Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

I’d spent my share of Navy time in Newport down on Thames Street (also known as Bloody Alley), which had ever been the waterfront thoroughfare, although things had slipped and no longer was it the main business street. But in the seventeenth century only a madman or seer might have predicted that upstart New York City would have an avenue more important than the Alley. Thames Street—a narrow, dark trench of a lane under hip roofs and gables and old doorways with fanlights—had seen the likes of Captain Kidd, Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Lafayette, Rochambeau, Kosciuszko, Baron Steuben, Count von Fersen (a lover of Marie Antoinette), Nathanael Greene, Gilbert Stuart, Stephen Decatur, Oliver Perry (Battle of Lake Erie), Matthew Perry (opening of Japan), Herman Melville, most of the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, and Kennedys, and a thousand-thousand fishermen and sailors. Not bad for a street that began as a swamp. Citizens of Newport hanged pirates at the north end of the Alley, buccaneers and merchantmen refitted ships at the Thames Street wharfs, and Englishmen impressed American seamen they found wandering “the Strand,” as it was once called. The first cobblestones were bought with receipts levied on each slave imported from Africa (later, any Negro who owned a pig and sty could vote in a mock election for a black governor at the corner of Thames and Farewell streets). In one house nearby, a boy in his father’s arms, upon seeing George Washing...

A man, young, said, “They trashed the place to save it. The American plan.” “How did it happen?” “Navy cut back. Businessmen wanted tourists who’ll spend more than sailors.” “But the history.” “American history is parking lots.”

The Newport-Jamestown ferry was extinct too, superseded by a two-mile bridge. I said to the tollkeeper, “Damn expensive bridge—the toll, that is.” “We got a joke here. It’s high because it’s high. Get it? They built it so aircraft carriers at Quonset Point could sail under. As soon as the paint dried, the Navy pulled its birdfarms out of Narragansett Bay.”

AN Englishman once had a good laugh when I asked how far it was to Chichester, a name I hadn’t come close to pronouncing properly. I tried three other ways and still didn’t get it right. He was in stitches. “Oh, you Yanks just slay me.” “Okay, pal,” I said. “Tell me the body of water Seattle is on. That ought to be easy—it’s only five letters.” I started to spell it. “I can spell it, mate. P-u-g-e-t. And I’ll pronounce it for you too. PUG-it.” I laughed and he tried, “Poo-GET.” More laughter made him desperate, so he tried a little French, the last resort of the English: “Pooh-ZHAY.” “Nope. It’s PEW-jit. You Limeys just kill me.” “Look,” he said, “all you have to do to pronounce Chichester is soften the vowels and swallow more than you say.” The English must do well in Rhode Island, what with all the softening and swallowing necessary to pronounce the descriptive Algonquian place names: Chepiwanoxet, Annaquatucket, Usquepaugh, Woonasquatucket, Nannaquaket, Quonochontaug, Quanatumpic (if you like the letter q, you’ll love Little Rhody of the big names). Someone once said that if Niagara Falls were in Rhode Island, the English settlers would have pronounced it “Niffuls.” There are other names here, thank heavens, just as distinctive but still pronounceable. Take, for example, the meandering county roads that most states would identify by numbers or letters: Willie Woodhead Road, Widow Sweets Road, Hog House Hill Road, Molasses Hazard Road, Biscuit City Road, Boom Bridge Road...

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...

I said to the engineer, “Isn’t this ferry some kind of old Navy craft?” “An LSM they brought out of the Pacific after the war and put a new superstructure on. She’s been making this crossing since nineteen forty-eight, but she’s in her last month. They got a new, specially designed boat just about ready.” When John Steinbeck began his 1960 tour of the United States that he describes in Travels with Charley, he crossed Long Island Sound on this very boat and worried about the nuclear submarines of an earlier day. Yet a couple of decades later, that great flash of light still had not shown mankind the way out. Watching the shipyards disappear from view, the engineer said, “Maybe it’s a crazy way to be sane, but men are most reasonable when they’re scared.” “Ever seen a cornered animal?” “We’re not animals.”

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...

I stopped at Lakehurst Naval Air Station to look at the dirigible hangars, those thousand-foot-long, twenty-story buildings, where the Pineys allegedly did in the blimp. Another era of flight ended here too: Lakehurst was the last place the Navy trained carrier pigeons.

Somewhere south of Jenkins, population forty five (five was more believable), I gave in to the heat and pulled up under the trees by a small bridge. A stream, about half the width of the highway, moved through with a good current. I took it to be the Wading River. Bog iron (cannonballs fired at Valley Forge were made here) and tannins had turned the transparent water the color of cherry cola. This “cedar water,” as it is called, sea captains once carried on long voyages because it remained sweet longer than other waters. Even today, it is remarkably free of pollutants since all streams that flow through the Pines have their source here.

McPhee reports that, in the twenties, a Philadelphia newspaper gave away lots in the Pines as premiums with new subscriptions, and that during the Depression movie houses passed out deeds to small tracts as door prizes, and that realty agents offered lots here for five dollars. McPhee writes: When prospective buyers actually came to see the land, promoters tied pears and apples to the limbs of pine trees and stationed fishermen in small boats in Pine Barrens lakes with dead pickerel on the ends of their lines and instructions to pull the fish out of the water every ten minutes. But no one cared for the giveaways, and, even now, although the margins of the Pines were shrinking from commercial encroachments, the heart of Burlington County—the middle of the pinelands—still belonged to the quiet and Pineys. Whenever that last foot of concrete is poured to complete the Boston-Washington megalopolis, it’s likely to be in the Pine Barrens.

As the pine belt disappeared, the state took on a Southern cast below Millville, an old glass-making town on the Maurice River flowing through the exposed silica deposits of lower Jersey. Near here, the first Mason jar was made.

I came to Greenwich (pronounced GREEN-witch), population one thousand, a village built along a broad single lane called “Ye Greate Street” (Ye correctly pronounced as “the”), which ran from a rotting boat landing on the Cohansey River northwest for two miles, most of the way lined with old homes and buildings. In the seventeenth century, “greate street” meant “main street,” but now, “great” in the sense of “grand” was also accurate. Of the nearly hundred homes and buildings along the three-century-old thoroughfare, about ninety percent were built before 1880 and more than a quarter dated from the eighteenth century. Even the Sunoco station was in a 1760 house. Although the old structures appeared sound, only a few had been restored. Greenwich was a Williamsburg with a difference: it wasn’t dug out of the ground and rebuilt. There was another difference too: it didn’t have that unnaturally genteel, sanitized look of the Virginia village that turns it into a museum. Surely, the first Williamsburg must have been a knockabout frontier town, a place of skullduggery and war, where the laundry got hung out and dogs pissed in the muddy lanes, where the scent of dung and wet horses was strong. To resurrect that town and playact the past is a good thing for Williamsburg. But it wasn’t the way of Greenwich. Hidden in the tall marsh grass of the coastal lowland, the whilom seaport that once rivaled Philadelphia was remarkable. I stopped at Arnold’s grocery, post office, and filling st...

All right, here’s how Othello got the name. Ignore other versions. In Cumberland County we have a settlement of people called ‘tri-bloods,’ people that trace their history—or legend—back to a Moorish—Algerian, specifically—princess who came ashore after a shipwreck in the first years of the nation. The Indians took her in, and, from the subsequent mixing of blood—later with a small infusion from the Negro—there developed a group composed of three races. The ‘Delaware Moors,’ they’re called. A similar branch is the Carolina Yellowhammers. “In the thirties and forties, governmental bureaucrats—especially in Delaware—they had a time trying to classify tri-bloods because the people considered themselves neither white, red, nor black. Usually they ended up in their own category, one so small as to be forgotten. To this hour, the people remain what you might describe as aloof, and they maintain themselves as independently as they can. Clannish, even secretive. But they always have been landowners and farmers. Never slaves. Still, they are—to use the phrase—‘men of color’ and consequently suspect, especially in border states, despite their features usually being more Indian than Negroid. Aquiline nose, straight hair, high cheekbones.” “I haven’t seen any blacks in Greenwich.” “That may be. They live just up the road at Springtown, one of the first stops on the Underground Railroad. The name comes from a place a Negro could ‘spring’ for his freedom. A springboard. But I’m talking ...

“This is about the limited capacity of men to understand because they measure time in terms of themselves. This is about men who won’t see causes and therefore can’t predict effects. This is about men who fail to realize that geographical refuge is central to our history. It’s about men who exterminate the species of the earth at the rate of one every day.” He gave my shoulder another shake. “You see no worry in me because I know the natural amenities will finally be preserved for a single reason and for a single reason alone—the force of nature demands it. Its sway is greater than ours. We will have our time of destruction nevertheless. But, in a nutshell, that’s why I’m an optimist.” He released my shoulder. “And for one other reason.” “Which is?” “Accidents, discovery, even enlightenment. Any projection must allow for man to change his history, a power second only to that of nature. A projection must allow for free will because only it does not despise or distrust or fear the unknown even if it knows the future is not a better place but only a different one. Any prognosis must consider that men can change their angles of vision and therefore change the future.” He stopped to catch his wind. “And if you reject all that, then say I believe, as did Tertullian, because it is absurd.”

“The problem of what we’re doing lies in deciding what’s the benefit of history and what’s the burden. We’re not trying to hold back the future, but we do believe what has happened in Greenwich is at least as important as what could happen here. The future should grow from the past, not obliterate it.” When Roemer brought a second round of tonics, he said, “The evidence of history, whether it’s archives or architecture, is rare and worth preserving. It’s relevant, it’s useful. Here, it also happens to be beautiful. Maybe I’ve been influenced by the old Quakers who believed it was a moral question always to consider what you’re leaving behind. Why not? It’s not a bad measure of a man—what he leaves behind.”

Salem, a colonial town to the west, was abundant with old buildings and homes that would be museums most anywhere else in the country, but here they were just more declining houses, even though many stood when the men of Salem sent beef to Valley Forge to help save Washington’s troops from starvation. The town is the birthplace of Zadock Street, a restless fellow who left New Jersey in 1803 to make his way into the new western territory. As he went, he and his sons founded towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa, and named them all Salem; in Ohio, his Salem sprouted North Salem, West Salem, South Salem, Lower Salem, and Salem Center. Americans can be thankful that Zadock Street was not born in Freidberger or Quonochontaug.

ON the village green in Dover, citizens successfully buried the ghost of Chief Justice Sam Chew in broad daylight. Around 1745, the judge’s shade developed a nocturnal penchant for meditating on the common and beckoning to passersby. His honor’s whangdoodle began to keep the streets empty after dark and tavernkeepers complained. So residents dug a symbolic grave on the green, and, in full sunshine, tolled bells as clergymen spoke the restless soul to its peace.

Out of Dover, I took the road toward Delaware Bay: out past the Delaware Fried Chicken stand, across the Muderkill River, and into Sussex County, an area once known to English settlers as the Whorekill, a name they took from the Dutch who called Lewes Creek the Hoerekill (“whore’s stream”) after Dutch sailors, one theory goes, consorted with Indian women there. Governmental officials now argue that the Dutch name was actually Hoornkill, after Hoorn, a village in Holland, but surely the American past isn’t always quite so proper as we hear it.

I walked along the estuary. A horseshoe crab the diameter of a basketball lay at surf’s edge. In spring the crabs, seemingly awakened from some lost Devonian deep, come up to the shallows of Delaware Bay to reproduce. The horseshoe crab does not look much like either a horseshoe or a crab, neither of which it is; its other common name, king crab, is also misleading. While the Alaskan king crab (truly a crab) is one of the culinary gifts of the sea, this Atlantic creature, this hoof of an arthropod, no longer even feeds chickens. But a generation ago, barefoot boys waded the bay and felt with their feet for horseshoe crabs and tried to stay clear of the lash of the spiky telsons, with which Indians once tipped fish spears; Delaware crabbers broke up the animals for chicken and pig feed, or they dried them in the sun for grinding into fertilizer. Today, horseshoe crabs again breed unmolested except for the old enemies of the sea bottom.

I got my duffel from the truck and went back to the pier to wait. A boxy man said, “Is it to Smith or Tangier?” “Smith.” “Ah. The Methodist island. Different world out there. Ninety-eight percent of them earn a living off the water. Water, water, water. They follow the water. Marine biologists without degrees to the last man.” He came up close. “Think I’m going to tell you something. You mayn’t be returning.” “Why not?” “The food.” “Is it spoiled?” “Spoiled? That’ll be you. They cook like every day’s Thanksgiving.”

He pulled up and pointed. “There’s the sight of sights in Crisfield.” “Where?” “Right there. The pyramid. An exact scale model of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Cairo, Egypt. Orientated exactly the same. On the twenty-first of December, the tip of the shadow falls at the same compass point just like in Egypt—except for a small difference caused by latitude.” The Great Pyramid of Crisfield was six feet three inches high—not as tall as an NBA guard. Goldsmith and his sons had designed and built the poured concrete monument to commemorate the national bicentennial; inside they had placed photographs, Nanticoke arrowheads, phonograph records, and other items. “When they open it in twenty seventy-six, it just might contain the last ’forty-seven Mercury outboard motor on earth.” “I’d think a big concrete oystershell would make an appropriate time capsule here,” I said. “Hollow inside and the way they clamp shut so tight.” Goldsmith was floored. “A reglar arster’s ugly, but a six-foot arster?”

At the east window she showed me Point Comfort Island, an uninhabited place heavy with small pines and only a hundred yards across the narrow inlet from the Ewell pier. “Our people won’t live on it. Too far from things. Besides, it’s an island.” “What’s Smith?” “Land surrounded by water. Like Australia.”

I rambled around the village in the cool night, then, at eight, went to the home of Mrs. Bernice Guy, who showed me my room, a small thing with a sagging bed and oval photographs of women from the time of Chester A. Arthur. She said, “Our island’s a nice place, but people visit once and not again. One time, though, in your bed Henry Cabot Lodge slept.”

I took the Tred Avon ferry, at three centuries the oldest operating cable-free ferry in the United States, to Bellevue and drove out the double-fingered peninsula toward Tilghman Island. On the way was St. Michaels, “the town that fooled the British” by inventing the blackout. During the War of 1812, word reached the citizens that a night bombardment was imminent. Residents doused all lights except candles in second-story windows and lanterns they hung in treetops. British gunners misread the lights, miscalculated trajectories, and overshot the town. The trick preserved numerous colonial buildings, including one home where a stray cannonball fell through the roof and bounced down the stairway past the startled lady of the house.

The road, a thing to wrench an eel’s spine, went at the mountains in all the ways: up, down, around, over, through, under, between. I’ve heard—who knows the truth?—that if you rolled West Virginia out like a flapjack, it would be as large as Texas.

I can’t say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn’t known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.