Mystery Tour

By J.D. Reed

BLUE HIGHWAYS by William Least Heat Moon

Little Brown; 421 pages; $17.50

"In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is," wrote Gertrude Stein. "That is what makes America what it is." It is also what makes American travel writing what it is: a constantly rewarding genre in the right hands. William Least Heat Moon has great hands.

Separated from his wife and laid off as a teacher of English at a Missouri college, the young part-Sioux begins a 13,000-mile journey around the country's perimeter. In an Econoline van called Ghost Dancing, the author shuns the 42,500 miles of interstate highways in favor of meandering two-lane roads, represented on older maps by blue lines. Here Least Heat Moon thinks he could "live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a matter of dignity."

Through Nameless, Tenn., Dime Box, Texas, and Othello, N.J., Blue Highways, illustrated with the author's photographs, presents a cast of kooks, codgers and geezers, closely observed and tenderly treated. Bill and Rosemary Hammond are welding together a 77,000-lb. steel boat in their Brooklyn Bridge, Ky., backyard; stolid Trawler Captain Tom West of Cape Porpoise, Me., goes home from the sea to console himself with television; Father Anthony Delisi in Conyers, Ga., reveals that Trappists have contemporized their mealtime readings aloud. He tells the author, "We just finished Nicholas and Alexandra. We began Understanding Media not long ago but voted it out."

The pilgrim has a sharp and jaundiced eye for "the plastic-roof franchises" of eight-lane America. Its most dangerous inhabitants are truckers. "When I watch drivers trying to recuperate on coffee and chili, and look at faces with eyes bloodshot from 'pocket-rockets,' and witness their ludicrous attempts to be folk heroes, I get very nervous the next time I see one pushing 40 tons 70 miles an hour at me." At last, some comfort comes on the bluest of highways. Searching for the burial place of an ancestor near Franklinville, N.C., Least Heat Moon struggles at night through miles of brush to discover it submerged in a reservoir. "I went down to it and washed away the thicket and sweaty dust. In my splashing, I broke the starlight. And then I too drank from the grave."

There are wounds that will not yield to mileage, and in time the series of landscapes wears away the psyche. At Rolla, N. Dak., the exhausted driver notes: "In a hotel room in the geographical center of North America, a neon sign blinking red through the cold curtains, I lay quietly like a small idea in a vacant mind." But the mood is as quirky as a backroad. Nearing the end of his journey, he thinks of his circular route: "There on the map, crudely, was the labyrinth of migration the old Hopis once cut in their desert stone. For me, the migration had been to places and moments of glimpsed clarity. Splendid gifts all." In Blue Highways, Least Heat Moon has collected those treasures at every intersection.

--By J.D. Reed This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.