Do you enjoy road trips? Back in the days before GPS, in the US at least, one way to plot out a road trip was to use a “road atlas,” which contained maps of most of the roads across the country. The major thoroughfares were thick red lines, the multilane highways were orange, and the older, twistier, less direct routes (“secondry roads”) were blue. Keeping to the blue roads meant you’d have a slower, probably more interesting journey.
William Least Heat-Moon wrote a whole book about it in 1982: Blue Highways. He set off in a 1975 van and wrote about what he found and saw, sometimes by parking on the main street in a small town, sitting in the back of his van, and taking notes.
William Least Heat-Moon was born William Trogdon in Kansas City, Missouri on August 27, 1939. The name he uses for his books comes from his Native American heritage as part of the Osage people. His father was Heat-Moon, his elder brother was “Little Heat-Moon,” which left “Least Heat-Moon” for William. It was probably lucky he didn’t have any younger siblings.
Least Heat-Moon earned BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Missouri, and later added another BA degree in photojournalism. He became a professor of English at the same school, but in 1978 he had a bit of a crisis: he lost his job and he and his wife separated. That was the impetus for his 13,000 mile road trip across the US. It took him three months, and as much as possible he traveled only on the blue roads on the maps.
Blue Highways is a pretty long book, but nevertheless became a bestseller and stayed on the list for 42 weeks. It won a Christopher Award in 1984 — an award given for works that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.”
After his success with Blue Highways, Heat-Moon continued writing rather than looking for another teaching position. His next book was PrairyErth: A Deep Map. In contrast to the long journey of Blue Highways, PrairyErth is an account of staying in one place: Chase County, Kansas. It introduced the idea of a “deep map,” which Heat-Moon describes as a map massively annotated with information abut history, people, events, and geography of a place.
Next, Heat-Moon returned to travel, and embarked on a four-month boat trip across the US, staying almost entirely on rivers, lakes, canals, and waterways often documented by early explorers like Lewis and Clark. He revisited the idea of tracing early discoverers’ routes in Columbus in the Americas. He published his first novel, Celestial Mechanics, in 2017.
Heat-Moon’s works have been influential in travel writing, bioregionalism, and cartography. Although his approach in PrairyErth of carefully documenting a particular place was not unique, his term “deep map” has been widely adopted by the BBC, the Common Ground organization, and the field of geographical information systems.
He still lives in Missouri, in the US, near both blue highways and the Missouri River. I highly recommend his work.
