Since setting out on this vanlife journey around the United States last August, Jean and I have logged 19,347 miles in our 17-foot white Winnebago campervan we’ve named Sugar. That’s a lot of miles humming past under Sugar’s tires. I don’t have exact data on this, but I would guess that only 35 percent of those miles were on interstate highways. The rest are, as William Least Heat-Moon calls them in the introductory note to his book by the same name, blue highways: “On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue.”
Whenever possible, Jean and I are back-roads travelers.
The interstates serve a purpose: rapid transport across barren stretches of land, and when we take the on-ramp to one of the “I”s, it’s because we’re determined to zip from one side of a state to the other (sorry/not sorry, Texas).
But is the land really “barren”? Of course not—even the wildest remote swathes of public lands are populated with hundreds of living souls, most of whom we never see crouched under rocks, fear-frozen in heavy groves of trees, and crawling around the soil beneath a canopy of tall grass. There’s life out there, and plenty of it.
When Heat-Moon stops along the Natchez Trace Parkway to look at his surroundings, this is what he finds:
In the muck pollywogs were starting to squirm. It was spring here, and juices were getting up in the stalks; leaves, terribly folded in husks, had begun to let loose and open to the light; stuff was stirring in the rot, water bubbled with the froth of sperm and ova, and the whole bog lay rank and eggy, vaporous and thick with the scent of procreation.
And the Places of Man along blue highways—the cartographic grids of streets and parks in small towns—are always more interesting off-interstate. Let’s put it this way, when you’re on the interstate, you are elevated and fenced off from the life “below and out there;” interstate highways are selfish, they want to keep you to themselves, only giving you respite at mega-gas stations like Love’s and Buc-cees every twenty or fifty miles; interstates don’t like it when you leave them to spend time with the “salt of the earth” you’ll find on a two-lane highway. Interstates are good for speed, blue highways are for experiencing life. You’ll “see America” from the interstate, but you won’t feel it.
As Blue Highways plainly states: “Life doesn’t happen along interstates. It’s against the law.”
Early in the book, Heat-Moon describes his intention to stay on small roads as much as possible:
The tumult of St. Louis behind, the Illinois superwide quiet but for the rain, I turned south onto state 4, a shortcut to I-64. After that, the 42,500 miles of straight and wide could lead to hell for all I cared; I was going to stay on the three million miles of bent and narrow rural American two-lane, the roads to Podunk and Toonerville. Into the sticks, the boondocks, the burgs, backwaters, jerkwaters, the wide-spots-in-the-road, the don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it towns. Into those places where you say, "My god! What if you lived here!" The Middle of Nowhere.
After eight months on the road, I can assure you the boondocks are where America really comes alive.
Since starting on this odyssey, I’ve been reading “road books,” classics I’ve been meaning to read for years—starting with John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, continuing with Blue Highways, and eventually making my way to On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Among other things, the authors are schooling me, the writer, in ways I can best document our vanlife days.
Heat-Moon is a master at lyrically describing the kind of things we’ve found out here in this country—for instance, this observation early in his travels: “Indiana 66, a road so crooked it could run for the legislature, took me into the hilly fields of CHEW MAIL POUCH barns, past Christ-of-the-Ohio Catholic Church, through the Swiss town of Tell City with its statue of William and his crossbow and nervous son.”
And it’s not just the land and places he writes about—the people he encounters grow vivid under his pen:
Inside one of the white-walled rooms, a woman, forlorn in the quiet economy of things, sat staring numbly through the miasma of her cigarette into the March grayness. On a chair lay a Successful Marketing magazine. Her flesh looked as if it had been dumped into her stripy dress the way grain gets dumped into a feed sack.
Or this word-portrait of a man entering a bar in Deming, New Mexico:
A small man, tightly and neatly put together, his muscles wound around his bones like copper wire on an armature, his eyes faded turquoise, sauntered in.
You won’t be able to see men like that in a Buc-cee’s (oh, they may be there, but you couldn’t see them past the wall displays of chips and jerky, the half-mile aisle of candy bars, the kiosks of earbuds and phone chargers, and the whirling colored lights of the drink station). You must unhitch your wagon from I-10 and roll into Deming with its dust devils and faded saloons.
Save for some weeks-long patches where we’ve rested and relaxed with family along our route, Jean and I have been nearly constantly on the go since last August, riding a spiraled, corkscrewed route across the American west, southwest and southeast, eventually landing us in Middle America (we’re in Arkansas now to visit our daughter and her family for a few weeks). If you were to trace our route on a map, it would look like something scribbled by a sleep-deprived four-year-old on a sugar high—lines and circles everywhere.
These days, I average anywhere from 50 to 300 miles a day; the long days make me feel like I’m missing something out there in the small towns of America, and they certainly drain some of the reserves of my energy—as Heat-Moon writes, “After a while, the road seemed a continuum of yellow-lined concrete, a Mobius strip where I moved, going neither in nor out, but around and up and down to all points of the compass, yet always rolling along on the same plane.”
Those are the times when Jean and I land-and-settle for a day or three, finding a haven in a campground or small town to park Sugar so we can breathe and think, away from the billboard-clutter of the Big Roads. It’s only there where we can find William Least Heat-Moon’s true America. Viva les jerkwaters!
Wonderful!
And thank you for reminding me to re-read Blue Highways.
Keep on keepin on!
I read Blue Highways years ago and fell in love with William Least-Heat Moon, his writing and his name.