Heat-Moon’s book was about not bypassing people, but truly meeting them, another very Catholic idea. But it was the blue highways that connected American towns before those interstates allowed us to bypass them.

There was a bit of John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley in Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways.ĭo you remember road atlases? The roadways in blue were the older roads that had been made somewhat unnecessary by the appearance of red ones, according to the maps. The road here follows, more or less, the Booneslick Trail, the initial leg of the Oregon Trail it also parallels both the southern latitude of the last great glacier in central Missouri as well as the northern boundary of the Osage Nation.” This is how he memorably put it, at the start, from behind the wheel: “The first highway: Interstate 70 eastbound out of Columbia, Missouri. He was 38 then, on an extended road trip in a Ford van following a somewhat circular route around the United States, sticking to the highways marked in blue on his old road atlas. He was Bill Trogdon, or William Least Heat-Moon, according to his Osage lineage. An autobiographical travelogue written by an author seven years too old to be a baby boomer, it nevertheless appealed strongly to that generation and became a metaphor for life as a journey-a very Catholic idea.

Blue Highways is one of those rare books that continues to define a generation.

Author william least heat moon