Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened

III. Onto the Blue Roads

15 III. Onto the Blue Roads This chapter really lies within Blue Highways, but a few elements (what we’ve come to know as a “backstory ”) will help account for the book that fetched up so distant from the place of its embarkation. Once the road had carried me into new lands, I felt old constraints and constrictions with their worn and numbing familiarities fall away one by one as if I were a bird molting into spring feather, and I began to awaken to a new season and, to push the metaphor to the edge, found myself trying to sing a new song. A sense of being in an elsewhere drew me out of Ghost Dancing (a symbolic name I hoped the journey would render as mere cultural history) and onto little Broadways and Main and High streets where I walked or just idled to see what might turn up. Such an approach may work in a city, but it’s certain to elicit a response in places dismissed as Podunk where people can’t escape their own curiosity about an apparently disengaged stranger: 16 Writing Blue Highways What’s he up to? Is he lost? To get an answer—even if the loiterer looks suspicious—they ask whether they can be of help. That offer became an open sesame for a return question, something plain, say: Where’s the best breakfast? or I can’t find the library. With a couple of sentences, a guard was dropped, a possibility rose, and, while I didn’t see it immediately, a book began to happen. Although I went forth with the simple intention of finding people who would sit for a portrait and maybe say a few words about their life, I discovered expansive responses arising from deep landscapes calling for something more than a simple album. Small or large, a good story lies within almost everybody, and the challenge for a reporter is to uncover those willing and capable of telling it. After all, good writing begins with reporting, with the transporting of a story from its source—whether actual or imagined—to a listener, a reader: report, “to carry back.” I was in search of people who saw a stranger as fresh ears for a tale they hadn’t had a chance to air for who knows how long. On the road there’s a powerful force known as the lure of the outsider. I saw it whenever a resident began to weigh my interest: This here fella is asking and listening, and he’s gonna be on out of here before long. Hell, I can tell him just about anything. What difference will it make? They had watched enough westerns at the Bijou, and I could count on their knowing the pattern : The stranger who rides into town is the stranger who rides out of town. And so conversations began freely , boldly—sometimes in such a way the stranger later would have to cover the teller’s identity. Onto the Blue Roads 17 As the stories accumulated, words began gaining equal importance with images because one amplified the other. A photographed face without a story is a portrait; a face with its tales is a person. Even before I’d traveled four hundred miles, the idea of a continuing narrative of a journey emerged to dominate, encouraged by musings and memories the road can induce. Three years earlier I had an idea for an illustrated story about taking secondary highways—the ones printed in blue ink on the old road maps—from the Zero Mile Marker immediately south of the White House and only ninety miles from the Atlantic Ocean and staying on back routes all the way to the Pacific. I had a title: “Across America on the Blue Roads.” I figured the National Geographic couldn’t resist it, but the only thing I did with the idea was ignore it. For a writer, for anyone, byways grant space and time to reevaluate what one should not have slighted, and they can stimulate, if not actually manufacture, ways to discover and enter corridors of disregarded thought and dismissed expression and even vocabulary. (Ernest Hemingway famously said, “The old, simple words are the best.” Were he right, I’d be keying this sentence into my laptop in the language of Beowulf.) Every permutation of the nearly half-million words in English has not yet been...