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Take a newly exposed interior wall, a confusion of plaster and brick, and ask a dozen people what patterns they see. Everyone knows you'd get a dozen different answers. But anyone familiar with William Least Heat-Moon's writing can easily imagine what he'll see there: a map of America.
The cartographically obsessed writer has been known to stare at just such a pattern, on just such a wall, right above a favorite table at the Trattoria Strada Nova, one of his favorite restaurants in Columbia, Mo., the Midwestern college town where he has lived for years.
Columbia -- at the center of the map and of Heat-Moon's imagination -- also happens to be the place where, as the writer chronicles in River-Horse: A Voyage Across America -- out next month from Houghton Mifflin -- high water on the Missouri River brought his morale to a low ebb as he sought to navigate the nation's waterways from coast to coast in less than a year. Near disasters in New York harbor and on the Erie Canal lay behind him, as well as more placid moments on the Allegheny and the (sadly polluted) Ohio. Ahead, he hoped, lay challenging whitewater on the far side of the Continental Divide. Yet now torrential floods had driven him aground near the mid-point of his journey -- and also, coincidentally, only 90 minutes from home.
The deluge might have seemed a message from the gods to terminate an arduous quest. Yet having retreated inland to drown his sorrows with friends at his hometown Trattoria haunt, Heat-Moon found himself growing determined to continue his journey. To commemorate his new resolve, he would later carve his course into the large patch of old plaster where he sees the continent's shape, cutting a jagged line from coast to coast along the restaurant wall.
When PW meets Heat-Moon in Columbia -- at the Trattoria, of course -- it's immediately clear that the place is not the kind of backwater diner or small-town tavern the writer so lovingly details in 1983's Blue Highways, the best-selling account of America's back roads that made his reputation. Even given the restaurant's cameo appearance in River-Horse, its chrome fixtures, lavish displays of fresh produce and smartly turned out clientele might be expected to clash with the author's folksy persona.
Yet when Heat-Moon arrives, the restaurant's comfortable surroundings seem to suit him just as well as the more rugged scenery of his adventures. Although the pictures of the writer in action on the water that accompany River-Horse suggest a somewhat bearish man, in person he seems spry, indeed something of a spark plug, his energetic demeanor giving no hint that he's nearing 60. A hitch in the navy still shows in his bearing, and a helmet of silver hair sets off his animated features. From sharp gray slacks to slate-colored shirt to close-trimmed white beard, his appearance blends the urbane and the practical.
In conversation, he moves from point to point with a quiet obsessiveness -- a trait, he avers, that animates his writing as well. "I work so damn intently when I'm writing my books," Heat-Moon confides at one point, "that I'm not a good human being. I can't escape. The book won't let me escape."
Born in Kansas City as William Trogdon, the writer was bequeathed the "Least Heat Moon" title by his scoutmaster father, who drew on Sioux lore to come up with the name. Dad was just plain "Heat Moon," and an older brother "Little Heat Moon." While the family d s claim a strain of Native American ancestry, and while Heat-Moon, like his father before him, finds much to identify with in native culture, the name is not a tribal one per se. (Heat-Moon later added the hyphen to stave off references to "Mr. Moon.")
Heat-Moon spent his early adulthood studying at the University of Missouri in Columbia, when he wasn't in the navy or on the road. It was in the service that he first encountered one of the classics of road-trip literature -- John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, a work that would eventually shape his conception of Blue Highways. "I read it in 1962 when it came out," he recalls. "I was in the navy.... I did not like my time in the navy. I liked the traveling -- but when we were locked in the ship, I did not like that, and this book, when I had a moment to read it here and there, gave me a great escape. I said to myself, 'One of these days I want to take a trip around the country.' In terms of the topography of Blue Highways, that was extremely important."
Another early inspiration was William Faulkner. Though Heat-Moon did not find Faulkner at home on a pilgrimage he made to seek out the author in Mississippi, he befriended relatives and took away a strong impression of the author's home turf. Heat-Moon cites Faulkner as a formative influence, one apparent above all, perhaps, in 1991's PrairyErth, a Deep Map, his in-depth study of one rural Kansas county.
Academic ambitions at first kept his childhood dream of becoming a writer on the back burner. He spent most of the '60s and '70s at the University of Missouri, and was married in 1967 (the marriage ended in 1978). He now holds four degrees from the school ("more degrees than Celsius," he quips at one point), including a Ph.D. in English and an advanced degree in journalism. His journalism studies did point toward his mature efforts. He tells, for instance, of a school-sponsored effort to work up small volumes on the nearby Missouri River towns that line the route taken by Lewis and Clark toward the Pacific -- a project that helped open his eyes to the possibility of charting the heartland from the perspective of its waterways.
On the Road
The ambition to write only fully returned, however, in his late 30s, when, he recalls, "I couldn't get a job in teaching, and, as Blue Highways more or less chronicles, I decided that since a whole lot of things in my life weren't going right, I needed to do something different. One belief that I'd long held was that human beings need to pay attention to who we were when we were about 10 years old, because we're well enough formed by then to have certain elemental passions that never leave us. I went back and asked, 'What did I want to do when I was 10, 11, 12?' The answer was I wanted to be a writer, or a photo-journalist combining pictures and words. So I said, 'All right, that's what you need to be doing,' and I started out trying to make my way as a freelance photojournalist. I didn't get far, and about that time my marriage failed and I took off on the Blue Highways trip.
"I hoped that I could come away with stories, illustrated articles, that I could sell to maybe pay for the trip. There was at the back of my mind maybe a possibility of a book, but that just seemed far too difficult. I didn't think I'd be able to penetrate people's lives in the way that it turned out that I could. But after a couple of weeks on the road I realized that this could be more than a bunch of short pieces, this could probably be a book.
"Keep in mind," he continues, "this is in 1978 -- we still were using the word 'hippie' then. I had a beard, I wore suspenders, I was driving a van and I came into these small towns, and I was expecting maybe in some places to be run out. I really was concerned about the reception -- but it wasn't that way at all! People talked to me basically and honestly about their lives.
"It took me four years to write the book after I came home, and within the first 10 months or so I began to try to publish it. I was working as a clerk in the courthouse; if you go out of here, you go right past where I used to work. The book was being rejected -- it was so far from being publishable that if I'd known I would have quit."
To devote his days to producing a publishable book, Heat-Moon left his courthouse job to labor by night on a newspaper loading dock. He revised repeatedly, but received rejection after rejection. Finally, he hit upon a successful stratagem. "I knew that I had to get the manuscript past the so-called editorial assistants, the watchdogs at the door of the publisher who screen out what gets through. So, soon after reading Beautiful Swimmers by William Warner, I thought, 'This is a marvelous book, the kind of book that a Blue Highways reader would like' -- it was about blue crabs, and mine was about blue highways, so I thought, 'who knows.'" The title was based on the fact that back roads were printed in blue on old maps. Heat-Moon wrote a letter to Warner's editor at Atlantic Monthly Press, Peter Davison, in which he "implied but did not say that I had heard William Warner praising his editorial work. Legally, it was perfectly clear, but it sounded like that."
The letter and the accompanying sample from the manuscript sailed through to Davison: "he looked at it," Heat-Moon recalls with satisfaction, "and he was the right man to read it." Davison signed up the book, beating out Amanda Vail at Viking and Roby Macaulay at Houghton Mifflin, to whom Heat-Moon had simultaneously made similarly artful submissions. In later years, Heat-Moon, Davison and Warner would all share a laugh over the serendipity of Heat-Moon's ploy. Blue Highways enjoyed enormous success, leading the boomer generation to a new appreciation of rural Americana. It has sold well over a million copies, and will be reissued by Little, Brown in hardcover and in paperback to coincide with the publication of River-Horse.
Heat-Moon has stayed with Davison ever since, following him to Houghton Mifflin for PrairyErth and now River-Horse, and praising Davison as an "old style editor. He is wonderfully articulate, amazingly well-read, he knows the classics, he knows what good writing is, he respects it and he d s his best to publish it, and that's what I wanted. Whatever else he was, he was not a schlockmeister, he was not a hustler, and that appealed immensely to me."
"I'm known in the trade," Heat-Moon declares, "as an author who follows his books the whole way, sometimes to the annoyance of publishers. I want to know what kind of paper we're going to use, what kind of binding we're going to use, what colors we're going to use." He offers up "great admiration and thanks to Houghton Mifflin that they have never fought me on that -- well, maybe not never, but rarely -- they consider my wishes, and we work together," most recently to assemble the maps and photographs that adorn River-Horse.
Whereas Blue Highways is illustrated with documentary photographs of the everyday folk whom Heat-Moon encountered on his trek, the pictures that accompany the River-Horse saga feature him and his small motorboat, the Nikawa (the "river horse" itself, its name a coinage from the Osage), front and center.
Yet Heat-Moon won't allow that the new book foregrounds its author much more than his previous efforts. Instead, he points with pride to his creation of "Pilotis," a composite character standing in for the seven or so shipmates who accompanied him along the various portions of his journey. To his great satisfaction, he believes that Pilotis -- thanks to many arduous revisions -- finally emerges not as the hydra-headed monster he once feared he might create, but instead as a compellingly unified character, with a wit and resourcefulness all his or her own (He artfully leaves Pilotis's gender unspecified). Sometimes, apparently, the travel writer's most satisfying discoveries come not in the journey, but in its redaction.
The Nikawa now resides in a barn in the middle of the county, a fair ways from the old tobacco farm on which Heat-Moon's house stands. "Not wanting to be burdened," he says, "with things that big in my life," he's hoping to find a home for it -- in some sort of museum, perhaps, if one will take it. But then again, Heat-Moon may take his river horse back out on the water. For not only the road, now, but also the watery blue highways, continually beckon him to cut his way across the country once again. "I celebrated finishing River-Horse by going 200 miles down the Columbia River, through the Grand Canyon," says Heat-Moon. "I hope before I die to sail all of it."
Baker is a frequent contributor to PW.
