Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened

An Appendix of Sorts

An Appendix of Sorts 143 Of Clustered Coincidences I’ve mentioned several ruses and self-deceptions I used to keep from losing heart during the writing of Blue Highways. Now, some thirty years later, I’ve dropped some of those ploys, but there is one that continues to crop up, and whenever it does, its appearance gives considerable buoyance for a mind quite ready to doubt itself. Would I have continued to write without the peculiar manifestations I’m about to describe? Perhaps. But only perhaps. What follows is too specific for general application, yet the idea behind such materializations—to be alert for messages escaping pure rationality, especially ones that might be interpreted as a useful assist to creation— that particular notion does have a touch of the universal to it. In the days of waistcoats and pocket watches, my father , Heat Moon (Ralph Trogdon, a Kansas City attorney ), wore as a fob a small, silver token representing his 144 Writing Blue Highways cognomen. The figure is an ancient Plains Indian sign for the Moon of Heat. Years later, when I asked what he thought of my putting William Least Heat Moon, along with William Trogdon , on the title page of Blue Highways, he took several days to consider whether the name should be linked to anything other than its original intention as a reminder of honor and duty. He weighed Samuel Clemens’s Mark Twain and at last gave his blessing to use ours as a pen name—provided I didn’t forget its particular meaning to us. He said, should Heat Moon go on a title page, then “the book must be worthy of it.” Within a year following publication of Blue Highways, I began looking around rural Boone County for a homesite with greater solitude. After some weeks, a friend directed me to an old tobacco farm on the wooded hills near the Missouri River. The tranquility looked promising for writing, but before I decided, I walked the land and much of its surround for several miles. During one of those rambles, a hike along the bank of the great river, I came upon a kind of rebus that seemed to certify my interest in the nearby homesite. Allow me to quote from River-Horse, for I can say it no better than I said it there: When I turned to take a last look at the rocky bluff in the falling light of that July evening my gaze, as if it were an arrow put in flight by an unseen archer, landed directly on a rust-colored image, and I froze in disbelief, my skin crawling. There was a pictograph, but not just any pictograph—that one was the precise image Plains Indians drew to indicate the seventh lunar month, the Of Clustered Coincidences 145 Blood Moon, or the Moon of Heat. On that eroded limestone was a drawing of my name. Because remarkably similar and contemporaneous depictions appear around the world, astroarchaeologists and cosmologists now think all the designs represent not a season but rather the first earthly appearance of the explosion in the Moon of Heat—AD July 4, 1054—of a supernova. (You’ll recall it was on July 4, 1978, a day of American explosives, that I, unaware of the supernova, wrote the first page of Blue Highways.) The Missouri River figure, surely, was mere coincidence; but the undeniable pictorial link of the millennial-old image with a particular place was enough for me, and I bought the land and planted trees where tobacco once grew. Three years later I was on assignment in New Zealand, a country far from any terrestrial connection with me, a place where the phases of the moon are reversed in the eyes of a Northern Hemispherean so that it appears upside down in a land where the Moon of Heat would be January. I told Lucy I thought Heat-Moon (the hyphen now added) might not be the author of the story I was to write there; after all, Sam Clemens turned out several pieces under the nom de plume Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. She said,“I’m not reading anything by Bill Snodgrass.” Through chance or coincidence, during the anniversary week of the release of Blue Highways, we were on the eastern coast of South Island and close enough to catch cool air from beyond the Antarctic Circle. On a desolate , cobbled beach...