Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened

II. The Journey Contemplated

7 II. The Journey Contemplated In the weeks leading to my setting forth on the road, I saw my ten-year marriage collapse and my part-time job teaching English at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, disappear because of declining enrollment. Underlying those changes was the memory of six hundred letters from colleges and universities saying they had no openings in my area; in a drawer was an unframed, unhung diploma commemorating five years lost in earning the legal right to attach to my name three, now useless letters, PhD.At commencement, a fellow graduate passed a note: “Welcome, doc, you’re now Ph.uckeD.” Bumping bottom, dragging port and starboard anchors, I responded to the rejections with seeming illogic by returning to Missouri University for yet another degree, this one in photojournalism, something I’d started out for two decades earlier before waylaying myself into professordom. I’d heard that newsrooms were offering a few jobs, even if ones of limited promise. When I moved out of a split-level home I’d substantially rebuilt, and into an apartment about the size of 8 Writing Blue Highways my former living room, I was forced to shed possessions (books aren’t possessions) and ended up with a load lightened into simplified quarters a Zen master might respect. The remaining encumbrances, like presumednecessary duties or expectations of others, I cast off as best I could in hopes of leaving only fundamentals facilitating an improved clarity of mind able to perceive a new course. It began unexpectedly and almost immediately. One afternoon I happened past a furniture-store window displaying a small couch and a reading lamp,and behind it on the wall hung not a framed diploma but a mass reproduction of a landscape painting depicting a country lane with a roadster following it into wooded hills. There it was, a question with only two answers: What would it be? An asylum of a couch going nowhere or a road leading to places not down on any known map? A sketch of Ghost Dancing for an early draft of Blue Highways. The Journey Contemplated 9 Stasis, continuance, passivity, abeyance, the sedentary? Or kinesis, disruption, motility, passage? A kitchen sink of dishes or the kit bag over the shoulder? It was a question of exercising one’s motorium. Why not turn Ghost Dancing into a monk’s cell on wheels where the goal could be the ancient quest for ways to escape the limitations of self and the ruinous barriers between it and otherness? How about a chance for disconnection from deleterious habits and a petrified existence no longer much linked with life? Why not a try at reconnecting with the unforeseen and opening to unfamiliar presences? Go out and acknowledge the inexplicable , leave exclusion for inclusion. Have a run at escaping the greatest cage of all—the interior of the human skull. Free the gerbil from its wheel! Shake the terrarium to see if the turtle will move! After all, I lived in the most unfixed nation the earth has ever seen, a country conceived and populated by wanderers, wayfarers, migrants, immigrants, voyagers, vagabonds, most of them believing in the far side of the rainbow, in the possibilities of elsewhere, optimists for whom a road is an enticement beyond resistance and almost any there is preferable to a here. Movement is in our bloodstream in actuality and in metaphor. Is there an American who has never muttered, “What if I just quit? Just said fuggum and took off?” We, so our ancestors prove, run away from home better than anybody else on the planet, and we’ve built a nation that draws in runaways as a black hole does stellar dust. I would write several months later, “A man who couldn’t make things go right, could at least go.” 10 Writing Blue Highways A few days after passing the couch in the store window, my final class in the university photojournalism sequence began with deployment to the Missouri River town of Glasgow, Missouri, where we nine cub reporters were to engage the people, photograph them, write brief accompanying texts to reveal the living place. As I walked about town and met residents on the streets,in cafés and taverns, and even one in a trench he was digging, I realized I’d reBill of sale for Ghost Dancing, 1975. [3.139.81.58] Project MUSE (2024-04...