He dreams of the headline: FROZEN MAN FOUND IN AVALANCHE. The account is a highly personal one, filled with close observation, dry wit and keen style, but unlike many travel. Called a masterpiece by Robert Penn Warren, the book spent forty-two weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and has since become an American classic. Moon goes on to quote Black Elk and Walt Whitman, and to give the reader information about lightning that only a curious meteorologist would know. Blue Highways brought William Least Heat-Moon immediate recognition. Lightning tried to outdo thunder in scaring me. “A loud racketing of hail fell on the steel box, and the wind seemed to have hands, it shook the Ghost so relentlessly. But if he’s in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid. If he’s being installed as a Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that’s a fulfilling notion. “At any particular moment in a man’s life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. “There it was, the striped centerline, glowing through the sleet, disappearing under a seven-foot snowbank. It’s May, but the weather turns from desert to blizzard and he gets stuck in the snow. Moon avoids main highways, and tiring of the desert, decides to head into the mountains toward Cedar Breaks, Colorado in his RV, which he has named Ghost Dancing.

The next few posts will be short excerpts from his book BLUE HIGHWAYS, published in 1982, called by some, including me, a masterpiece. William Least Heat Moon is the modern deTocqueville, traveling the country, observing America.

Blue highways book review