Blue Highways: A Journey into America

“When memory is too much, turn to the eye. So I watched particularities.”

Heat-Moon is at the beginning of his journey and thinking of his unpleasant marital situation. He realizes that by focusing on his immediate surroundings, he can stay grounded in the present. He follows through on this strategy and begins noticing the landscape and the birds therein, and soon he shakes the bad memories’ hold on him.

“Factory work’s easier on the back, and I don’t mind it, understand, but a man becomes what he does. Got to watch that. That’s why I keep at farmin’.”

Bob Wheeler, a farmer whom Heat-Moon encounters during his search for Nameless, Tennessee, expresses his sentiment that jobs can sometimes define a person, especially their self-understanding. In Wheeler’s ethos, there is more dignity in farming because it involves greater self-reliance than does factory work. His awareness empowers him to define himself rather than being defined by external forces.

“Highway as analog: social engineers draw blueprints to straighten treacherous and inefficient switchbacks of men with old, curvy notions; taboo engineers lay out federally approved culverts to drain the overflow of passions; mind engineers bulldoze ups and downs to make men levelheaded.”

As Heat-Moon observes the utilitarian angularity of modern construction, he laments the loss of old roads’ organic curvature—which he sarcastically describes as “treacherous and inefficient.” The author’s metaphor addresses the human tendency to forcibly extract order from chaos. In Heat-Moon’s estimation, that endeavor can sometimes be detrimentally mechanical; beauty resides in chaos, and chaos need not be entirely purged.