Book Review: Pages In Heat

“Blue Highways”
William Least heat Moon
Back Bay Books
429 Pages






I read this book on the recommendation of a grade school and high school compatriot who I ran into up in Michigan. I was extolling the virtues of diners and she and a Lutheran Minister of my acquaintance began extolling the virtues of this book and his system of choosing the best diners which was to see how many calendars were on the wall. The theory was a simple one that the best diners were frequented by local and the best evidence of locals were their wall calendars for auto parts, insurance, etc... I do not know about the theory but the book is a serious one.

"Least Heat Moon was living in Columbia Missouri when with his life going apparently bad he decided to go on a little vision quest in his pick up Ghost Dancing and travel all around the country. The name of the book and the idea was to not drive on inter-states but only the blue highways on his atlas which were small roads through the “real” America. Wikipedia tells us:
“His pen name came from something that his father once said, "I call myself heat moon, your elder brother is little heat moon. You, coming last, therefore, are least." Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he attended the University of Missouri–Columbia where he joined Tau Kappa Epsilon Fraternity and received a bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D degrees in English as well as a bachelor's degree in photojournalism. He also served as a professor of English at the University.
He is a contemporary Missouri travel writer, and author of a bestselling trilogy of topographical U.S. travel writing.
Blue Highways, which spent 42 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 1982-83, is a chronicle of a three-month-long road trip that Heat-Moon took throughout the United States in 1978, after losing his teaching job and being left by his wife. He travelled 13,000 miles, as much as possible on secondary roads (often drawn on maps in blue, esp. on the old style Rand McNally road atlas) and tried to avoid cities, living out of the back of his van "Ghost Dancing" and visiting small towns such as Nameless, Tennessee; Hachita, New Mexico; and Bagley, Minnesota in an attempt to find places in America that were untouched by fast food chains and interstate highways. The book chronicles the people he talked to in roadside cafés as well as his personal soul-searching.”

It is an interesting book. Written or experienced in 1978 and published in 1982-83, right about the time I was getting out of college and not getting into Law School immediately. It was a best seller but I didn’t have time for it then, and to be fair it was hard to make time for it now. It is an excellent book. It is most interesting in that it is just kind of a slice of life view of our country at that time and in that regard it was fascinating. He visited a lot of towns that were on the map that had literally ceased to exist and then when he had the chance he found people who told the stories and in the oral tradition, put to writing there is some brilliant stuff.

But it was kind of hard for me to read. there is no plot. He starts off heading southeast to the Atlantic coast and goes clockwise from there around the country. He sleeps in cheap motels and his truck. He meets religious people and he frequently quotes Walt Whitman to anyone who will listen. He is cold and miserable a lot. Besides sitting in diners he goes to bars a lot and talks to people there. There is some connection between diners and bars which need to be explored in some kind of scholarly article. He often has a hard time finding a place to park the truck where he will not be harassed and it is hard to feature in the post 9-11 era that anyone would be even able to accomplish this anymore.
I recommend the book as a bed side companion but it took me almost a month to get through it. He is an excellent narrator and seems to have a gift for getting people to reveal things about what they perceive the history of their places are. In that same vein I am reading a book called “Psycho-Geography” written by one of my favorites Will Self that is based on an idea that the places we live shape or psyche. More later. For this one, it is a must read if you are a reader. It is a classic, but like all classics, it takes some work. Good luck.

7 Slingers on the ten scale