William Least Heat-Moon - Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened

The winter of 1977 began the day before Thanksgiving and lasted nearly to the first week of spring. Even in the middle latitudes where I lived in central Missouri, snow falling on the second of December took months to turn, glacially, into sooty heaps melting just enough to change into a dirty ice that remained until a week beyond the vernal equinox, and only then did the remnants soften into gray honeycombs before at last turning to slush promising the end of the long and hard season.

At age thirty-eight, overdegreed and undereducated, living a life that could be represented by the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, I was iced in by failed expectations and a cold logic suggesting I should expect no interior spring thaw. Wearied of waiting for some sort of change to the obstacles I saw before me, I decided to try the ice-ax method of hacking and hewing a way through debilities of stasis and into movement that might find a path out of the frozen fields of Missouri.

If you've read the opening chapter of Blue Highways, you know what happened next: On the first day of spring I boarded my small three-year-old Ford van, called Ghost Dancing, and with its dicey water pump lit out for some other, and warmer, territory that could be termed Any Damn Place Else. That act may be the most American undertaking I've ever tried: an embracing of our storied, historied, ineluctable, continuing, kit-bag-over-your-shoulder solution to finding a new life or, if not quite another existence, at least something offering differences.

Now, a third of a century later, this little book is not about the ensuing three-month journey. All of that is in Blue Highways. Rather, this one is about what happened in the following four years, the fifty-five months, the sixteen hundred days after I returned near the summer solstice to the same placetopographically but hardly otherwiseand began trying to make sense of what I had encountered over thirteen thousand miles of back roads, and to discover where they might lead. The idea is to relate events in a narrative serviceable to other travelers and writers regardless of whether they use roads, rails, computers, or means simply of mind. (Where's the traveler who doesn't also gallivant about from time to time in the arms of a favorite easy chair?)

I want to set down how the second journeythe one emerging from the end of a pencil or issuing out of the interior of a portable typewriterwent. This trip is an exploration into the myriad routes of heart and mind that led to the making of a book from the initial sorry and now vanished paragraph to the last words that camenot from a stick of graphite but from a letterpress in Tennessee. I want this journey to escape me and reach someone who dreams of writing for an audience beyond self or family or friends, someone looking to offer stories to strangers, and to send them traveling beyond cyberspace and into the deepest chamber of the human heart. I hope this little chronicle is an analogue of larger undertakings.

Autobiography is a poorly named genre. After all, when we tell stories about ourselves, we're speaking not of who we are but of who we have been, somebody we once were, one who no longer exists except in memory, that mental function more attractive to errors, distortions, and fantasies than the myths of the American West or Sasquatch or cavity probes by aliens. Although I hope it is otherwise, this story might be termed an inadvertent autobiography written not by the traveler who took Ghost Dancing in 1978 over the byroads of America but by a man only listening to him. That blue-roadman hasn't been seen in more than a third of a century, and over the last many weeks as I sketched in these pages, I've regretted his inevitable departure. I wish I could have heard directly from him about the scent and flavor of those years when he was trying to tell the story of a long journey. As if foreseeing this day and realizing he would know things I don't, he left behind notes and pictures and documents for me to puzzle out in hope of writing accurately. Surely, though, he would shake his head over some of what's about to happen in this narrative that I want to escape the bounds of autobiography.

I've tried to make Writing Blue Highways the kind of book I looked for when I began comprehending what Blue Highways would require, when I started to see what the devil I was getting into. Although writers have been writing about writing almost from the beginning, I still haven't found anything containing what I was in search of. Had I anticipated the four years of travails following the three months of travels, and had I understood the impediments and encumbrances and barriers inescapably coupled with any serious writing, I could have lived less labored in mind and body. Writer Henry Miller said the most hazardous voyages are made without moving. Despite the three millennia of authors experiencing the bugaboos native to literary creation, I was little aware of their universality, and so, week after week, I blindly reinvented old means to kindle and stoke creative fires. When I mentioned the title of this book to a friend, he said, You're calling it Riding Blue Highways? I thought about it a moment until remembering it was the book that rode me.

What's here is not a manual on ways to writealthough there are chips of counsel; rather, it's a compact guide on ways to survive the demands of real writing, and perhaps a dispelling of a few popular illusions. This is the story of how Blue Highways began, repeatedly slipped toward the pit of failed dreams, only to clamber up and creep onward toward a rainy day in December 1982. As you'll see, in your hands, this biography of a book ultimately is not so much about struggles as it is about where struggles can lead, and in that way, like its progenitor, it too is a road book about traveling a strange and poorly charted land. If I can setdown things aright, then for a writer striking out into new territory, perhaps I can lay down a few flagstones, hang a rope bridge or two, and maybe even put up a couple of signs warning of dead ends.