Blue Highways: A Journey into America

Much of the author’s enterprise concerns self-discovery. He is not quite sure what he seeks, but he expects to learn much about America and himself. At 38, Heat-Moon begins his journey from a place of uncertainty. He is separated from his wife (whom he refers to only by the nickname “The Cherokee”), and the course he planned for the local community college was canceled, leaving him jobless. As a college instructor, Heat-Moon is an educated individual, and he brings his intellect with him as he traverses the nation. In the text, his intellect finds greatest expression not in his grasp of history, nor in his knowledge of the natural world, but in his openness of mind. He brings the idea of this open-mindedness alive through metaphor when he says, “A traveler who leaves the journey open to the road finds unforeseen things come to shape it” (108). This is the quality that enables Heat-Moon to learn from others who might not otherwise come across as teachers but who nevertheless possess a wisdom exclusive to life experience.

Among these many people, Noel Jones perhaps best exemplifies an intellect grounded in common sense and experience. Jones’s learning throughout his life has been of the pragmatic kind, and during his extended discussion with Heat-Moon, he explains the old methods and labor requirements of curing tobacco. He recalls a story when he was a boy and one of the field-hands passed away from pneumonia. His father brought him to the man’s quarters, and the young Noel witnessed the man thrashing in his bed from the sickness and fever. A life of labor and hardship gave Jones a very practical view of the world, though he is not hardened, nor is he mean-spirited.

Jones’s expressions—such as “nobody ever heard of junk then. Junk’s a modrun invention” (47)—reveal a man who, though world weary, has wisdom exclusive to experience and observation. The contrast between the academic Heat-Moon and the old tobacco farmer Jones shows two ways of learning, and the text intends to fuse these two ways. The author equally values “book smarts” and “street smarts,” and throughout his book, he often oscillates between the two.

Change is inevitable, and the complicated nature of humanity’s relationship with change is a central theme. Heat-Moon witnesses a wide variety of ways in which people respond to a changing world. From the white residents of Selma whose explicit racism exposes their harmful resistance to change, to the Italian immigrant couple in upstate New York whose lives are continuous adaptation and perseverance, the figures of this text struggle against the inevitable sweep of increasingly rapid change.

Heat-Moon states that “[t]he nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one and the line from inorganic to organic and back again is uninterrupted and unbroken” (241). This complex thought represents Heat-Moon’s own complicated relationship to change. His tendency toward nostalgia, evidenced in places such as the Sutton pharmacy, demonstrates his resistance to change. In fact, his simple insistence on staying off the interstate system shows a man stubbornly clinging to a bygone age. The early-21st-century equivalent might be someone refusing to purchase a smartphone, just out of a stubborn refusal to embrace new technology and a new way of doing things.

However, while Heat-Moon can be stubborn, he realizes the pitfalls that await those who cannot accept change. In the above quote (241), he indicates a path forward in which one can change regardless of their reluctance. Life, in this case, is the process of change—and whether or not one accepts it, change will come. The secret for Heat-Moon adaptation methods, and he learns this through interviewing average folks whose stories demonstrate that ability.