Heat Moon's first, and apparently more popular, book. He was told his position at the university wasn't being renewed, and his marriage was on the rocks, so he set out in his modified van to travel the less-known highways, as opposed to the interstates. Those state routes are usually marked in blue in the road atlas, hence the title of the book.
He essentially circles the country, although based on the map on the inside cover, he never enters Florida or California. You can tell how long ago this was because he makes the trip on his last $246 and 4 gas credit cards. He stops where he likes, or where the weather or fatigue force him to. At one point he's stuck on a mountain in Utah in a blizzard because the road ahead is closed and he can't see enough to turn around. Usually sleeps in his van, which results in him getting repeatedly bothered by cops.
And he talks. To other people, about why they live where they do, or what life is like. Why live in a town in Nevada with a population of four, on a fault line and near a Navy test range? He travels to Selma based on the rather aggressive suggestion of one person, to see if race relations have improved in the decade+ since the bus boycotts and Martin Luther King Jr.'s work. The answer would seem to be, "In some ways yes, but in many ways, no."
But he's also trying to figure himself out. Increasingly as the trip and book progress, Heat Moon questions what he's doing out there. What's he looking for, really, or is he just running away from something? He may have come to some sort of conclusion at the end, though I wonder if it amounted to anything.
The book has a nostalgic air I can't entirely engage with (but does explain to me how the book spent 42 weeks on the New York Times best seller list, as the paperback cover exclaims.) A rose-tinted look at Americana of the early to mid-20th Century, and a scorn for what's replacing it. I can appreciate the desire of many of the people he talks with to preserve their local history, but it often feels like a very selective history being preserved. Not always, as in the visit to Selma - really, most of the "South by Southeast" chapter - you see how people trying to exercise a feeling of greater freedom is met with resistance from the factions that liked the old ways just fine.
Maybe that's an inevitable consequence of a book written specifically about visiting places that are off the main track, where the march of fast food and strip malls haven't reached. He seeks out several towns that exist only as abandoned remains, and in some cases not even that. Of the other towns, many are either dying slowly, or trying to survive as they are, without losing land to power plants or tourist attractions. The people who live in those places do so by choice or lack of alternatives. Either way, they either like it as is, or made peace with it.
But it does start to boil down into a complaining about how things are versus how they were. You can't make money farming except in huge acreages. You can't get real cigarettes anymore (one guy presciently suggests there's a college engineer out there trying to design a cigarette you have to plug in.) The kids don't care about their history or want to walk anywhere any longer. People travel just to get somewhere, without any care for the actual destination. Based on my dad's descriptions of family vacations with his father, that was true long before this book was written, but whatever.
The advantage PrairyErth had was its tighter focus allowed (or forced) Heat Moon to go deeper. It was layered. Here, even when he finds someone that really knows the history of their town, more than just a surface skimming, it's still only one perspective. But even if he took the back roads, he's still on highways. He's still a passerby, so it was always going to be the equivalent of watching through the windshield as he drove through.
'There is one almost infallible way to find honest food at just prices on blue-highway America: count the wall calendars in a cafe.
No calendar: Same as an interstate pit stop.
One calendar: Preprocessed food assembled in New Jersey.
Two calendars: Only if fish trophies present.
Three calendars: Can't miss on the farm-boy breakfasts.
Four calendars: Try the ho-made pie too.
Five calendars: Keep it under your hat, or they'll franchise.
One time I found a six-calendar cafe in the Ozarks, which served fried chicken, peach pie, and chocolate malts, that left me searching for another ever since. I've never seen a seven-calendar place.'
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