Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened

X. The Wheel and the Plaque

133 X. The Wheel and the Plaque The last month before publication was a seesaw of little heydays and small retrogressions as the Great Wheel turned faster than I’d ever experienced. Round and round she goes, and where she stops everybody knows is nowhere and never. On the third of December 1982, a rainy afternoon, I laid eyes for the first time on the real book. I was suddenly a wordless writer who could utter only clichés and the obvious. Almost precisely five years earlier I had come upon the couch and painting in the furniture-store window and at that moment locked in the decision to take to the secondary roads of America for as long as will and money (and a couple of pickup jobs along the way) would carry me. If the Wheel of Fortune turns without regard for what we do, can’t we still try to influence the nature of the ride? The making of Blue Highways is a story more of labor than luck, more of fight than fate, but it also wasn’t without those other two elements. 134 Writing Blue Highways Dust jacket of the first edition, December 1982. The Wheel and the Plaque 135 Alone that afternoon, all the better for absorbing a once-in-a-lifetime event, I sat down in an easy chair by a large window looking onto a stand of trees, and watched the bare limbs drip, a day at once dismal and, so I wanted to think, baptismal. Blue Highways at last had an independent life spinning away fast from mine. Publishers ask of a new book:“Does it have legs?”and the writer can only hope.“Oh, the places you’ll go!” writes Dr. Seuss. To lands I’d never see, into hands I’d never hold, through minds I couldn’t imagine, and if the wheel so ordained, on toward times beyond mine. I opened the book slowly, doing what I could to extend a moment unprecedented, unrepeatable, and damned near unimaginable. From the title page to the last town in the index—Zwolle, Louisiana—I scanned along, taking my time, reading a sentence here, a paragraph there. I didn’t like the faded blue of the binding or the rather muddied reproduction of the photographs, or that entire line of missing type, but the text, regardless of its shortcomings, was what for so long I had intended. After an hour, I closed the book, looked at it in my lap, then turned to the window and watched the winter rain slip down the glass. If nuclear detonations cannot stop or even slow the Wheel, how could the publication of a book? The next morning Peter Davison phoned.“It looks like Blue Highways doesn’t have legs,” he said. Now what’s happened? “It’s more like wheels.” He gave an ominous clearing to his throat. “You’re new to this, so don’t expect wheels never to need rebalancing. On the road blowouts happen, 136 Writing Blue Highways axles break, hubs squeal.” He seemed to be writing a poem, that particular one to tell me I’d flubbed a phone interview with a young woman (she not unlike those guarding a publisher’s transom), who had called me for The Today Show. Unaware the conversation was a test, I rambled along in my usual manner, stumbled over unanswerable questions like “So what was the most interesting place you visited? What was the best meal?” Thereafter, I tried to learn how to wrench a poor question into a “sound bite,” a talent usually escaping me. In our time, much book promotion benefits from the writer quickly fabricating snappy one-liners. Mark Twain, in his shaggy stage-tales, might struggle today, and I can’t imagine Nathaniel Hawthorne or William Faulkner even considering a request. One evening I happened on a former English Department colleague whose two novels, although nicely written, had received little attention. He offered congratulations , something I was happy to hear from a man who had often given me sound counsel about teaching. As he turned to go, he said over his shoulder,“Now that you’ve got that first book out of your system, maybe you can step up to the novel.” Well, boys . . . Just before Christmas 1982, I proposed a small reception to announce Blue Highways to Columbia ahead of the national release in January. It...