. We call them Zinfandels now. Always kept the winecellar locked and the key around his neck. He’d come upstairs and say, ‘Il vino fa’l sangue sano!’ Wine makes good blood! The old man’s breakfast was a big glass of red with two raw eggs in it.”

“You know how we knew when to bung up the bottles? The way we knew the fermenting was finished?” “I couldn’t guess.” “Then you’re learning, my friend. This is the old Italiano way: we pulled a penny balloon over the neck of the bottle to keep air and dirt out and let gas escape into the balloon. When the balloon didn’t get bigger, we’d start bunging up.”

“You know, we hear about this place called McDonald’s. Two weeks ago we drive there for a hamburg sangwich.” Her face pinched up. “Meat was thin like cheesecloth. ‘This is no hamburg sangwich,’ I say. ‘This is joke.’”

Filomena, whose common name was Fanny, finished her meal and sat back listening as best she could, looking at nothing in particular. Her hands, spotted and veined like moth wings, fluttered up and down from time to time and landed softly on the table, in her lap. I asked her, “Did you like the old days?” “Ha!” she said. “They think more of horse or jackass than human person. They never teach me to read!” “We womens was brought up to be just like mouse,” Pauline whispered. “We was so quiet.” “Work all time because we got to make everything,” Filomena said. “Couldn’t buy no cookies, no cakes. Got to make it all. Couldn’t buy nothing.” “You had two choices for dinner and supper,” Pete said. “Pasta fasol or nothing. Every day we ate pasta fasol. Always on the stove pasta fasol, pasta fasol. Macaroni and beans. Shit on it.” “You got tired of it?” “What can you do, my friend? We ate poor, lived poor, slept poor.” “How do you sleep poor?” “Five to a room.” “My mother she had eight childrens,” Pauline said. “They was all delivered by midwife. She go to doctor for first time in her life when she is sixty-five. Poor was not all things bad.”

JOSEPH Smith, an eighteen-year-old with small hands and big feet, a quiet and “unlaughing” boy, encountered the Angel Moroni, son of Mormon, on a drumlin alongside a little road south of Palmyra in 1827. The road is now New York 21 and the drumlin, a streamlined hump of glacially drifted soil, they call Hill Cumorah. It is not a Mount Sinai or an Ararat, but rather a much humbler thing, yet apparently of sufficient majesty for angels and God to have chosen it as the place to speak to Smith. There he unearthed the golden plates that he said were the source of the Book of Mormon. With the aid of an ancient pair of optical instruments, the Urim and Thummin, which Smith found with the plates, he was able to translate the “revised” Egyptian hieroglyphics, although he insisted on dictating his translation to scribes from behind a curtain.

The lake once formed a twenty-mile link in the Erie Canal, and just east of Oneida, excavation for the waterway began on the Fourth of July, 1817. I stopped near the spot at an abandoned section of canal and walked down the old towpath, now a snowmobile trail. The canal, only four feet deep in its early years, had become a rank, bosky, froggy trough. But it was that forty-eight inches of water that did so much to open western New York and the Midwest to settlement and commerce. “Clinton’s Folly,” the popular name for the canal as it was being built, followed the Mohawk Valley, the only natural break at this latitude in the Appalachians. From Lake Erie to the Hudson River (363 miles, 83 stone locks, 13 aqueducts) the canal moved people and things between the middle of the nation and the ocean; it was this watercourse, as much as anything else, that made New York City the leading Atlantic port. Travelers who had some money could take a packet boat with windows and berths, while poorer immigrants heading into the Midlands rode cheaper and drearier line boats. Ten years after Clinton’s Folly opened, the populations of Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo increased three hundred percent; the canal, having paid for itself in that decade, had changed the northwest quarter of America. No paltry accomplishment for a scheme that even the visionary Thomas Jefferson saw as a little short of madness.

Adirondack (“bark eaters”) was a contemptuous epithet Mohawks gave to some degenerated tribe so poor it had to eat trees.

I bought gas in Alder Creek and asked the pumpman what winter was like in the mountains. “This,” he said and held up the stump of a little finger. “Frostbite. Snowfall of a hundred forty-two inches last year, forty-five below, wind chill seventy below. That’s what we call winter.”

Through the villages of Orwell, Sudbury, and Goshen Corners, past the old groceries with SALADA TEA lettered in gold on front windows, and into the Green Mountains (which, some say, Vermont means in French despite cynical literalists who insist on “Worm Mountain”).

Any New England town worth its colonial salt has at least one bell cast in Paul Revere’s foundry; like a DAR certificate, it’s a touchstone of authenticity. Here, they boasted of four.

I took route 104 up to the motel congestion of the west side of Lake Winnipesaukee—the lake with a hundred thirty different spellings and almost as many translations from the Indian (the best is “the smile of the Great Spirit”)—and

I ate a grinder—elsewhere called a hero, hoagie, poorboy, submarine, sub, torpedo, Italian—and drank a chocolate frappe—elsewhere called a milkshake or malted velvet or cabinet.

“Live long enough and you turn into history regardless of what you know.

The evaporator, built in 1930, was an eighteen-foot contraption of plated tin mounted above a long firebox that burned four-foot pine slabs. From a holding tank, the raw, clear sap drained into the upper end of the evaporator pan where it heated to a foamy boil of two hundred nineteen degrees; if the foam began to inhibit evaporation, Hunter would throw in a piece of salt pork or a dollop of milk; the thickening liquid then moved down the pan through numerous little troughs to the strainer and outlet. Once the firebox reached temperature, the sap of two to four percent sugar became syrup of eighty-five percent sugar in about four hours. It is the critical evaporating process that creates the color and flavor of maple syrup and determines the profit. Fancy-grade pure maple, the light-amber premium syrup, brings the best price. Grade A is darker, more pungent, and B darker and more potent yet. It’s a peculiarity of history that the milder tasting grades are the most expensive: in the early days when the primary purpose for maple syrup was to furnish sugar, women didn’t want all their baked goods tasting like maple.

We went outside where Hunter pointed out a big sugar maple (also called a hard rock maple because of the tough wood and the rocky soil it grows in). Many kinds of trees produce syruping sap, but none gives a greater or sweeter flow than the sugar maple. To get his average annual yield of three hundred gallons of syrup takes about twelve thousand gallons of sap from twelve hundred tapped trees.

We had been almost sauntering, but Hunter began walking fast. Then he stopped. “When I’m up on the peak lookin’ down, sometimes I try to imagine the orchards and pastures a generation from now. Or in five generations. I imagine different ways it’ll turn out, but the thing I always end up with is those fields I raked hay on when I was a boy. We’re takin’ timber off them now. People—outlanders—get upset because we cut trees. They don’t see that those trees are growin’ in an old field. I know this, what you think comes down to your point of view. Don’t know where theirs is, but mine’s from up on that old volcano.”

I lost myself to the monotonous rhythm and darkness as past and present fused and dim things came and went in a staccato of moments separated by miles of darkness. On the road, where change is continuous and visible, time is not; rather it is something the rider only infers. Time is not the traveler’s fourth dimension—change is.

“People think hydropower is a Grand Coulee Dam—big. But little is valuable too, especially in New England where heating oil is expensive and falling water is cheap. A lot of tide and streams get wasted now. And you wouldn’t believe the number of little hydroplants on town dams that have been abandoned in the last thirty years. If we developed only ten percent of the small existing dams in the country, we could save a couple hundred million barrels of oil a year.

As we eat, he gives the news off the marine radio: the relative calm won’t hold till evening. From the CB we hear the day’s prices for “flats” (flatfish): flounders (yellowtails or lemon sole, blackbacks, dabs or plaice, gray sole or witch flounder) are selling at thirty-five cents a pound on the New Bedford market, the earliest auction. Less abundant groundfish—halibut (a flounder), cod, haddock, hake, whiting—are going at forty to fifty cents a pound. What the fisherman will sell for a half dollar a pound, the supermarket will sell for two dollars after the fish passes through the trucker (add ten percent), the broker (another ten), and cutting house where the fish will become a filet. “In the winter when the weather cuts down on the fishable days,” Tom says, “the supply drops and prices will triple. But the catch is smaller, and we have to fish at twice the depth, so our income stays level.” “Do you sell your catch in Boston?” “Mostly, but it goes all over. Some of it, like the sand sharks, even goes to England for fish and chips. Flats that are too small to take to market—the ones we call ‘windowpanes’—those fish end up on the pier as lobster bait at six dollars a box.”

“Driving a truck up a mountain is less strain than towing,” Tom says, “especially when we go against the tide. You tow with or against the tide. If you pull across it, your doors are going to foul and close up the net. We’re burning five gallons an hour now, and we’ll try to keep the gear down for ten miles or three hours. We like to get three long tows in by sunset. Night dragging isn’t very productive. If we get a good tow, we’ll heist a ton or more of fish. A dragger never knows how well he’s doing until the bag comes up. That’s why you’ve got to tow by the clock. If you tow by feel, the tide can make you think you’ve got a full bag.”

Ken begins winching in the net as Ron pries with a length of pipe at the cable on the drums to keep the lines from snarling. The cable jerks and flings water. “If she’s going to part, now’s the likely time!” Tom shouts from the wheelhouse. The weight of the net pulls the boat backwards until we are above it. An aura of anticipation. A crew gets paid only for its share of the catch. There are no salaries. Gulls, spotting the activity on deck, come from invisibility and plunge to the ocean to bob and wait. White on blue. Then the orange floats break the surface, then the doors, then the forward portion of the net called the “square” is up. Caught in it are several small starfish—white and brown ones—and a herring. Ron jumps to secure the deadly crash of the doors against the gallows. The net is entirely out of the sea and swinging like a giant pendulum above the deck. Ken reaches under the cod end to pull a line tied in a slip knot, and the bag opens and seven hundred pounds of bottomfish pour all over the deck. We stand ankle-deep in marine quicksilver and opalescent eyes. There isn’t a thrash anywhere. I ask, “What’s wrong with these fish?” “They’re dead.” “Not already.” “Look at them.” The rapid decompression has bulged their eyeballs into spheres. Stomachs swell out of some mouths, and guts dribble from anuses. “The bends,” Tom says. “You should see the bag surface with a big load of cod. It explodes from the water when the fish blow their pokes. Their air sacs bust like...

Ron, a big man, struggles to pick up a four-foot specimen so I can look in its mouth. “They come six feet and longer. This one’s just middle size.” He drops it to the deck, pulls out his knife, cuts away the bony head to leave only the considerably smaller tail that contains a single bone. “Nobody would eat a head that can eat you. Especially when it’s this ugly.” “Who’s going to eat that tail?” I ask. The flesh is loose, almost like jelly. “Damn, that’s revolting!” “Ever had a franchise fishburger? Did you think you were eating red snapper? Monkfish take on the taste of what you cook with them.”

A trawler cannot legally keep lobsters because dragging is such an efficient means of harvest, trawlers could clear out the species in a year or two. “Biggest lobster ever found came up accidentally in a drag net. Forty-four pounds.”

I ask Tom what the future of bottom fishing is for Maine. “Good, bad, so-so. All of that. In ’seventy-six, the government extended the old three-mile territorial limit to two hundred miles to keep foreigners out. Had to do it. Russians and Germans and Japanese were coming in with armadas of trawlers and factory ships that process and freeze the catch. Once they found a good coordinate, they’d sit on it until they cleaned it out. A factory ship can hold six-months’ catch so their draggers don’t have to return to port to refuel or off-load. And they used roller nets so they could drag bottom we couldn’t, and they fished with two-inch mesh nets, whereas we have to use five-inchers to let the little ones escape. The Europeans and Japanese lost all their boats during the war so their governments subsidized new ones in the sixties. Their fleets are newer and more efficient than our Yankee one. We couldn’t compete. But since the two-hundred-mile limit, our catch is way up.” “That’s the good. What’s the bad?” “About the same thing—the government. They watch over everything out here now. That helicopter that passed a while back was observers. We’ve got quotas imposed by marine biologists although nobody has an accurate idea how many fish are below. You can’t count them like elephants. A year ago, we caught the entire East-coast quota for haddock in two days. Some of the regulations are just out of line with reason. This is one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. It’s why N...

With everything hosed down and secured, Ron pulls out a couple of big yellowtails. In quick strokes, he slices behind the gills, down the spine, flips the fish and does the same thing, then, with two final quick cuts, frees the filets. “Put your nose here,” he says and holds up the flounder. “All I smell is sweetness.” “Sweetness is right. It’s fresh. Once you eat a real, honest fresh flounder, you won’t like what lubbers call fresh seafood. You’ll be like the woman after the French tickler—never satisfied again.” He drops a filet in a bag. Ken says, “Cook it up in your truck tonight. Eat it tonight, or you’ll never know what fresh fish is.”

Highway statistics: since 1930, American road and street miles have increased only eighteen percent while car traffic has grown by fifty percent, truck by seventy. But most of that increase in roadways has come in surburban streets. Even though there is about one road mile per square mile in the contiguous states, highways take up less than one percent of the three million square miles in the country.

More statistics: if you poured all the sand, gravel, and cement in American interstates into a nine-foot-thick, ten-foot-high wall, it would circle the world fifty times.