In my Mapquest atlas, the interstates are blue, with narrow white lines in the middle like a digestive tract, and the blue highways of the past are red or orange or nonexistent. Road atlases, it seemed to me, were the proper domain of Rand McNally. I felt bad obtaining it, with its jaunty Mapquest logo, even though it was free. It is from back in the days when Mapquest was in its ascendancy and Google was perhaps nothing yet but a twinkle in is founders’ eyes.
Blue highways book for free#
The atlas I have been consulting for our own travels is “The Mapquest Atlas,” copyright MMIIV, it says (a Roman numeral which doesn’t exist, I think) which I got for free with a book club offer. Sadly, I bet 90% to 95% of the people he profiled along the road-venerable American men and women who were denizens of the blue highways-have passed away. This is the cover of the bestselling paperback I read in my youth Least Heat Moon’s observations, I am pleased to say, remain as trenchant as they did when I first read them. Well-wr0ught, with a sense of rhythm and depth that suggest miles on the highway spent working out the sentences. The above passage is typical of Blue Highways. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose itself.”ĭetail of 1960 road map, with blue highways. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk-times neither day nor night-the old roads return to the sky some of its color. “On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back rods blue. William Least Heat Moon he explained the source of the book’s title thus: After losing his job and, to some degree, his wife, he got in a van he named “Ghost Dancing” and drove around the country, sleeping in the van most nights. If I am right about his stature, it probably served him well for the long journey he took. Least Heat Moon, half Native American (they were called Indians in those days), leans against a cane on the back jacket of the 9 th printing that I borrowed from the library, a short-looking man with a thick head of hair, a pair of suspenders, and a soulful look in his level gaze. Then we will pass through the Berkshires of Massachusetts (once home to Melville and Hawthorne) on the way to Boston and to Concord, where the first shots of the Revolutionary War had been fired, and the first blood spilled, before Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Alcott made it their home.Īs preparation, I have been reading a book I once read in paperback, in my teens: Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon, copyright 1982. A stop along the way will be Cooperstown, New York, founded by the father of James Fenimore Cooper-once the greatest “painter” in words of the American landscape. It will be a reverse journey in terms of the history of American literature: the California coast that became a symbol of promise-of sunshine and well-defined noirish shadows-backwards through Salt Lake City-the location that Brigham Young declared was “the right place” for his band of followers in 1847, eastward over the Rockies, through the prairies and past the isohyetal line of rainfall that defines the American Desert, back through the settlements of farms and white houses of Illinois and Ohio. In less than two months, my wife and son and I will be hitting the road in a one-way Budget SUV rental, headed from Santa Monica, California to Boston, Massachusetts.
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