R ENÉE B RYZIK
Repaving America: Ecocentric
Travel in William Least Heat-Moon’s
Blue Highways
In an introduction to the travel essay anthology Temperamental
Journeys, William Least Heat-Moon notes the popularity of American
travel writing with the remark, “After all, every American is a descendent of travelers from the eastern hemisphere” (20). The contradiction
that Americans are unified in a common ancestral impulse to travel,
yet often as a result of problems at home, captures the competing
sentiments of Least Heat-Moon’s narrator in Blue Highways. Although
he has since spent a lifetime of unconventional travel in America,
Least Heat-Moon’s first travelogue Blue Highways (1982) grapples
with the complexities of his emergence within the travel-writing tradition, while representing his own unique self.1 This article will consider some of the ways in which Least Heat-Moon’s multiethnic
ancestry and academic background offer a particularly ecocentric
alternative to Jack Kerouac’s iconic On the Road (1957) and American
travel (writing) thirty-five years later. In Blue Highways, Least
Heat-Moon circles the country to challenge monocultural assumptions of America, instead piecing together a new sense of home. As
he documents the lifestyles of rural America, he links small town and
farm lifestyles with their unique American landscapes. Unlike
Kerouac, Least Heat-Moon struggles against static, idealized settings
with an ecological sensitivity that borrows from the strong American
tradition of nature writing.2 There have been other travel narratives
that attempt to alter the influence of Kerouac’s premise, but, as any
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17.4 (Autumn 2010)
Advance Access publication September 29, 2010 doi:10.1093/isle/isq106
# The Author(s) 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the
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For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
Repaving America
667
trip down the interstate would show, the American travel tradition
still struggles to escape the destination-driven egotism of the road.
The success of Least Heat-Moon’s non-fiction bestseller, however,
indicates that late twentieth-century readers can (and want to) comprehend complex environmental representations of America. Least
Heat-Moon’s escape from the egocentric American road trip depends
initially on his alternative mode of travel, but it is his ecocritical
awareness of places in life and literature that enables the abstract
internal struggle to resolve in the changing environment of the road.
Despite the fact that some popular reviewers and literary critics
have compared Blue Highways with Kerouac’s classic,3 especially in
relation to American road travel and rambling plots, one notable
textual characteristic highlights their fundamental difference.
Kerouac’s novel is decidedly people-centered, while Least
Heat-Moon’s travelogue seems deliberately to refuse human privilege
over non-humans and landscape. Kerouac defined what it means to
live “on the road,” with Sal traveling at break-neck speed back and
forth across apparent nothingness to get to the pockets of artists and
friends living in cities across America. As Least Heat-Moon’s introduction suggests, the American road trip is both a unifying national
activity and a prehistoric, pre-national tradition. Kerouac battles
against this tension between old and new by privileging self over
place (and even perpetuates the misunderstanding of place) in order
to claim a new American fiction. The problem with this is that
Kerouac’s American travel account enervates environmental imaginations by relying on an abstract concept of “America” that necessarily
oversimplifies American landscapes and fails to provide the tools for
self-knowledge his road of escape promises. On one level, this is not
surprising. In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell justifiably admits, “[A]nyone looking for place-sense in literature had
better start with modest expectations” (256). Buell’s definition of literary place-sense as “the sum total of experiences and events human
and non-human alike” (253) was and remains understated in popular
American texts not because Americans omit wilderness and nature
from their writing, but because writers often manipulate place-sense
to amplify human relationships. On another level, however,
Kerouac’s Sal claims to provide various understandings of
America-as-place, and the influence of these claims has only grown
with the novel’s cultural importance and canonical status. Although
Sal’s rebellious desire to “go,” widely considered Kerouac’s trademark spontaneity, dates to the pre-war era and before, On the Road
set a precedent for the contemporary escapist-traveler’s penchant for
the road as both a place and a lifestyle.4 The novelty of On the Road is
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the combination of the “just go” luxury with post-war restlessness
and patriotism without family responsibilities.5
The surprisingly direct contrast between Least Heat-Moon and Sal
Paradise informs an ecocritical reading of road narratives. In On the
Road, Sal spends most of his time in large cities like New York and
Denver, and when he travels, he often hitchhikes. This mode of travel
creates problems out of small towns with little traffic, and makes a
chore out of the conversations he has with the “innumerable people”
(16) who pick him up. Because New York and Denver are far apart,
Sal’s ultimate travel goal is speed. These breakneck cross-country
trips have become a large part of the destination-driven American
road trip mentality, and this form of travel seems to imply the
in-between places are an unavoidable burden. At one point, Sal’s
travel partner Dean states that he can sleep as they roar across the
American landscape because “we know America, we’re home; I can
go anywhere in America and get what I want because it’s the same in
every corner” (120 – 21). This broad sense of “America” is easily perceived, but underestimates the diversity of American landscape. Sal
must exclude whole regions so that his concept of “America” remains
consonant with his experiences. For example, when he and Dean
travel to Louisiana marshland, his reaction is to “zoom on back to
familiar American ground and cowtowns” (188). Because the marshland does not fit the America he normally experiences between
New York and Denver, it becomes un-American. Barry Lopez defines
the transient American longing as a multi-purposed “American
psyche” which alternately desires to conquer and “sojourn in”
America. Lopez explains that unlike conquest, in order to fulfill the
desire to “sojourn” a person needs “not only time but a kind of local
expertise, an intimacy with place few of us ever develop” (83). At the
end of On the Road, Sal draws us into his romantic, unifying vision of
“America when the sun goes down . . . all that raw land that rolls in
one unbelievable huge bulge . . . all that road going . . . nobody knows
what’s going to happen. . . .” The beautiful poetic image is a valiant
attempt at an American sojourn, but this thought concludes with
Sal’s famous association, “I think of Dean Moriarty” (309 – 10).
Kerouac’s spontaneous writing style draws the reader into a “go”
mentality that depends on America’s vastness, but the ending points
to the novel’s deficient place-sense. Sal ultimately credits his road
experience to Dean, not America.
Least Heat-Moon tells a very different story of America through
his windshield. He drives along the “blue highways,” the two-lane
roads color-coded blue on maps, noting how each regional ecosystem
interlinks along the way. Although Least Heat-Moon had not read On
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the Road before writing Blue Highways, he seems to salvage and
revalue the places Kerouac disregards. Instead of stopping in big
cities, Least Heat-Moon travels between small towns in search of lifestyles that still hold a connection with their environments.6
Sociologist E. V. Walter conceptualizes a collective place-sense that
does not require the “local expertise” (Lopez 83) of a certain individual, but rather collaboratively creates a “local imagination . . . what
we imagine as well as the signs, stories, feelings, and concepts”
(Walter 2).7 While Least Heat-Moon in isolation does not know
enough to sojourn in the places he travels, his journalistic curiosity
does in fact access local imagination. He documents this local placesense through stories and observations of regional lifestyles, but he
also considers environmental tensions between humans and land like
dams and reclamation projects that impede environmental cycles.
David Teague’s biography of Least Heat-Moon in American Nature
Writers, written after his more explicitly environmentalist second
book PrairyErth (1991), characterizes the writing style that emerges
by degree throughout Blue Highways. Teague says that Least
Heat-Moon’s accounts of people and land through food and habitat,
and between tangible and conceptual regional boundaries demonstrates a “multiperspectival non-linear approach to landscape” (513)
that includes people and histories. Least Heat-Moon records the local
in a collective sojourn that Jonathan Levin terms “irreducibly
human” and unique with “ecocentric sensitivity” (216). Least
Heat-Moon does not favor human over place in his descriptions, but
rather places humans within the context of the landscape, relying in
particular on regional dialects and photography in order to represent
the heterogeneous, the unique, and the local.8
Traveling clockwise through distinct regions, Least Heat-Moon’s
sensitivity to detail enables his discovery that even man-made
boundaries often originate in the physical world. Divisions of the
land into political entities are often influenced by physical geography,
a notion that gives the physical world an agency even Buell does
not.9 Properties of place (region in this case) do not belong exclusively to the human mind, and boundaries connect land and human.
In Blue Highways, place is not only “space-humanized” (Buell 253),
but also “space-environmentalized,” which is to say that the environment plays an active role in the creation of and adherence to boundaries. Kent Ryden’s Mapping the Invisible Landscape considers how
cultural differences in place-sensitivity affect cartographic representations of lands and people. Ryden compares the way in which one
group of American Indians draws maps that symbolize relationships
between people, animals, and other environmental factors,
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“experiential, narrative reality,” and the way in which cartographers
concentrate on “mapped reality,” a term he associates with the “touristic imagination” (42). The cultural differences evident in these two
maps relate to Least Heat-Moon’s initial reliance on “mapped reality”
as well as the many meanings that the narrative develops, both symbolic and experiential, for the “blue highway.”10 When traveling from
Utah to Nevada, for example, Least Heat-Moon notes, “Within a mile
of the Nevada state line, the rabbit brush and sage stopped and a
juniper forest began . . . I was struck, as I had been many times, by
the way land changes its character within a mile or two of a state
line” (188). For Least Heat-Moon, the Nevada state boundary marker
triggers his awareness of the changing physical landscape. This alliance between human concept and the physical world shows how
“mapped reality” can inform and inspire narrative maps.
In her comprehensive work Road Frames: The American Highway
Narrative, Kris Lackey claims that both Kerouac and Least Heat-Moon
try to “evoke an abstract, poetical unity with a profusion of vivid
images” but “personal history often jangles the lyric accord of
American experience and landscape”(90). Although each author
deals with his own profound “American experience,” a closer look at
Least Heat-Moon’s writing style would undercut any claim that his
personal history derails the “poetical unity” between either the
elements he captures journalistically or his notion of
America-as-home. He often uses neutral syntax to promote the
agency of both subjects, as when he compares elements. For example,
he explains, “Cottonwoods, like cattle, followed the streambeds for
water and escape from the wind” (269). By making cottonwoods “followers” of streambeds, but like cattle rather than people, he
encourages a broader sense of environmental agency that does not
romanticize away the integrity of each non-human identity.
Furthermore, the poetic capacity of this neutral syntax tacitly supports Least Heat-Moon’s understated environmentalism throughout
the text. David Teague ascribes “the depth or ‘verticality’ of [Least
Heat-Moon’s] writing” to his “reconceiving some of the most basic
ways in which contemporary Americans approach their landscape”
(515).
Syntax is one of the most basic examples of this depth. While
careful language choice is a tenant of nature writing, Blue Highways is
primarily a travelogue that adopts ecosensitvity. Least Heat-Moon’s
unconventional style endures the challenge of forging new comparisons between humans and non-humans. With this ecosensitive
writing style, he captures a sense of each individual region, as well as
the movement between those places along the traditionally egocentric
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671
American highway. He describes a man from the West has a face “so
gullied even the Soil Conservation Commission couldn’t have
reclaimed it,” while a Mississippi woman’s “dark, musky scent
brought to mind the swamp” (210, 106). In order to represent both
human and landscape as equal, unprivileged entities with interconnecting characteristics, he does not use simple anthropocentric
similes or metaphors. A face and gullied land both can be viewed as
eroded from either natural forces or human misuse. Least Heat-Moon
does not say that the man’s face looks “like” lumpy terrain, which
would reduce the landscape to the anthropocentric task of representing a man’s face. Similarly, the woman’s smell “brings to mind” memories of the swamp, but is not an olfactory descriptor of a human
characteristic like “she smelled like a swamp.” In both comparisons,
Least Heat-Moon uses descriptors that coincide with the region in
which the person lives. This unconventional use of language connecting humans, plants, animals, and land illuminates Least Heat-Moon’s
sensitivity to detail and dedication to orienting humans within a
larger ecosystem.
The unique combination of narrative components in Blue
Highways like photojournalism, physical geographical description, literary analysis, and novelistic self-discovery introduces a travelwriting style that allows the narrator to convey his personal struggle
with American identity and place-sense. By documenting dialect,
Least Heat-Moon definitively connects language to the region, as
when he draws attention to differences in speech when he describes
one woman’s accent as “soft Mississippian” (106). Rather than
describing the accent as southern he uses “Mississippian” to link her
words more significantly with her location, both within “mapped
reality” (Ryden 42) and in narrative. Although Mississippi is a political boundary, it is also a place in the American reader’s mind that
magnifies the physicality of language differences. He frequently
maintains dialects when he could easily omit them, such as the subtle
nuance of a North Carolina accent that adds the short “a” sound
before each stressed verb: “I’m not atakin’ sides, I’m just atellin’ you”
(47). As with the poetic comparisons of animals, land, and humans,
varied dialects lend poetic alliteration to the text. In this case, the
man’s opinion that the river should run freely coincides with the
rolling flow of his speech. His sensitivity to detail also appeals to the
realistic notion that this is a transcription rather than a memory.
Often on his travels Least Heat-Moon records people correcting his
speech, an act that takes Least Heat-Moon away from the travelogue’s
controls and truly shows his “multiperspectival approach” (Teague
513). In Louisiana, Least Heat-Moon asks where he can hear French
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music and one man says “laugh yet.” Least Heat-Moon replies,
“Lafayette?” to which the man responds—“You got it, junior, but we
don’t say Lah-fay-et” (111). The local pronunciation of places through
narrative shows one way in which “mapped reality” often needs multiple narratives in order to exist.
David Robertson’s inquiry-based definition of bioregional nature
writing, “To see how culture is related to nature, or, to see how
nature gives rise to and is expressed in culture” (1013), introduces
conflicts of nature and culture, and regional and national distinctions,
that Least Heat-Moon’s text struggles in new ways to represent. Least
Heat-Moon focuses on people within regions, but the places he finds
most inspirational are those where nature and culture appear inseparable. Although descriptions of regional food, shelter, and community
sites of place-sense fill the pages of Least Heat-Moon’s travels, the
question whether Blue Highways works as bioregional nature
writing—works about the culture that arises from nature—highlights
a number of tensions between local lifestyles and America-as-home.
One place where this tension can be traced is in the twenty-three
photos that supplement his literary work. These photos suspend the
people he interviews in their regional environment at a specific time
and place. The regional, yet collective, result resembles that of a
family album, with proud faces posing in their homes, businesses,
and backyards. E. V. Walter historicizes the classical term “chorography” as an accurate artistic representation of the earth that gives “the
perspective of unity and continuity” (Walter 115).11 On the one hand,
Least Heat-Moon’s photos accomplish this exact unity and continuity.
But, the format of this multimedia interrupts the written text, complicating the photo’s accurate depiction of the continuity between
humans, habitat, animals, land, and the sky that Walter describes. In
one photo, a mother and daughter in Frenchman, Nevada, stand
outside of their weather-beaten diner. The vacant desert and Nevada
sky frame the image of the two unfocused figures. He supplements
this photograph with an interview in which the two women appropriately describe Frenchman’s “law of the land.” “Look out for yourself, look out for each other” is a philosophy that they claim the
landscape espouses; the mother gives an example of a robber who
“can’t get away . . . [the] desert’s our defense” (201– 02). Even though
the women are not far from the lens, their individual faces are indistinct. Instead, the photo captures the continuity between the women
and the land, and the grayscale of the image likewise relates to the
written philosophy of the place. By switching between linguistic and
photographic snapshots, Least Heat-Moon threads together certain
moments as well as places that allow Blue Highways to represent
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nature and culture, and the text to function as bioregional literature
despite its ultimately national scope.
The descriptions of places and interviews that make up the
majority of the text support these photographs with complex observations of land use and management. Least Heat-Moon accesses local
environmental imaginations through stories of how people adapt to
the topography, animals, water, and other environmental features of
their region. Often his initial observations convey an outsiderenvironmentalist perspective, but in the process of learning, a particular narrative of the place Least Heat-Moon exchanges his totalizing perspective for a balance of environmental concern and an
awareness of the limits of human destruction. Early in his travels,
Least Heat-Moon stops in Dare County, the place in which “the first
white child (says tradition) [was] born in America” (55). This
comment, authorized by the parenthetical note “says tradition,”
introduces the current topic of the county that includes Roanoke
Island. He explains, “Men with caliper hands and parallelogram
brains were taking the measure of the salt marsh and trying to
‘reclaim’ it—a misleading word since this tidewater has always
belonged to the sea” (55). Although Least Heat-Moon never mentions
the long history of failed habitations in this area, which includes the
original “Lost” Colony of 1587 – 89, the implicit parallel between contemporary builders and the first English settlers serves as a warning
for the people who refuse to conceive of a complex ecosystem that
resists human accommodation. While Least Heat-Moon’s selection of
locations engages with a preconceived environmental perspective,
the lessons of the land counterbalance any overestimation of human
dominance. In his later narrative River Horse (1999), Least Heat-Moon
travels west on another sort of blue path—rivers—and experiences
water management first-hand. Like in Roanoke, Least Heat-Moon
interviews a man who asserts, “We don’t need to fret about that
Missouri. It’s not endangered . . . I’m just too small for that river”
(345). Despite the many environmental problems of river damming,
to which this man expresses sympathy, his emphasis on the
Missouri’s strength and the human’s weakness relies on the longevity
of geologic time. Water resurfaces throughout Blue Highways as a unifying element that shapes American culture and physical geography,
linking travel, environmental awareness, and American heritage in a
way that orients human decisions within the larger scope of geological time.
Later in the narrative, in the section “West by Southwest,” Least
Heat-Moon associates movement, environmental awareness, and
American heritage, this time on the Navajo and Hopi reservations.
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He explains that the “white man had believed the land worthless”
(173), and thus, after a brief period of displacement, Navajo and
Hopi returned to their homelands under the new term “reservation.”
Least Heat-Moon emphasizes the difference between the tribes as one
of ecosensitive home design. The Navajo, who live in wide-open
desert, “prefer widely dispersed clusters of clans” (174), while Hopi
have “at the heart of the reservation, topographically and culturally,
Second Mesa. Traditionally, Hopis, as do the eagles they hold sacred,
prefer to live on precipices” (175). He further describes Hopi by comparing them with bristlecone pines because both “live where almost
nothing else will, thriving long in adverse conditions” (175). The
poetic comparison of Hopi to local flora and fauna instead of other
native peoples illustrates how ecocentric sensitivity enables a simultaneous closer cultural sensitivity between tribes, regions, and ethnicities. Least Heat-Moon’s visit to Navajo and Hopi reservations and
not, for example, the impoverished Oglala Sioux reservation in South
Dakota, invites criticism that Least Heat-Moon idealizes reservation
life and ignores the social injustice inherent of the reservation system
as a whole. And yet, the difference between the Hopi and Navajo
reservations on the one hand, and the Oglala Sioux reservations on
the other, is that the Southwestern tribes have remained (more or
less) on the land of their ancestors, a detail relevant to the central
purpose of Blue Highways. Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000)—a possible
parody of On the Road—deals in depth with the issues of movement
and stasis that Least Heat-Moon raises with his visit to Navajo and
Hopi land. As Frazier’s book amply illustrates, Least Heat-Moon may
have skipped the Pine Ridge reservation because it suffers from a
similarly malnourished place-sense to the commodified America of
the interstate. Like Least Heat-Moon, Frazier’s text is a non-fiction
account of an outsider whose friendships enable cross-cultural
experiences of community life. Frazier depicts poverty-stricken “Rez”
life with details akin to Least Heat-Moon’s multiperspectival
approach to regional lifestyles. Most notably, the recurring problem
of Rez life is forced stasis: the seclusion of the reservation away from
even a blue road demonstrates the problem of considering regional
lifestyles without considering how these regions intersect. The belabored process of finding rides, fixing engines, and coping with fatal
car accidents threads together Frazier’s account of various individuals
trying to hold on to their culture on the Rez. Frazier begins his text
with an optimism that introduces the complexities of what American
identity means. He claims that while an emigrant narrative unifies
most Americans, the “Indian part was what made them American
and different” (8). As Least Heat-Moon travels, the multiperspectival
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approach allows him to compare aspects of native and non-native
regional lifestyles by learning to celebrate his travel as a complementary opposition to the stasis of regional life.
Throughout the travelogue, Least Heat-Moon searches out and
documents the local histories that describe change within individual
places, especially those that combine natural history with folklore,
food, occupation, and overall place-sense. At the start, Least
Heat-Moon says he “took to the open road in search of places where
change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected” (5). Least Heat-Moon broaches the humbling concept of
Earth’s vast geological time to allow an undramatized, though
dynamic, representation of environment. He visits a little cabin in the
woods that was the scene of a historic battle, and spends five pages
recording how the place connects landscape with people of many
generations. A National Park ranger explains, “[A] guy wrote a letter
in eighteen-fifty and said people here considered the trees and
bushes of the battleground too sacred to be ‘molested’” (75). The man
in the letter espouses the concept of “space-environmentalization” by
contending that, in this physical setting, the trees are a “sacred” part
of the battleground’s place-sense. More than a museum of isolated,
categorized artifacts, this place demonstrates how all aspects of life
interconnect to form a deep, changing, communal sense of place.
Least Heat-Moon has a similar experience in an unlikely location out
West. When he visits a tourist trap created to resemble Stonehenge,
he notices on the rocks the inscriptions of fellow travelers. He reflects,
“I felt again the curious fusion of time—past with present—that
occurred at the Nevada petroglyphs. . . . [T]he monument had
become a register, and the scribbles gave a historical authenticity”
(239). Petroglyphs of the past did not represent abstract ideas, such as
a heart represents love, but concrete objects from the material world
such as mountains or deer.12 This attempt at concrete representation
is a tool that ecocentric writers try to capture in order to free the text
from some of the egotism inherent in language (Buell 99). As an ecocentric writer, Least Heat-Moon does this when he avoids metaphors
that privilege humans over animals or other non-human elements of
place. But this comment also joins Least Heat-Moon’s own past and
present road experiences, the Nevada petroglyphs of his travels with
the imitation-Stonehenge. This acknowledgment of the parallel
between his own movement and changing place-sense establishes a
self-awareness that places him within a community of travelers. The
Stonehenge example suggests that despite the destination-driven
American travel industry, travelers have a common desire to make
direct connections with places, and also other travelers, through
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language. This place posits that it is not the deliberate reminders, the
monuments and museums, which connect us with the history and
true sense of place, but the ever-changing power of particular places
that powerfully resist homogenization.
Food, a common though commodified aspect of travel, plays a
particularly integral role in Least Heat-Moon’s travelogue by connecting regional food preferences and livelihoods with community gatherings and local imaginations. These gastronomical experiences
contrast those of many American travel writers, including the
popular comic writer Bill Bryson. Bryson’s travel books use selfdeprecating humor to satirize the traveling consumer, but often fall
short of offering more environmentally responsible alternatives. At
the start of The Lost Continent (1989), Bryson satirically comments that
a small town is useless without certain distinguishable “features”
(16), by which he means business districts with recognizable store
logos. Interstate consumerism, and food in particular, is generally
accepted as satire because of its cliché status in print, on screen, and
in life. Thirty years earlier, Kerouac romanticized roadside consumption with the appropriately iconic diner apple pie, musing, “that’s
practically all I ate all the way across the country” (15). The notion
that every stop has apple pie is a comforting familiarity in Sal’s everyday life of travel in “America,” but it is ultimately a 1950s fantasy
transformed over and over today on neon signs.13 Least Heat-Moon’s
food, however, edifies the mind as well as the body because he seeks
out regional dining experiences, rather than quick-fix calories. At a
local seafood gumbo restaurant, Least Heat-Moon describes his meal
through conversations with a local helicopter mechanic and musician. In a “large concrete-floor kitchen with an old picnic table under
a yellow florescent tube” he enjoys gumbo in which the “oysters are
fresh and fat, the shrimp succulent, the spiced sausage meaty, okra
sweet, rice soft, and the roux—the essence—the roux was right”
(114). The evocative description of the gumbo compliments its
history, to which Brittany, African American, and some American
Indian cultures all contribute (114). Even distinctly regional food is
an amalgam of past cultures that links the food Least Heat-Moon eats
to the food of the past in a vast culinary web; his experience accesses
the local imagination in a way that justifies the sojourn. In this
section Least Heat-Moon also discusses the land conflicts of this
swamp region, which is only more apparent now after Hurricane
Katrina and the BP oil disaster. He explains how a Cajun lifestyle of
“fishing, frogging, mudbugging, trapping, and mosspicking” is now
threatened due to the Corps of Engineers’ “protective levees” that
accept Mississippi river runoff into the river basin so that the
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Mississippi will not flood New Orleans. The silt in this runoff,
according to Least Heat-Moon’s research, has “altered not just the
Atchafalaya and a great swamp but also one of the distinctive ethnic
peoples in America” (123). Like with Roanoke, Least Heat-Moon
highlights the tension between regional lifestyles and national land
management by showing some ways in which regional cultures are
part of local ecosystems, and that these unique places have as much
potential to feed America as the pastureland the Corps attempts to
recreate.
Some ways in which Least Heat-Moon self-analyzes his journey,
both within and beyond the text, suggest that his literary transformation from ego to eco can function as a guide to ecocentric travel and
ecocritical reading. In the afterword, Least Heat-Moon admits that
his inspiration for the trip comes in part from Steinbeck’s Travels with
Charley, a mid-life man-and-dog travelogue (418). Least Heat-Moon is
also middle-aged during the “blue highways” trek, but Blue Highways
is only Least Heat-Moon’s first published work. He had not become
the acclaimed American author Steinbeck was in Travels with Charley,
nor does Least Heat-Moon’s style emulate Steinbeck. David Teague
notes that Least Heat-Moon “attempt[s] to reorient himself in
American Society” (515). The word “attempt” seems to characterize
correctly the first half of Blue Highways. Despite Least Heat-Moon’s
attempt to associate with the more self-reflective and ecosensitive
Steinbeck, his failed marriage and career more closely resembles the
circumstances of Kerouac’s Sal. Least Heat-Moon escapes his home
with the attitude, “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at
least go” (3). The expressed destination is a familiar America that
might welcome Least Heat-Moon as both Osage and white, both an
academic and popular writer. At the start of the narrative, Least
Heat-Moon recounts, “With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and
a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open
road” (5). Neil Evernden translates Homo sapiens as “‘the natural
alien’, the creature without a proper habitat,” but Least Heat-Moon
initially assigns the characteristic “alien” to the land, not himself,
showing that he associates his feeling of placelessness with a troubled
environmental imagination.14 After he begins his travels and realizes
that his feeling that he does not belong follows him onto even the
blue highway, he muses, “I was the strangest piece of topography I’d
ever seen, a place, until now, completely beyond my imaginings.
What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen
only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a
new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of ?” (162). By
calling himself “topography” he attempts to express his feelings
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through the physical world, but the thin line between egocentric and
ecocentric language blurs when Least Heat-Moon tries to justify his
movement. Kerouac’s Sal makes a comment similar to Least
Heat-Moon’s prefatory musings: “I was half-way across America, at
the dividing line between the east of my youth and the west of my
future” (17). Although Sal’s comment relies on preexisting associations that link American identity to westward movement, Sal’s
romantic view of a sympathetic American landscape reveals its limit
even within the plot of the novel. Sal does not make one epic trip
west, but rather zigzags east and west several times, ending at his
northeastern origin. During the first half of Blue Highways, Least
Heat-Moon allows himself few self-centered pages, but this decision
does not obviate his central role as the movement and voice of the
travelogue. When questioned about his route, Least Heat-Moon
replies vaguely, “I’m working on who. Where can take care of
himself” (163). His confidence in the “where” of his travels echoes
the local confidence seen in Roanoke and Louisiana, but it also shows
his uncertainty as a narrator and traveler. As he struggles to connect
the land with his travels, Least Heat-Moon works through the complexities between author, place, and text that enable the transformative potential of the blue highways project.
In “Constructing a Self on the Road,” literary critic Mark Allister
likens Blue Highways to On the Road because both main characters do
not move “on at all” but rather each “simply moves along” (101).
According to Allister, the “just go attitude creates a nearly desperate
need to perform an act of self creation” (102). Allister criticizes Least
Heat-Moon’s work because instead of explicating a self-creative act,
he spends the majority of his text “dramatiz[ing] the importance of
place in human life” (102 – 03). While his article does move toward
recognizing Least Heat-Moon’s potential, Allister’s narrow critical
focus on emotions fails to consider how these emotions connect with
the changing road environment. Furthermore, the thirty years
between On the Road’s first publication and Blue Highways resists such
an easy parallel between the emotions of Sal and those of Least
Heat-Moon. Least Heat-Moon begins his travels with the cultural
familiarity of Kerouac’s “just go” attitude, and spends the majority of
the travelogue focused on diversifying his notions of American
people and places. Allister’s parallel does highlight a similar problem
between the two men that originates in their familial pasts, but Least
Heat-Moon’s problems inform his road narrative, while Sal’s brief
description only orients his travel in relation to his own fictional timeline, “not long after my wife and I split up,” when he felt “that everything was dead” (3). Least Heat-Moon describes his failed marriage
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679
as “the Indian wars” (5), an unresolved conflict that refers back to his
multiethnic heritage. He notes, “To the red way of thinking, a man
who makes peace with the new by destroying the old is not to be
honored” (5). In this explanation, he calls himself a “half-breed” (5), a
term that further chastises him for changes in history and his personal life. Both Least Heat-Moon and Sal Paradise grasp for a notion
of America-as-home after their traditional male role in the household
disappears. Although Least Heat-Moon begins with the neurotic
persona Allister seems to prefer, his ecocritical tools allow the diversity of small-town America and historical continuity of place to
prompt self-discovery.
Least Heat-Moon’s response to American travel relies on his critical awareness of language and land. In this way, Blue Highways
resembles Robert M. Pirsig’s first-person Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance (1974), in which an unsuccessful middle-aged academic
travels America with “deliberately indefinite” plans (12). As the title
suggests, Pirsig resists the western travel trope of conquest by emphasizing the process of travel. He replaces the car with a motorcycle
and supplies the details of its mechanics, but the appreciation he
demands for mechanical processes does not extend beyond his bike.
Instead, the changing landscape threads together monologues about
western philosophy, providing a philosophical, academic oasis away
from the empty road. During one of these placeless moments of
travel, the narrator ruminates, “This western philosophy has been
used since antiquity to remove oneself from the tedium and
depression of one’s immediate surroundings” (76). Western philosophy’s prevalence throughout the text introduces critical thinking as a
tool for a process-oriented travel. Least Heat-Moon similarly reflects
on the relationship between western and eastern philosophy and
travel by drawing from American writers who have guided his
impulses. Like Pirsig’s philosophical novel, Least Heat-Moon’s contemplation combines with movement in order to create the novelistic
epiphany of Blue Highways. In his introduction to Temperamental
Journeys, Least Heat-Moon paraphrases Blue Highways in novel plot
style: “The narrator descends into the topography of self for half the
journey before he realizes the futility of that course. He then begins to
move from an inward-turning spiral of his own self-absorption
toward a spiral of discovery that opens outward to other lives and
new places” (“Journey to Kansas” 21).15 His retrospective treatment
of the text as if it were a novel, and not a non-fiction travelogue like
his other work, is telling. His reference to “the narrator” distances
himself from a text in which he develops his own unique narrative
voice via painful reflection on clashing ethnicities, American identity,
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and homelessness. The pivotal moment in the text is also the most
generically uncertain, reading as much like an academic article as a
novel. It is when Least Heat-Moon finds himself simultaneously
between two texts, Whitman’s Song of Myself and Black Elk’s The
Sacred Pipe, and physically encircled by America as a whole, that the
alternative road narrative comes to fruition.
Least Heat-Moon carries Whitman from the start, but he buys The
Sacred Pipe while on the road in Arizona. Whitman’s Song of Myself
represents the canonical American literature of his former academic
life, while the Black Elk purchase indicates Least Heat-Moon’s
growing interest in American Indian place-sense. The Sacred Pipe is
Oglala leader Black Elk’s account of his tribe’s rituals. His purpose
was to facilitate cross-cultural understandings of Oglala and
Christian spiritualities.16 Despite The Sacred Pipe’s conciliatory
purpose, Least Heat-Moon reads The Sacred Pipe with pre-existing
guilt for his multiethnic ancestry, focusing more on differences, rather
than similarities, between cultures. Black Elk details the difference
between spirituality through common familial terms. Whereas the
Christian Father “art in heaven,” Black Elk’s ancestors “are of earth”
and provide food for the living (Black Elk 13). In the Oglala view of
spirituality, abstract connections to spiritual beings are also concrete
in their constant material presence. Before Least Heat-Moon buys The
Sacred Pipe, he interviews a Hopi medical student at a Utah university. The Hopi student gives Least Heat-Moon some blue corn and
explains, “We consider corn our mother. The blue variety is what you
might call our compass—wherever it grows, we can go” (184 – 85).
The agricultural “blue highway” of the corn mother also arises in The
Sacred Pipe, an inter-textual connection that Least Heat-Moon omits.
Black Elk explains that in the corn ceremony one person says to
another, “This food I shall place in your mouth, so you will never
fear my home, for it is your home” (114). Like other food on the trip,
the recurring corn mother would help reconcile Least Heat-Moon
with his outsider status as a traveler, but Least Heat-Moon does not
make this association between text and experience. Instead, he cites
Black Elk’s comment, “The blue road is the route of one who is distracted, who is ruled by his senses, and who lives for himself rather
than his people” (219). Least Heat-Moon responds, “Was it racial
memory that had urged me to drive seven thousand miles of blue
highway, a term I thought I had coined?”(219). In an interview, Least
Heat-Moon articulates how he conceptualizes historical continuity in
American identity. He explains, “There’s something that moves
within all of us that . . . I call genetic memory . . . in which, things that
occurred to our ancestors get passed on to us . . . certain feelings,
Repaving America
681
certain inclinations to do things in a particular way. . . . [T]here’s a
response to the land that wouldn’t otherwise be there” (Overby).
While Least Heat-Moon’s comments on genetic memory parallels his
unconscious acquisition of the blue highways idea, it also seems to
relate to the unconscious acquisition of travel writing that wrestles
with how to represent changing place-sense.17
Although Whitman’s poetry accompanies Least Heat-Moon from
the start, quotes appear in abrupt fragments throughout his western
travels. Despite Least Heat-Moon’s literary academic background,
each quote begins, “Whitman says”: or just “Whitman”: without any
attempt to integrate the quote into his own text. On the other hand,
Least Heat-Moon always integrates Black Elk’s words, either through
paraphrase or with in-text quotations. The differing contexts of the
two texts illustrate the main tension of Blue Highways. Black Elk’s text
is non-fiction and serves a cross-cultural community, but Whitman’s
poem is ecstatic language use and celebrates individuality. Whitman’s
quotes appear as an authoritative companion where there is no local
authority to interview.18 For example, in Texas Least Heat-Moon
responds to a sign “IMPASSIBLE TO TRAILERS” with the quote, “O
highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?” (167). He then
continues down the forbidden road. The identity-shaping western
landscape of personal independence, for Least Heat-Moon becomes a
frantic moment of identity crisis. In Oregon, at the western edge of
his journey, he cannot decide where to go. This time, instead of
looking to Whitman, he begins to read The Sacred Pipe and discovers
its warning against egocentric travel. He exclaims, “I even made a traveling companion of the great poet of ego, the one who sings of
himself” (219). He travels despondently through the northwest with
this concern until he picks up a hitchhiking Bible salesman. When
this spiritual traveler inquires into his religion via Bible verses, Least
Heat-Moon parries by quoting Whitman, “Why should I wish to see
God better than this day?” and then Black Elk, “Whatever you have
seen, maybe it is for the good of the people you have seen it” (261).
This selection of quotes shows how each author, despite their different ancestries, depends on the physical American landscape for his
own spirituality, and consequently both can support ecocentric travel.
When Least Heat-Moon is again alone, the cohesion of these texts
and the solitary landscape prompts his discovery, “This squander of
land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him
days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for
the relief to the bigness outside—a grandness that demands attention
not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual
change” (274). The movement west and the return journey show how
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I S L E
Least Heat-Moon’s own experiences with American land and
lifestyles interact with diverse textual representations of American
identity to create a unique multiperspectival approach to travel
writing. This non-fictive account can be viewed as a sort of narrative
through which ecocentric sensitivity combines with literary criticism
and personal reflection to develop not only a writer, but an ecocritic
as well.
William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways takes us on a journey
that stresses travel as an ecocritical tool for understanding multiperspectival representations of American place-sense. Least Heat-Moon
uses his multiethnicity, a cause célèbre of America, to rediscover the
importance of ecocentric thinking. We are all travelers coming from
someplace, going somewhere else—even if we stay in one spot, we
cannot assume our environment is only a static backdrop in front of
which we live our lives. The better we understand how our own
emotions and interests relate to our changing surroundings, the more
harmonious these connections will be. Least Heat-Moon expands on
multiperspectival representations of a single region in PrairyErth, the
text that follows Blue Highways, and then considers ecological change
and resource management in his second travelogue, River Horse. He
has even returned to the road in a new travelogue, Roads to Quoz
(2008), with a confidence now comparable to Steinbeck’s Travels with
Charley. These texts exemplify the post-epiphany narrator whose
dynamic presence in the texts more explicitly amplifies ecological
processes and ecocritical work. After rehabilitating his own environmental imagination and viewing himself within the larger ecological
community, Least Heat-Moon’s other work contributes in a more
self-aware way to environmental history, criticism, and activism.
Least Heat-Moon’s struggles with opposing white-and-red-man
ideologies in Blue Highways resolves with the multiperspectival, yet
unifying symbol of the blue highway, which reminds us that dealing
with multiple cultures is highly American. Least Heat-Moon recasts
the American road trip to accommodate for not only human connections across the continent, but also every other connection in
between. Responding in River Horse to the comment of an interviewee who “wouldn’t give a tinker’s durn for a man who can’t spell a
word more than one way,” Least Heat-Moon states, “I think I’m like
that about interior selves” (118). After discovering a new way to look
at the world, Least Heat-Moon no longer needs to question the status
of his interior self to find a deeper sense of place; it is beneath and all
around the pavement itself.
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683
NOTES
1. See PrairyErth (1991), River Horse (1999), and Road to Quoz (2008).
2. See David Mazel’s introduction to A Century of Early Ecocriticism, in
which he answers the question “Is our national literature recognizably
American in some way?” by considering the authoritative tone and
American-specific focus of non-fiction nature writers (5 –6).
3. See Devries B2, and Teague.
4. Kris Lackey’s Road Frames: The American Highway Narrative provides a
comprehensive history of car travel narratives, starting in 1903.
5. Two examples are Jack London’s Valley of the Moon (1913) and
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). For more on family on the road, see
Lackey 28.
6. See interview with Diane Dismuke in NEA Today.
7. See Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, 1988, 1 –23.
8. In River Horse, a later travelogue in which Least Heat-Moon travels
across America not on roads but on rivers, he claims that one of the benefits
of river travel is arriving in a town “without having to undergo those purgatorial miles of vile sprawl . . . , [the] endless surround of no placelessness”
(48).
9. See Buell 253.
10. He develops his interest in narrative maps in PrairyErth: A Deep Map
(1991).
11. To illustrate the appropriate context for the term “chorography, Walter
explains that ancient Greek writers would use the word “chorophilia” and
not “topophilia” to describe their love of place. See Walter 120.
12. For a discussion of petroglyphs and the history of storytelling in
American Indian communities, see Silko 30 –42.
13. Even in Kerouac’s more ecosensitive narrative The Dharma Bums, in
which Kerouac considers Zen’s earth-based philosophy, Ray (Kerouac’s fictive
self ) turns to the familiarity of the iconic American camping food, the
Hershey bar, when he fails to feel a spiritual connection to the mountainous
landscape.
14. Quoted in Buell 254 from his work of the same title The Natural Alien:
Humankind and Environment, 1985. See especially 103– 24.
15. This concept coincides with the spirituality described by Ray’s friend
Japhy in The Dharma Bums. Japhy claims, “This enormous inhuman beauty—
letting go I am simply it, being part of it, in me as well as outside” (109).
16. See Black Elk. The Sacred Pipe: Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala
Sioux, 1971.
17. Like Least Heat-Moon, Kerouac struggled to reconcile Judeo-Christian
and land-based spirituality. See David Robertson’s Real Matter, 1997, 109–12.
18. See Blue Highways 167, 189, 221, 240, 270.
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