A goldmine that folklorists and others interested in the mind of America should not overlook. That's the best I can do for a one-line description of Blue Highways.

Let me back up a little. I’m a traveller: four round trips to Alaska, who knows how many to the West Coast, Florida, the East. I’ve been to places like Oconomowoc, Banff, El Paso, Bisbee, Nome, and Little America, and I’ve always preferred the "blue highways." I’ve driven so many miles my insurance company classifies me "high annual mileage" and sets my rates accordingly. But Blue Highways tells me how much I haven't seen, how anguishingly much more there is.

I have driven through tunnels of tree branches in central Washington, bathed in hot springs in British Columbia, slept in my car beneath the redstone massifs of Utah and in the lava beds of Oregon's Cascades. I’ve seen the Devil's Sliding Board, the surviving ruts of the Sante Fe Trail, and a thousand other of America's wonders. But I haven't seen America as Least Heat Moon saw it.

A fine awareness of the ironies inherent in American life pervades this book:

I don't know whether Oregonians generally honk horns or whether they had it in for me, but surely they honked. Later, someone said it was part of the "Keep Moving, Stranger" campaign.... Fort Klamath, a town that began in 1863 as an Army post with the mission of controlling hostile Klamath Indians, who had succeeded for years in keeping settlers out of their rich valley. Keep moving, stranger. (p. 241)

Of more particular interest to folklorists, though, is the constant spicing of Least Heat Moon's narrative with bits of folk wisdom: ". . . and from out in the Pacific came the deep-throated dolor of sonobuoys groaning in their chains (seamen say) the agony of drowned sailors" (p. 249). Or, ". . . when a man's whereabouts come into question, the people say he's 'gone up Salt Creek'" (p. 243). It is full of little anecdotes which uncover the hidden mind of the nation: "gone too was any indication of where on the green lies buried the boiled heart of a child thought to be a vampire" (p. 360).

Least Heat Moon laces his book with the wisdom of the Kentucky hillman, the religion of the Hopi, the humor of the Louisiana Cajun. He shows us not only the back roads and small towns of America, but the wit and wisdom, the hopes and hatreds, the confusion, the cantankerousness, the conservatism of America's ordinary citizens.

His backdrop is off-road America—a May snowstorm in the mountains of Utah; a black community in Selma, Alabama; a house of ill-repute in Nevada. Besides the whims of a mind in search of itself and the blue lines of a road atlas, the only organizing theme of the book is restaurants—the home-town, home-cooking, blue-plate-special beaneries which never make the "dining out" columns of metropolitan newspapers, but which feed the souls and appetites of millions each day. It is a catalog of chilis rellenos, Pacific bottomfish, creole gumbo, and shadroe omelets, all washed down with clear fresh steam water.

Blue Highways is not a book full of excitement, but it is a beautiful book, a rambling odyssey through the mind of America. The language ranges from the homey "argy-bargy" to the scholarly "toponym." It records the flavor of America's dialects as often as it does the menus: "Lost me an orange cat" (p. 1S0) and "Ole color man, he work on da rayroad" (p. 127). It speculates on place names (Mount St. Helens is named for an English ambassador to Spain, p. 253) and word origins ("skidrow" from "Skid Road" in Portland, Oregon, p. 254).

Blue Highways is a beautiful sad book, truly an account of America from the inside, a description of where we are and a hint of where we're heading. The author's renaissance sensibility, his voluminous mind, his Weltschmerz, simmers and bubbles throughout. Whatever university "terminated" him surely deprived its students beyond measure.

A scholarly work on American folklore? No. Merely a sad, beautiful, compelling, stimulating, thoughtful book. Good stuff, Mr. Least Heat Moon. "It was good to ride highways Americans wouldn't build today." Every folklorist and historian should ride along with you.

Jim Vandergriff

Richland, Missouri