Blue Highways
Darst, Stephen
Books: OTHER VOICES, OTHER AMERICAS BLUE HIGHWAYS William Least Heat Moon Atlantic/Little Brown, $17.50, 412 pp. Stephen Darst IT MIGHT seem the easiest way to encapsulate an entire continent...
...Indeed, it is only in those stray (Continued on page 312) (Continued from page 305) moments when he falls into philosophizing that the book becomes, momentarily, banal...
...Stephen Darst IT MIGHT seem the easiest way to encapsulate an entire continent and generations of history: trek the roads with tape recorder, notebook, map, jotting stray notes, snatches of conversation, evocative misty glimpses...
...Blue Highways leads one to remote corners of the North Carolina Outer Banks, back bayou Louisiana, lost gasoline stations in the desert, and the inhabitants thereof...
...Perhaps one of the reasons Moon has succeeded so signally where others have faltered is that he started his journey so lightly encumbered with possessions, literary, philosophical, or material...
...In the last few years alone, one can recall doomed expeditions by Richard Reeves, one of the most original political reporters extant, and Eugene J. McCarthy, a public figure of even-greater originality, whose abandoned wagons were found with bones of Smith-Coronas and Pearlcorders devoured by buzzards...
...is everything...
...As Conrad said of his own writing goals: "That is all, and it is everything...
...actually as tough a literary "trick" as any...
...I hadn't sailed the Atlantic in a washtub, or crossed the Gobi in a goat cart, or bicycled to Cape Horn...
...Only copies of Whitman and Black Elk, and a broken-down pick-up with makeshift bunk...
...Always got beans and taters and a little piece of meat.' Down along the ridge, I wondered why it's always those who live on little who are the ones to ask you to dinner...
...Moon is himself part Indian, not an "apple Indian" (red outside, white inside) but a real Sioux, son of Heat Moon, younger brother of Little Heat Moon...
...His book is the work of a fine writer, but it is equally the product of old-fashioned gum-shoeing, hard-news reporting, beating the bushes, following down that last mile of road, seeking out the final witness...
...Seemingly easy...
...As I started the engine, Wheeler said, 'If you get back this way, stop in and see me...
...The Reeves Party" of last year fared little better...
...Nor was John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley of several years before that a great success...
...Moon kept to the back-roads, the highways colored blue on old maps...
...No Charley, no Tocqueville...
...Hence, the title...
...Voila (as Tensing de Tocqueville, your faithful French Sherpa, might say): a "masterpiece of Americana...
...Another reason was Moon's talent for simply keeping all senses alert...
...In my own country, I had gone out, had met, had shared...
...Without even a dog as company, Moon found companionship in hitchhikers, monks, fishermen, Cajun chanky-chank musicians, tavernkeeps, Indians...
...In a season on the blue roads," Moon asks at the end of the journey and book, "what had I accomplished...
...McCarthy confided to a reporter several years ago that his imitation of Tocqueville, coming approximately one-hundred-and-fifty years after the original, had turned out badly...
...All of which suggests the dimensions of William Least Heat Moon's accomplishment in Blue Highways: A Journey into America...
...His namesake, William Trogdon, eight generations back, earned mention in Makers of America by getting killed for providing food to rebel patriots in North Carolina...
...attach these to a framework, slap between covers...
...Just when one is beginning to believe that all of the United States has become one homogeneous mass...
...He, Bill Trogdon, is also a descendant of pioneers...
...Neither locales nor people are in the least homogenized and Moon has a rare sensitivity to both landscape and people...
...Skulls of distinguished reporter-writers spook the trails north, south, east, west...
...Hence, one suspects, part of the reason for his success...
...It seemed like a good idea," McCarthy said in his laconic way, "but it wasn't...
...I had stood as witness...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 10
