Heat Moon - Blue highways : a journey into America

In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

Copyright 1982, 1999 by William Least Heat-Moon

Excerpt from Roads to Quoz copyright 2008 by William Least Heat-Moon

Author photograph by Newman Richardson

Cover design by John Fulbrook III; cover illustration by Paul Bacon

Cover copyright 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

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First e-book edition: April 2012

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Portions of this book appeared in The Atlantic.

Daniel Boone by Stephen Vincent Bent

From: A Book of Americans by Rosemary & Stephen Vincent Bent

Copyright 1933 by Rosemary & Stephen Vincent Bent

Copyright renewed 1961 by Rosemary Carr Bent

Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc.

ISBN 978-0-316-21854-2

Some men, when they lose their jobs and wives, take to drink and go to the dogs. When William Least Heat-Moon lost his, he took to the road and went to Subtle, Neon, and Mouthcard, Ky.; to Dull, Weakly, and Only, Tenn.; to Dime Box, Tex., Scratch Ankle, Ala., and Gnawbone, Ind. He wrote a book about his travels in order to find out where he was trying to arrive at and called it Blue Highways, because on old maps the back roads were colored in blue. The book is wonderful.

Anatole Broyard, New York Times

Plenty of plain good old entertainment. Heat-Moon has a penchant for humor; a zanier cast of characters has rarely been paraded before modern-day readers.

David G. Wilck, Christian Science Monitor

A masterpiece a magnificent and unique tour.

Robert Penn Warren

We have a whole literature of on the road books. Steinbecks Travels with Charley is one of the best, and William Least Heat-Moon is even better.

Norbert Blei, Chicago Sun-Times

William Least Heat-Moon writes with true heat and pungency about an America that scarcely anybody knows about, an America that we have been led to believe no longer exists.An overwhelming book.

Jim Harrison

Wondrous brilliant a stunningly good book. Reading Blue Highways made me go back and look at Jack Kerouacs On the Road to see if Mr. Heat-Moon does as well. He does far better.

Noel Perrin, New York Times Book Review

Its a beauty, a true delight on every page.

Walker Percy

The real life of the book lies in the amazing variety of American originals the lonely and curious author meets along the way.Heat-Moon has the judgment to step aside and let them tell their own often remarkable stories in their own words. The results are unexpected and sometimes very funny.

Gene Lyons, Newsweek

If you would like to know who and what America is at the center, read this book. This is what we, as a people, are about.

N. Scott Momaday

William Least Heat-Moon has gone on quest, on the thin blue highways of America that drift like smoke.He has come back and turned the quest around, and made a gift to us. Heat-Moon walks through this book about our land and our people with a patient, eloquent, beautiful pace, his eyes taking in everything and its meaning. Then he puts our words and our vistas into language that lives on the page.

Michael Parfit, Los Angeles Times Book Review

PrairyErth

River-Horse

Columbus in the Americas

Roads to Quoz

This book is for the wife of the Chief and for the Chieftain too.

In love.

O N the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusktimes neither day nor nightthe old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and its 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 himself.

B EWARE thoughts that come in the night. They arent turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources. Take the idea of February 17, a day of canceled expectations, the day I learned my job teaching English was finished because of declining enrollment at the college, the day I called my wife from whom Id been separated for nine months to give her the news, the day she let slip about her friendRick or Dick or Chick. Something like that.

That morning, before all the news started hitting the fan, Eddie Short Leaf, who worked a bottomland section of the Missouri River and plowed snow off campus sidewalks, told me if the deep cold didnt break soon the trees would freeze straight through and explode. Indeed.

That night, as I lay wondering whether I would get sleep or explosion, I got the idea instead. A man who couldnt make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.

The result: on March 19, the last night of winter, I again lay awake in the tangled bed, this time doubting the madness of just walking out on things, doubting the whole plan that would begin at daybreakto set out on a long (equivalent to half the circumference of the earth), circular trip over the back roads of the United States. Following a circle would give a purposeto come around againwhere taking a straight line would not. And I was going to do it by living out of the back end of a truck. But how to begin a beginning?

A strange sound interrupted my tossing. I went to the window, the cold air against my eyes. At first I saw only starlight. Then they were there. Up in the March blackness, two entwined skeins of snow and blue geese honking north, an undulating W-shaped configuration across the deep sky, white bellies glowing eerily with the reflected light from town, necks stretched northward. Then another flock pulled by who knows what out of the south to breed and remake itself. A new season. Answer: begin by following spring as they diddarkly, with neck stuck out.