William Least Heat-Moon

Birthday greetings to a writer I haven't thought of in a while.

It's the birthday of travel writer William Least Heat-Moon, born William Trogdon in Kansas City, Missouri (1939). He's best known for an account of his journey across the back roads of America, Blue Highways.

Of mixed English-Irish-Osage ancestry and the son of a lawyer, he spent the first part of his life immersed in academia, earning four degrees: a bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. in literature, and then a bachelor's in photojournalism. He had been a university professor in the late 1970s when, within the course of a few months, his life seemed to have fallen apart: He lost his teaching job because of declining student enrollment at his school, and his wife of 11 years separated from him.

He decided to take to the open road and "live the real jeopardy of circumstance." He had a 1975 Ford van, which he made into a camper, and he gave it the name "Ghost Dancing" — a reference to ceremonies by Plains Indians of the 1890s, who "danced for the return of warriors, bison, and the fervor of the old life that would sweep away the new ... the dying rattles of a people whose last defense was delusion." He brought along a sleeping bag, portable stove, four gasoline credit cards, some cameras, a cassette recorder, various notebooks to write in, and his remaining life savings, which totaled less than $500. He also brought a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

He wrote that he began his journey "with a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land. ... I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected."

Over the course of several months, he traveled 13,000 miles around the United States. He sat in local coffee shops and diners and parks and conversed with residents, listening to people narrate stories of their town. He said, "I wanted a journey that would present people, specific people, with names and addresses almost, so that the reader could pick up a Rand McNally and follow along and know almost mile by mile where this particular traveler was."

The book in which he chronicled his adventures, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, was published in 1982 and garnered widespread acclaim.

He's also the author of PrairyErth (A Deep Map): An Epic History of the Tallgrass Prairie Country (1991) and River-Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America (1999).

Blue Highways has been sitting unread on my shelf for five years now, a used hardcover I picked up at Brattle Books in Boston. I've been meaning to crack it open but for whatever reason haven't gotten around to it. I read River-Horse back in 2001, and liked parts of it. Here are my thoughts on it from back then:

Like the cross-country boat trip this book describes, getting through this book is a test of endurance. I greatly enjoyed Heat-Moon's narrative as he journeyed through towns on the Hudson, the Erie Canal and the Ohio, but things bog down quite a bit as he travels the Missouri, whose valley is so wide that few towns are adjacent and the only structures to describe are the inhumanly-scaled dams foolishly plunked down by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Maybe it's the "test of endurance" thing that is holding me back from Blue Highways, because reading descriptions of that book gives me the vague feeling that it's very similar to River-Horse - one on land, one on water, both meandering and often without direction.