Blue Highways Revisited

In my last column, I discussed my need to get the hell out of dodge so I could shake the anger and misery of a bad school year. I’m not sure going on a cross country road trip was the way to do it.

During the last major road trip I undertook alone, I fell in love with William Least Heat Moon’s autobiographical book, Blue Highways. In it, Least Heat Moon describes a journey he took after divorcing his wife and losing his job. He outfitted his van with sleeping quarters and took to the road. While mapping out his trip, he decided to keep to the blue highways (the color of U.S. highways on older maps). Least Heat Moon’s autobiography begins as a simple journal about his trip but evolves into a more intimate account of his own spiritual journey.

Inspired by this and despite the farm animal settings my dad had prearranged (see my last column, “Mapping”), I decided to put TomTom to work. I programmed him to avoid the major interstates. I believed a trip down those lonely highways would soothe my troubled soul.

In the beginning, the blue highways were superb. Well, except for the cattle drive I ran into only 20 miles north of Dillon. I’ve lived in Montana for almost four years and had never seen a cattle drive. Of course, Murphy’s Law dictates that such an event would correspond with my soul journey. Riders on horses expertly moved the cows down the shoulder of the road, however, a couple of errant bovines decided to move down the middle of the road, aiming directly for my stopped car. It was then I learned that Montana cattle are bigger than my MINI Cooper. Luckily, Martha (my Cooper) didn’t appear interesting to the cattle, and they moved away from us.

Motoring along U.S. 12 in Montana, I got a look at central Montana, a place I hadn’t yet seen. The rolling hills and green grass brought a smile to my face, but I’ll admit what really pleased me was learning that the Town Pump franchise had planted itself along the highway. No matter how small, most of the towns I puttered through offered this well-equipped convenience store that allowed me to eat somewhat healthily on the road.

The last time I drove across the country by myself (15 years ago) convenience store fare was very different. Today’s convenience stores offer vegetarians like me the best invention since sliced bread: Campbell’s Soup At Hand. A minute and a half in the microwave and I was good to go. Don’t get me wrong; I love road junk food tremendously (Slurpees and Bugles and Ho-ho’s, oh my!), but I wanted to give my aging body a fighting chance at a b.m. at some point during the trip. (Hey, I'm a teacher. I'm always interested in outcomes.)

In fact, I drank at least one Soup At Hand each day, and while I was on the blue highways in the west, I had no trouble finding great convenience stores along the highway for my daily soup fix.

After Montana, I crossed through a tiny corner of Wyoming into South Dakota on U.S. 385. This beautiful blue highway afforded me an experience through the Black Hills that was breathtaking. Literally. Since I live in a town so small that trips to the grocery store only have me in my car for two minutes and so isolated that longer trips outside the county require strict attention to roads that may be littered with animals (see above), I don’t generally spend a lot of time cruising easily in my car.

On this trip, however, with my Ipod loaded with CDs I hadn’t listened to in a while, I enjoyed cranking up some tunes and singing loudly, badly, and, given the altitude, somewhat breathlessly. My favorite Black Hills CD was Barbara Streisand’s Broadway Album. Maybe it was her version of “Being Alive” that got me going or maybe it was the misguided notion that I actually sounded good when I sang along with Barbara, but when I was listening to that album, I felt great. My soul started to shed all the junk from the past year and leave it in the wind.

After South Dakota, I cruised happily on U.S. 20 through Nebraska and learned that no matter how small the town in Nebraska, there is always a Pizza Hut. I’m a big fan of the Hut, and though I didn’t stop to sample the pan pizza, I loved knowing that they were there.

In fact, during the first half of the trip, I enjoyed a great amount of abundance. There were plenty of places to eat and sleep, and I never worried about Gracie, my cockatiel who rode right beside me. I plied her with millet and Ritz crackers when she wasn't napping atop her stuffed bird. Life was good for both of us.

From Nebraska, I traveled into Iowa and saw something I rarely see in Montana: happy cows. Now, this is not to say that cows are unhappy in Montana, but when I observe cows pulling up dry grass and milling around aimlessly, I believe them to be dissatisfied with their lives. The cows I saw in Iowa were curled up, chewing their cud in the shade of large trees. They looked contented and peaceful.

Unfortunately, my time in Iowa was the last peace I was to find on the blue highways. Once in Illinois, I found that the blue highways were crowded with large towns through which TomTom skillfully guided me. However, unlike the blue highways of the West, the blue highways of the Midwest and East lack services.

Gone are the roadside convenience stores and cheap hotels. Such amenities in Illinois and Indiana are reserved for the numerous interstates that criss-cross the states. Fearing that I wouldn’t find gas or lodging on those highways, I decided to find the nearest on-ramp of a major interstate and just jet on to Virginia.

This turned out to be a huge mistake. If I had stuck to the blue highways, I would have made it home a day later, but I probably would have avoided the giant rainstorm that socked me in on the West Virginia Turnpike. As it was, just as it  turned dark and I paid $1.50 in tolls (and there were two more tolls to come), it started pouring. Then the clouds rolled in so that I was driving in the mountains, through the rain, and in the dark. I put on my hazard lights and slowed down to a crawl, but 18-wheelers kept zipping past, spraying Martha and me with water. The road, slick with rain and tractor trailer oil, looked (and felt) like corrugated cardboard, and Gracie and I bounced our way down the mountain. How ironic that the one road I actually paid extra to drive on was the worst maintained.

I’m glad to say that I arrived that night in Virginia safely but exhausted, with my shoulders up around my ears from four hours of tense driving.

Now that my shoulders have relaxed, I am sorry that I gave into the fear of scarcity when I arrived in Illinois. I know if I had believed in the beauty of abundance that I would have had enough, but fear is a powerful motivator. If only I had remembered this passage from Blue Highways:

But it is man’s potential to try to see how all things come from the old intense light and how they pause in the darkness of matter only long enough to change back into energy, to see that changelessness would be meaninglessness, to know that the only way the universe can show and prove itself is through change. His job is to do what nothing else he knows of can do: to look about and draw upon time. Driving on the blue highways was meant to slow me down so that I could “look about and draw upon time,” but in the remaining hours of my road trip, I forsook that notion in favor of fear. I guess all I can do is to keep traveling down blue highways (both literally and figuratively) and know that I have all that I need.