46 pages • 1 hour read
William Least Heat-MoonBlue Highways: A Journey into America
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Eastward”
William Least Heat-Moon begins by discussing the events leading to his project of traveling a circuit around the United States. He learns of his termination from a college English department due to lackluster student enrollment. He mentions he is separated from his wife and implies she is having an affair
As Heat-Moon lies awake that night, the idea occurs to him that if he cannot get a handle on his life, he may as well just take off and hit the road. Heat-Moon says, “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity” (3). Here, Heat-Moon gives the reader the first hints toward his motivation for the journey at the heart of the book.
Heat-Moon sets off on his trip, heading out of his home state of Missouri. He drives a 1975 Econoline van that he nicknames “Ghost Dancing” and that he has set up like a small camper. Heat-Moon will do most of his sleeping in the van. He also brings two books along for the trip: Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks.
He passes by St. Louis, points out the “glowing skullcap of foul sky” (6) caused by the dismal fog. He travels through Illinois and takes his first rest stop, during which he has the first of what will be many encounters and conversations with strangers. From Illinois, Heat-Moon travels through Indiana into Kentucky where he meets with Bob Andriot, a man rebuilding a historic log cabin, and Bill and Rosie Hammond, spouses whom Heat-Moon befriends because he notices the boat that Bill was building.
After spending time with the Hammonds, Heat-Moon sets off again, this time heading through Tennessee. He’s on the hunt for a place called Nameless, which, as it turns out, is rather difficult to locate even with his trusty atlas. After the search and sojourn to Nameless, Heat-Moon again takes to the highway and heads east into North Carolina.
Chapter 1 Analysis
Heat-Moon, lately separated from his wife and now jobless, is 38 years old when the book opens. His life circumstances leave him feeling somewhat aimless, which partly motivates his adventurous undertaking; he’s trying to give his life direction and value.
Heat-Moon’s ancestry, which is of multiracial descent, is also important as his European and Native American lineage inform much of the narrative. Heat-Moon tends to look at the world from both vantage points: the white colonial and the Native. Generally, he identifies more positively with his Native American heritage, and he tends to process the world through this cultural lens more so than through the white colonial lineage. As an example, Heat-Moon says, “Yet to the red way of thinking, a man who makes peace with the new by destroying the old is not to be honored” (4); this quote reveals his preferred cultural perspective. We also see for the first time one of his primary pre-occupations: how people respond to their places in time.
The inevitability of change is at the center of the book; it informs much of how he processes the people he meets and the historical significance of the places he visits. The ways in which the modern supplants the old is, at times, unsettling for Heat-Moon, and is a vehicle for his many tangential, philosophical musings. Many of the modern and commercial images Heat-Moon witnesses he presents derisively and contemptuously, such as when he describes St. Louis as a “glowing skullcap of foul sky’ (6). Heat-Moon tends to prefer the old ways, and though he does not say this explicitly, it will become increasingly noticeable.
Additionally, as Heat-Moon encounters strangers along his journey, he is sympathetic to the ways in which a progressing modernity imposes new lifestyles on these folks—but he is also impressed and moved by how they adapt out of necessity. He especially admires figures who search for permanence in this life. For example, there is Bob Andriot, the man Heat-Moon meets while the former is remodeling a rustic and historic cabin. Of his cabin, Andriot says, “I guess rescuing this building makes me feel I’ve done something to last” (14). This one man’s quest for permanence symbolizes Heat-Moon’s own quest. Thus, another of the books’ major themes emerges: persons seeking permanence in a world that will always resist it.
