The Country Writ Small
MELLOW, CRAIG
The Country Writ Small Blue Highways: A Journey into America By William Least Heat Moon Little, Brown. 412 pp. $17.50. Reviewed by Craig Mellow Recently separated from his wife of 10 years...
...Fishing out a bit of the dark side of folks shouldn't have been difficult for a traveler, of all people...
...You can teach a horse to back up, but forget an ox...
...Only thing that doesn't run down is your mouth," they are apt to say, or...
...Possessing a subtle eye and an unsubtle love of the land, he richly evokes the shifts in landscape, wildlife, crops, accents, architecture, cooking, customs of drinking and courting...
...We don't say dumb as an ox anymore because we've forgotten how dumb that is," a storeowner explains...
...As often as not, those who extend kindness to a passing stranger seek in return some amelioration of their own loneliness or a safe sounding board for their secrets and troubles...
...He breaks up stretches of monotonous prairie with brief disquisitions on the historical uses of the armadillo (known as a " Hoover hog" during the Depression, when it was barbecued with greens and corn-bread on the side) or the cottonwood tree (Indians cured stomachaches with a brew made from the inner bark and extracted honey from the hollows of the trunk...
...America emerges, awash in heritage...
...A descendant, mostly, of the Siouxian peoples of the Great Plains, he has versed himself extensively in the background and lore of the major North American Indian nations, and apparently speaks several tribal languages...
...Elsewhere Heat Moon recalls the exploring Spanish missionaries who in 1776 lived on boiled cactus and the meat from two of their horses for 10 days before they could find a ford across the Colorado River...
...The author's most interesting encounter is with a white man in a white bar in Selma, Alabama, two blocks from Brown Chapel where Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Heat Moon's affection for the old, it is true, sometimes results in a sopho-moric condemnation of the new...
...the third with a graybeard itinerant preacher turned to a life of the gospel after a near fatal car crash, whom the author picks up hitchhiking across Montana...
...Early in his voyage, he tramps a precarious footpath through North Carolina swamp to find the grave of his grandfather eight generations removed, an immigrant from Lancashire murdered by local Tories for abetting rebel fighters during the Revolution...
...Less satisfying are Heat Moon's people, who tend to come across as types rather than distinctive personalities...
...More often, though, the author's point is well taken...
...they sat on old porches and shook the evening paper into obedience, or they rocked steady as old pendulums and looked into the old street as if reading something there...
...northwest across the desert states and northern California...
...Nonetheless, he does—uninterruptedly, through two drinks and a trip to the John...
...If Heat Moon is not headed anywhere in particular geographically, our literary sense after a while craves some sort of psychic destination...
...His investigations, almost always presented with precisely the right amount of detail, are consistently fascinating...
...Distressed by what he believes is the United States' drift toward homogeneity and thoughtless materialism, he searches in the back country for places where regional distinctions and a keen consciousness of local history survive...
...All the same, the failure to instill in the reader a strong sense of the narrator leaves Blue Highways a little formless...
...organized his march to Montgomery...
...He refers to blacks only as "niggers," rehearses the litany about Northern agitators being at the heart of the South's trouble, and swears repeatedly, "I'm sick of talking about it...
...Who among us, after all, could say that his life would not be a little fuller for having learned how Nameless, Tennessee got its name, which Maryland coastal town invented the blackout during a British naval bombardment in the War of 1812, or the going price of a "straight" at Ely, Nevada's hot spot, the Big Four lounge...
...draining the poison for a while," as Heat Moon puts it...
...Much of the famed healing power of the open road, indeed, has its source in this shadier sort of sharing...
...Hope to die here," or "This truck runs about as well as the government...
...Fortunately, that is not always possible...
...A reader in too much of a hurry may miss something beautiful or curious, such as this description of a late afternoon in South Carolina: "Newberry was a town of last-century buildings, old trees, columned houses with cast iron fences, and gardens behind low brick walls...
...Although such talk can be uplifting, frequently one wishes Heat Moon would find out what his new acquaintances fear or feel spiteful toward...
...Interestingly, the Trappist and the preacher, figures many observers might quickly pass over as one-dimensional, are drawn with far more complexity than most of Heat Moon's amiable citizens...
...The facts of American history hold a particular poignancy for him, in part perhaps because of his own lineage...
...back east via Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, the Great Lakes, New York, and New England...
...Heading east-southeast from his home in Columbia, Missouri, he reaches the Atlantic at Wanchese, North Carolina, then hangs a right to circumnavigate the country clockwise, traveling west through the Deep South and Texas...
...The "bug-bitten teenybopper," it turns out, is a young woman of strength and good humor coping fairly successfully with a dreadful situation...
...The writer at first finds Stacy obnoxious—she comes out of the forest, opens a can of Pepsi, then throws the ring top into an unpolluted lake—and hesitates before giving her a ride to her grandmother's in Green Bay, Yet ultimately he is charmed by her spirited retelling of her struggles with a brutal father who victimizes his children to cover his own incompetence and cowardice, a self-effacing mother, and a brother who has bolted to New York, joined the Hare Krishnas, and won't talk to her again until she sheds her "false values...
...The book proceeds at a leisurely day-to-day pace, like the journey itself...
...But by and large Heat Moon allows the U.S.A...
...Yet the author, whose driver's license identifies him as William Trog-don, has deep ties to the Anglo world as well...
...Inter-states are marked in red on the standard map, two-lane roads in blue-thus the book's title...
...Still, many readers will find an exquisitely observed spring and early summertime America ample compensation in itself, and everybody is bound to find out a lot about their country...
...Away from the open waters, the day was warm, and in the pocosins drained by small canals and natural sloughs, mud turtles, their black shells the color of the water, crawled up to the warmth on half-submerged logs...
...to speak for itself, offering the embellishments of editorialization and roadosophy only sparingly...
...The man is an unregen-erate racist—almost...
...A lacy town...
...He tells a North Carolina woodsman, for example, that "New industry means more people to buy clothes and open savings accounts...
...Heat Moon is a great enthusiast of the past...
...Since he left home looking to renew his hopes both for himself and for his country, it may not be surprising that most of the Americans who make it into his chronicle are cheerful, flinty, self-respecting, hospitable, apolitical, and earthily wise...
...He takes it one mile at a time, devotedly attentive to the minutiae of flora and fauna, sky and wind: "Along highway 264, skirting the sound, grew stands of loblolly and slash pine, as well as water oaks, bayberry and laurel...
...Combining curiosity and respect with a secularist's determination to keep an adequate distance, he delicately exposes the dynamic men behind the static doctrines...
...born in this very house...
...Whatever the reason, Heat Moon is determined to track down the origins, rise, apex and eclipse of every cranny he passes through...
...another with a Hopi premedical student in Utah trying to balance the pride he takes in his traditions with a desire to live and achieve in contemporary society...
...He ferrets out, for instance, the truth behind the main street of Fredricksburg, Texas, built wide as a Moscow boulevard so that oxcart drivers would have room to make U-turns...
...Heat Moon, however, seems anxious to avoid it...
...He recalls once more the scenes on Edmund Pettis Bridge and the Jefferson Davis Highway, thedogs, clubs, Jim Clark, George Wallace...
...Other episodes that linger in the mind include those where Heat Moon is drawn into discussions of religion—one with a former New York City policeman turned Trappist Monk in a monastery in Georgia...
...He recounts Andrew Jackson's expulsion of the Choctaws from Mississippi, Lewis and Clark's reaction to dining on the blubber of a beached whale on the Oregon coast, and how the beaver trade kept Minnesota from becoming a Canadian province...
...The shape and spirit of the America he uncovers change virtually county by county...
...Heat Moon makes one clear resolve: to avoid interstate highways, and thereby major population centers...
...Heat Moon drops his passenger and drives on to catch the ferry across Lake Michigan, flooded by a sudden loneliness...
...Nothing disturbs the flow of one thing following another...
...Old people moved along the sidewalks or pulled at greenery in old flowerbeds...
...In one sense this is just as well, for he is not the writer to crank up, a la Kerouac or Dos Passos, a luminous two paragraph summary of the metaphysical impact of 1,000 miles of country...
...A similarly welcome counterpoint is the meeting with Stacy, a teenage runaway in the Northwoods of Wisconsin...
...Heat Moon's tone, despite his making us privy to numerous broodings on and phone calls to his estranged wife, remains stoically even...
...Reviewed by Craig Mellow Recently separated from his wife of 10 years and excessed from his college teaching position, William Least Heat Moon decides to load up his truck and drive around America...
...And he finds them...
...There is a limit to the appeal of homespun philosophy and simple good news...
Vol. 66 • March 1983 • No. 6
