Blue Highways: The Ending

Unfolding the Map

It's the end of the road for our Blue Highways adventure.  Even though the book ends with William Least Heat-Moon gassing up Ghost Dancing at New Harmony, Indiana for the final run to Columbia, Missouri and home, we know that he made it because he subsequently wrote other books.  Thank you, all of you Littourati, for reading my posts during my 2½ year journey through the book.  I'll be back in a few weeks with my next mapping project, whatever that may be!  In the meantime, here is the completed Blue Highways map!

Book Quote

"The circle almost complete, the truck ran the road like the old horse that knows the way.  If the circle had come full turn, I hadn't.  I can't say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn't known what I wanted to know.  But I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know....

"....The pump attendant, looking at my license plate when he had filled the tank, asked, 'Where you coming from, Show Me?'

"'Where I've been.'

"'Where else?' he said."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 4

Columbia, Missouri and the end of the Blue Highways. Photo by CosmiCataclysm and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Columbia, Missouri : The Ending

It's with some bittersweet feelings that I begin this post.  On May 17th, 2010 I started this project to map and to explore my thoughts. feelings and emotional reactions to Blue Highways.  The concept remained simple, and followed neatly from my previous explorations into On the Road.  I would map Blue Highways, and write about whatever moved me from the reading.  This would provide a geographical map of Blue Highways, and also a map for me (and whomever else was interested) of my inner emotional geography and thought process.

Little did I know that this project would consume 2½ years, constitute 375 mapped points and 318 posts.  I could have never fathomed that, since I wrote a rough average of 1000 words per essay, I would easily write at least 318,000 words or more.  Nor did I know just what depths of my emotions and my knowledge, and in many cases my curiosity, I would sound in my journey through Blue Highways.

The fruits of my project have been, for me, overwhelmingly positive.  I feel that I've become a better writer and essayist, though I realize that the quality most likely varies from post to post.  I also loved immersing myself so completely into a book.  What the reader has seen in Littourati has been my thoughts and feelings that have been dredged up through William Least Heat-Moon's skillful and polished prose.

Littourati has also become more well-known on the internet.  Someone, I have no idea who, has put a link to Littourati on the Blue Highways Wikipedia page.  I've received the occasional comment of support and visits from all over the world.  I can only hope that what I've put down in these Blue Highways posts resonates with readers.  I've also added some additional small embellishments, like the "Musical Interlude" where I insert songs that I believe relate to the posts, photos of the towns and pictures of symbols of the state.

I'm very thankful to William Least Heat-Moon for writing Blue Highways and providing me with so much inspiration.  If he knows about Littourati and my efforts to map his book, I hope he approves.  I have never meant to diminish Blue Highways, but to celebrate it, and I hope that is evident.

My life's journey has progressed in the time since started mapping Blue Highways.  My job has changed, I'm buying a house for the first time, and there have been numerous joys and heartbreaks that I've experienced.  In other words, life has occurred.  One thing that has helped me through these ups and downs has been knowing that 2-3 times a week, I had posts on Blue Highways to do.  You, as the reader, have come along with me through some of those ups and downs, just as I have accompanied William Least Heat-Moon, circa 1980 or so, on his journey.  I don't know if I feel I've come full circle, because like he writes, I didn't know what I wanted to know.  That's been my joyful discovery during this process - those things I didn't know that I wanted to know.

What will I do, now that Blue Highways is over?  First, I have some unexpected, pressing personal business to attend to.  Then I must update my knowledge on Google Maps because its version has changed during my Blue Highways effort and I want the next project to utilize the latest version.  And finally, I need to pick my new project.  I have three in mind:

1. Neil Gaiman's American Gods, where I would map the physical and spiritual journey of the main character Shadow (as well as my own feelings on spirituality and religion).
2. Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days in conjunction with pioneering female investigative journalist Nellie Bly's effort to beat Phileas Fogg's (fictional) record in her around the world effort in the late 1800s, and Elizabeth Bisland's efforts to beat Nellie Bly at the same time as Bly's journey by traveling in the opposite direction.
3. Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi in conjunction with Eddy Harris' solo trip by canoe down the Mississippi in his book Mississippi Solo.

So many possibilities!  If you have a preference, or a journey that I haven't thought of, please feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.  I want to be back with my next project in late February.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who has visited this site.  Littourati would be nothing if you didn't visit.  At last count, the average is about 125 unique people per day, and about 231 hits per day.  I still find it astounding that technology allows one to reach so many people now with just a click of a mouse.  As you might have gathered in many of my posts, it's the blessing and curse of modern technology.  But, in this case, I have only found blessings.

Musical Interlude

I will end the Blue Highways posts with a song I just discovered: Eddie Vedder's End of the Road from the Into the Wild soundtrack.  I was leery, given how Into the Wild ends, but the lyrics really fit the end of Blue Highways.

If you want to know more about Blue Highways or William Least Heat-Moon

William Least Heat-Moon has written many other fine books since Blue Highways.  I was enchanted by PrairyErth, an in-depth look at Chase County, Kansas.  He also wrote another road travel book called Roads to Quoz, and a water-travel book called River Horse.  Please consider reading more from this accomplished author.

Audio interviews with William Least Heat-Moon
Booknotes interview with William Least Heat-Moon
In Depth with William Least Heat-Moon
Onpoint interview with William Least Heat-Moon
University of Missouri Museum of Anthropology: Ghost Dancing (the Blue Highways van)
Wikipedia: William Least Heat-Moon
WorldHum interview with William Least Heat-Moon

Next up: Wherever the Journey Takes Us!

Blue Highways: New Harmony, Indiana

Unfolding the Map

Making rapid progress to the end of Blue Highways, we stop for a while in New Harmony, Indiana with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM).  What is apparent to all of us, I think, is that a journey into the unknown, one where we don't know the road, might be a journey where we learn the most about the world and about ourselves.  To think that one of our first stops on this Littourati journey was just 10 miles north at Grayville, Indiana.  The circle is almost complete.  I find the Indiana state flag, at right, to be almost symbolic of this completion.  If you want to see where this little result of the attempt to create Utopia in middle America lies, please consult the map.

Book Quote

"Not far from a burial ground of unmarked graves that the old Harmonists share with a millennium of Indians, the mystical Rappites in 1820 planted a circular privet-hedge labyrinth, 'symbolic' (a sign said) 'of the Harmonist concept of the devious and difficult approach to a state of true harmony.'  After the Rappites, the hedges disappeared, but a generation ago, citizens replanted the maze, its contours strikingly like the Hopi map of emergence.  I walked through it to stretch from the long highway.  Even though I avoided the shortcut holes broken in the hedges, I still went down the rungs and curves without a single wrong turn.  The 'right' way was worn so deeply in the earth as to be unmistakable.  But without the errors, wrong turns, and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth.  And worse, knowing the way made traveling it perfectly meaningless."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 4

Downtown New Harmony, Indiana. Photo by Timothy K. Hamilton and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

New Harmony, Indiana

What is the point to know the way?

I'm sure that anyone reading this can point out a number of reasons why its important to know the way, and can reel off at least five.  Here's mine.  You don't get lost.  You save time.  There's comfort in the familiar.  You'll never have any surprises.  It's safe.  These are good reasons, but I have some good questions about them.

Yes, in knowing the way one doesn't get lost.  For instance, I knew backwards and forwards the roads around my hometown.  I knew how to get here and there.  When I lived in Milwaukee, I had all the best routes to this place and that in my head.  Same for San Antonio and New Orleans.  But what happened?  Once those routes were new.  I paid attention to what was going on around me, because I had to be aware.  Then, one day, I stopped paying attention.  I missed details in the surety of my route.  I ceased to notice little changes, so focused was I on getting from Point A to Point B.  I would never take an alternate route, and therefore I ceased to be surprised, to see new things, and I denied myself new experiences and a chance to grow.

Sure, in knowing the way one saves time.  It's not efficient to be driving or wandering about on streets that you don't know.  After all, if the goal is Point B, why visit Point C, D and E in the interim?  You have places to go, things to do, people to see.  But what happens when you take your time and explore?  You see things, meet people and experience things that you might have never allowed yourself to experience.  In all my life's journey, I have never seen much of a correlation between saving time and growing personally.

Of course, there will always be comfort in the familiar when one knows the way.  But my analogy here relates to bed sores.  When you look at a soft, downy bed, what do you think of?  Comfort!  That "aaahhhh"ness of pushing your head against a soft pillow, the warmth of the blankets surrounding you, that dozing feeling.  But what happens if you spend two or three straight weeks in bed?  That familiar feeling becomes your bane.  Without movement and change you develop bed sores, which are painful and difficult to treat.  Your comfort has suddenly become your curse.  We can always come back to the familiar, but we need change and new things to stimulate us and stave off an existential putrefaction.

Do you never want to be surprised?  Sure, there are bad surprises, and knowing the way will often mitigate the potential to be surprised.  The man with the machete hiding in the back seat of a car is not the kind of surprise any of us could want.  But how often does that happen?  Most often, surprises are the harbingers of change in our lives, and with change comes self-reflection and opportunity.  I've been surprised lately by many things.  A close relative's illness, a house that it appears I will buy, a nomination for an outstanding teacher award, and organizational shake-ups at my office.  Each has it's share of headaches and even heartbreak.  I hate to see my family member have to deal with a serious health issue.  The house has some maintenance issues that will cost money, as well as a major sewage issue that must be solved before I buy it.  To get the outstanding teacher award, I must write a teaching philosophy, track down letters of support, and find the class evaluations I filed away.  The change at my office has left me feeling unsure about my role.  But each change is a window of opportunity.  My relative's illness means that my family will have to change and may or may not provide a new avenue to dealing with our dysfunction.  Owning a house, after a lifetime of renting, will challenge me in ways I've never been challenged before and will be a new rite of passage in my life.  Just being nominated for the outstanding teacher award has given me new confidence in myself - imagine what I'll feel like if I win the award!  The change in my office will allow me to create my role, and maybe even expand it and my influence.  It may offer me a way toward further promotion and advancement.  It's all in how I choose to frame the surprises and the consequences that come with them.

Which brings me to the last reason for knowing the way that I want to question.  It's safe knowing the way.  Being safe is fine.  We all want safety and security.  But safety and security, while prolonging well-being and maybe even life, can become a prison.  People can hide behind safety and security and never allow themselves to see beyond the walls and disarm their personal defenses.  And what good is that?  I've been there, and I've decided that to experience and see things different than what I know, to open myself to other viewpoints and opinions, is the best way for me to grow.  It's earned me a reputation of being eclectic, maybe even a little weird in my tastes, but I like it.

New Harmony symbolizes the end of a journey of Utopians, who thought that they could tame nature and their own shortcomings, and in the strength of togetherness create harmony, unity and a sense of unchanging peace in the middle of a wilderness.  However, to grow we often need disharmony and disunity to provide us with challenges.  As the two utopian experiments at New Harmony prove, drastic and catastrophic change often messes up the best of plans and desires.  The people creating utopias at New Harmony planned their way, they had their philosophy, they created what they thought was safety, and they still couldn't overcome rapid moving challenges.  Had they gone in with flexibility, knowing that there isn't one way but many, and it's when we try to force things to conform to us rather than allowing ourselves to experience and adapt that we get in trouble, they might have survived.  LHM learned that his trip had meaning precisely because it wasn't planned, it wasn't familiar, it wasn't safe, and it sometimes wasn't comfortable.  He even got lost a few times, and found himself afraid, but he traversed the labyrinth of his journey, survived, learned and grew.  May we all allow ourselves, at least once in a while, the opportunities to get lost, make time, be uncomfortable, be surprised, and take risks.

Musical Interlude

I've used this song before, but I had to use it again here.  Youngblood Brass Band, featuring Ike Willis, with Something.

If you want to know more about New Harmony

Historic New Harmony
Indiana State Museum: Historic New Harmony
MaxKade: Historic New Harmony
Posey County News (news site)
Robert Owen and New Harmony
Town of New Harmony
Wikipedia: New Harmony

Next up: The End of the Blue Highways

Blue Highways: Cincinnati, Ohio

Unfolding the Map

We are rapidly reaching the end of Blue Highways.  As William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) skirts Cincinnati in Ghost Dancing, I recall my first girlfriend who moved to Cincinnati to get a PhD after we broke up and after we graduated from college.  If you want to know where Cincinnati is located and see just how close we are to finishing this journey, please see the map.

Book Quote

"At Cincinnati, I looped the city fast on the interstate and came to Indiana 56, where corn, tobacco, and blue-sailor grew to the knee, and also wild carrot, fleabane, golden Alexander.  Apples were coming into a high green, butterflies stiched across the road, and all the way the whip of mowers filled Ghost Dancing sweetly with the waft of cut grass.  Each town had its feed and grain store, each farm its grain bin and corncrib.  Rolling, rolling, the land, the road, the truck."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 4

Cincinnati Night Skyline, by Kabir Bakie. Photo hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Cincinnati, Ohio

I associate Cincinnati with my first girlfriend.  I would have had no other reason to pay attention to Cincinnati as a place except for the fact that she went into a graduate program in psychology at the University of Cincinnati.  She moved to Cincinnati about a year and a half after we broke up, and I think I still had hopes that we might get back together sometime.  However, I had my own destiny to fulfill, and I moved to Milwaukee around the same time to do volunteer work.

Our relationship had been one that developed over time.  When I look back at my time in college, I realize just how troubled I was.  I came out of a terribly dysfunctional family, and I had a horrible self-esteem problem.  I had never had a girlfriend, and desperately wanted one, but as you may imagine my personal issues kept me from connecting with women on a deeper level.  I was everyone's friend but that was it.  I blamed the world because I didn't understand how I was limiting myself.  I didn't realize how desperate I must have seemed, and how leery that might make people.

Into that world she stepped.  We got know each other slowly.  I actually had a major crush on her roommate (who was unattainable for a variety of reasons) but that developed a lot of time that we were together.  Eventually, by my third year in college, we were in a relationship.  I had a girlfriend!  She was warm and kind, one of the nicest and most caring people I ever met.  We had good times together.  But my demons stepped in again.  I was somewhat possessive, and I made the worst mistake that one can make in a relationship - I put her on a pedestal and convinced myself that I couldn't be happy without her.  When, as in the course of most college relationships, she felt the urge to move on I was crushed.  Unfortunately, this experience didn't teach me much - I would make the same mistake again and again before I started to learn to be less needy.

We kept in touch - she in graduate school in Cincinnati and I in my Milwaukee volunteer work.  We both talked about the connection we still had with each other.  I think that I was convinced that sometime we would get back together.  It was not too long later that she told me of her engagement and invited me to her wedding.

I think I was depressed for a day or so, and then resolved to get on with my life.  Life in Milwaukee as a full-time volunteer was stressful in itself.  I threw myself into my work.  But I couldn't bring myself to commit to attending her wedding.  I went back and forth.  I didn't want to admit that she was getting married.  Finally, in a bit of irony, the woman who eventually became my wife told me to go because otherwise I would always question myself.

That was two days before I was supposed to be there.  I had no car, so I bought a Greyhound bus ticket to Cincinnati.  My wife-to-be-though-we-didn't-know-it borrowed a car to drive me to the bus station.  I knew the name of the hotel where the wedding party was staying and I hoped I'd be able to find it.  I arrived in Cincinnati, took a taxi to the hotel, and was able to contact my ex-girlfriend's parents who very nicely offered me a sofa in their suite.  My ex-girlfriend came back from an errand a little while later and was very suprised to see me.  She seemed gratified that I came, even amidst my excuses.  It was strange staying in the bridal suite, but I made it work.  I think it was important for me to have been there, because I was able to put behind me most of my pretentions.  As I saw her at the front of the chapel in her bridal dress alongside her new husband, I realized that the past was the past and that I could move forward into the rest of my life.

Since that time, we have pursued our own lives.  We remained friends, and she returned the favor by attending my wedding in 1995.  She moved to Connecticut and took a job as a professor of psychology.  For awhile I saw her somewhat regularly because my work took me to the East Coast a few times a year.  However, our contact grew less and less.  Her marriage ended a few years after her wedding, and she eventually remarried.  She became a respected and much-loved professor at her university, where she introduces young women to gender issues and, from what I can tell, really has a talent for empowering them.  I last saw her about ten years ago, when she traveled to New Orleans for a conference when I was living there.  I don't think I've spoken to her since then, although we do the Facebook thing every so often and, like so many people do, say we'll get in touch with each other by phone.  It never happens.

If we do happen to speak to each other again, I'd tell her how thankful I am to have known her.  I would thank her for sharing a relationship with a deeply troubled young adult.  I would apologize for any hurts or misunderstanding that might still linger, and how happy it makes me to see how much of an impact on people's lives she has had.  I would tell her that I don't think that our lives have been too dissimilar in general, though maybe somewhat different in the specifics and details.  I'd tell her I miss talking to her, and that I enjoy the snippets of her life I see on Facebook.  I'd tell her that I believe I'm finally becoming happy after learning a lot of lessons and taking some wrong turns.  And I'd tell her, if she wanted to know, that for the first time in my life I think I'm becoming the person that I'd like to believe that she saw in me so long ago when she let me be a brief part of her life.

Musical Interlude

Here's a song about Cincinnati by Connie Smith called Cincinnati, Ohio.

And another one - Lights of Cincinnati by Scott Walker.

If you want to know more about Cincinnati

Campbell's Scoop (food blog)
Cincinnati.com (news site)
Cincinnati Blog
Cincinnati Convention and Visitors Bureau
Cincinnati Herald (newspaper)
Cincinnati Magazine
Cincinnati USA
City of Cincinnati
CityBeat (alternative newsweekly)
Livin' in the Cin (blog)
Make Cincinnati Weird (blog)
University of Cincinnati
Wikipedia: Cincinnati
Wine Me, Dine Me (food blog)
Xavier University

Next up: New Harmony, Indiana

Blue Highways: Ohio River Towns

Unfolding the Map

As we pass by the river towns of Ohio, it is pretty clear that William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is ready to get home.  His pace of travel leads me to think about the stages of our journeys and put together an admittedly non-scientific, not really well-thought-out framework of journey stages.  It'll have to serve as a starting point for something more developed later.  At right is the state seal of Ohio from Wikimedia Commons.

Book Quote

"The old riverbank towns - Franklin Furnace, New Boston, Portsmouth, Friendship, Manchester, Utopia - now found the Ohio more a menace than a means of livelihood, and they had shifted northward to string out along the highway like kinks in a hawser.  I had no mind for stopping.  God's speed, people once wished the traveler."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 4

Marker for Utopia, Ohio. Photo by GBauer8946 and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.Ohio River Towns

There are times on a journey when one is caught up in the travel.  One looks forward to each new stop along the way, and even seeing the places in between where one doesn't stop.  There is a natural rhythm and flow in journeys at that time.

In fact, I see journeys as having definite stages.

1.  Pre-journey:  This stage involves the preparation and planning.  It is filled with much anticipation, some worry, and some guesswork.  Or, perhaps not.  A very organized person might look forward to the journey while perhaps worrying a little about the details and trying to troubleshoot any possible problems.  Will I forget anything, will I hit some obstacles or roadblocks along the way, will I see everything I want to see?  Of course, there are those who don't plan much - they have a destination and otherwise let some element of chance determine what will happen.  For me, I like a combination.  I like to be relatively prepared but I want to be able to have some flexibility to deviate from the course.  LHM doesn't really allow us into his preparation for his journey.  We know that he was having some life troubles and doubts, and suddenly he is on the road.  I'm certain that he did some planning, but he also seems to have given himself some latitude to improvise on his way.

2.  The start:  Not much to say about this stage.  One gets in the car, or gets to the airport. Of course, with my wife and I, there is usually a trip around the block and then we realize that we left the back door unlocked or forgot something essential.  When it's a car trip, we have had a myriad of reasons why we have started anywhere from a half hour to two hours behind schedule.  Once, just as we were preparing to leave on-time for a driving to trip to California, a large stray dog fleeing a hot air balloon ran into our driveway and vomited in fear, and then took a dump in our parking place.  We corraled the dog and then waited for Animal Control until we could start our trip. But once the trip is started, and you're finally on the road or in the air, you can sit back and breathe a sigh of some relief.

3.  Settling into the journey:  The first few hours are usually a mix of cautious relief and anticipation.  Traveling alone, I find that I'm taking in my surroundings, happy to be where I am, but at the same time I'm somewhat hyper-aware of things.  For instance, in a car I'm getting used to the car and road noise and what it might mean.  In a plane, I'm looking out the window or at my fellow passengers.  I'm basically adjusting to the new environment that I find myself in.  I also get used to the routines and the demands of traveling on my body.  When will I get hungry and need to stop for food and drink?  How long can I sit in a position before I need to get up and move around?  Eventually, these questions will resolve themselves into a set pattern that I can get used to.  A subset of this stage might be a sort of resistance to the process.  In wanting to get a few more miles, I might push the gas gauge a little farther toward empty than I should, or get a bit tired but still drive to the next town.  When I'm traveling by car with my wife, we usually go through a routine of listening to NPR until we lose reception, and then we settle into a mix of reading to each other and watching the scenery.

4.  Journey zen: After the settling in comes acceptance that one is on the journey.  It is a stage that some will not reach, but which I strive to.  It is only when one reaches this stage that one is able to accept what the journey will give them, and recognize opportunity even in the face of adversity.  To be able to reach this stage usually takes a combination of travel experience and a willingness to cede control to the universe.  I remember once talking at a conference with a Baptist pastor who had traveled extensively, and arrived at the conference a day late because of air travel difficulties.  I asked him if he was annoyed.  "Not really," he replied.  "I can't do anything to change it so it doesn't pay to get angry.  I just caught up on reading that I hadn't been able to get to, and met some interesting people who were in the same situation as me."  I think that LHM truly reached journey zen  after a rainy day in Corvallis, Oregon when he truly seemed to leave his troubles at home behind.  I can only really count a handful of times, on all my journeys, where I've achieved this kind of state.

5.  The return: At this point, we are in this stage with LHM.  At some point on the journey, one knows it is time for the journey to end, as all must.  Notice in LHM's quote that this is the first time that he has reeled off such a long string of towns with little to say about them, and that he had" no mind for stopping."  This is a man who wants to get home.  Of course, sometimes journeys end too soon.  But on most, we just know that the journey has played itself out and that we're ready to end it.

6.  The post-journey: This point of the journey is often an adjustment and acceptance in itself.  I often feel like a journey has been an effort, and that upon returning I could use a vacation to recover.  It is about settling back into routines, work, and home life.  It is about reflection on the journey just ended, what we've taken away from it, and what we have learned.  The interesting thing about Blue Highways is that even though LHM doesn't appear to allow us to share in this stage with him, he actually does.  He wrote Blue Highways after his return, which allows his thoughts and reflections in the aftermath of his journey to influence his writing.

I have one more thing to write about these stages.  They are not static, and there is no boundary line between them.  We slip back and forth, in and out of them.  Like many things in life, they are unpredictable, and we may not even experience some of them.  They happen when and if they should.

Musical Interlude

I hadn't planned to use Johnny Cash again so soon, but I liked his version of this song, Banks of the Ohio.  It's one of those nice gory murder ballads.  If you'd like another version, try Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Joan Baez, or even Olivia Newton-John.  My favorite version, by Mason Brown and Chipper Thompson, is not on YouTube.

If you want to know more about the Ohio River towns

City of Portsmouth
Forgotten Ohio: Utopia
Ohio History Central: Manchester
Portsmouth Area Chamber of Commerce
Portsmouth Convention and Visitors Bureau
Portsmouth Daily Times (newspaper)
Roadside America: Utopia
Shawnee State University
Village of New Boston
Wikipedia: Franklin Furnace
Wikipedia: Friendship
Wikipedia: Manchester
Wikipedia: New Boston
Wikipedia: Portsmouth
Wikipedia: Utopia

Next up: Cincinnati, Ohio

Blue Highways: Ironton, Ohio

Unfolding the Map

We have traveled far, and are now in the last chapter of Blue Highways.  We pass through Gallia County, which provides some nice contrasts of nature and progress, and then through Ironton, which once served as an engine of progress for the United States in its production of pig iron.  To see where Ironton sits, please see the map.

Book Quote

"'Inquire Locally,' the road should have been marked.  Of the thirteen thousand miles of highway I'd driven in the last months, Ohio 218 through Gallia County set a standard to measure bad road by with pavement so rough I looked forward to sections where the blacktop was gone completely.  Along the shoulders lay stripped cars, presumably from drivers who had given up.  Yet the sunny county was a fine piece of washed grasses, gleams in hounds' eyes, constructions of spiders, rocks broken and rounded - all those things and fully more.

"At Ironton I took the river road down a stretch of power lines, rail lines, water lines, and telephone lines (the birds sleep across the water on the wooded Kentucky bluffs, they say)...."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 4

Aerial photo of downtown Ironton, Ohio. Photo hosted at City Data. Click on photo to go to host page.

Ironton, Ohio

The interesting thing about Blue Highways, as we head into this last chapter of the book, are the contrasts that LHM writes about that you might miss if you don't pay attention.  I know that as I read the book, I sometimes get too caught up in where he's going, and I miss a few interesting things that are whizzing by the van in my anticipation of what town is next, or what person he might begin talking to.

It's those moments where I really get into the text that I realize that these juxtapositions are all over the place in the book for us to compare with each other.  In the text above, it is easy to just glance past a theme that permeates many parts of the book.  LHM makes a subtle contrast between broken down and intrusive human-made features of the landscape - the rough road, the abandoned vehicles, power lines, rail lines, water lines and telephone lines - and the sunny county, the fine and washed grasses, gleams in hounds eyes, spider webs, and rocks.  The human made stuff is presented as obstacles.  The road is horrible, the cars have an air of futility.

Signs of progress, such as the lines that provide power, transportation, water and telephone, are intrusive.  I love how LHM writes that the birds don't even use the power lines, preferring the natural trees and bluffs across the river.

I probably come across sometimes as anti-modern in these posts as I decry some of the harmful effects of technology and progress.  I'm not.  I'm as fascinated by progress as anyone.  I'm sitting here typing this on a four year old laptop that is woefully out of date.  It was the height of progress when I bought it, but now it is too bulky, a dinosaur compared to the sleek MacBook Pro that my wife is cursing at right beside me (she's attempting to figure out WordPress and having a devil of a time).  I'd love a new computer.  I have a smart phone in my pocket and am waiting to get the newest Samsung Galaxy III.  We have a Sony 19 inch TV that we got probably 10 years ago from a friend, and I dream of getting an LED or LCD flat panel screen TV sometime.  I regularly surf the web on an iPad provided by my job.

I read with gusto the latest scientific accomplishments, from the micro to the macro, from the human body to the depths of the universe.  I watch science fiction avidly, and am never happier than when immersing myself into Star Trek, Firefly or Battlestar Galactica.  I dream of what the world might be 50, 100, 1000 or even 10,000 years in the future.

Yet I'm no Pollyanna.  I see serious problems with progress.  It has made life better for billions of people, but it has also created just as many hazards as benefits.  Because of progress, the world is becoming seriously overpopulated.  The world is beginning to feel the adverse effects of climate change brought on by industrialization and modernization and I understand that the effects will only get worse.  Millions of deaths and casualties are possible at the touch of a button.  Groups that fear progress, or feel left out of the benefits, have grown terrorism from a global nuisance to a global problem.  Antibiotics have cured untold millions, but have also helped evolve "super bugs" which are harder to cure.

And some progress just hasn't happened like we were promised.  Cars do not run on water, they are still running modified versions of the original internal combustion engine, a concept essentially unchanged since its inception over 100 years ago.  Nor are there any feasible flying cars.  We haven't colonized the moon, or Mars, and in fact haven't sent any person beyond earth orbit since the last Apollo mission in the 1970s.  We could be snuffed out in an instant by a well-aimed asteroid.  And for all our signals to the cosmos, there has been nary a peep back - not even a hiccough. 

We are still at the mercy of floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural phenomena.  People still pick up guns and kill each other in shopping malls, theaters, schools and battlefields.  We are just as likely to go to war as we ever were.  Poverty still exists, even in the richest nations on earth.  People still die of starvation.  In the midst of health care crises, we still argue over whether the government should provide basic health care to everyone.  We still expect much, and are yet unwilling to pay for it.  We are still willing to take and exploit, but not willing to give back much.

To me progress is all it promises, and it is nothing of what it promises.  Which is why I probably identify so much with what LHM writes on a deep level.  I can appreciate the seemingly simple, intuitively complex beauty of nature just as he does.  Despite my love and appreciation of progress, I can still get lost in the beauty of trees, grass, the gleam in my dog's eye, and birds in the branches.  If I get caught up in the modern world, it flashes by like scenery in the windows of LHM's van.  But when I take time to notice, and take in the world as it is, without the flash of progress, I often find peace.

Musical Interlude

The topic of progress dovetails nicely with Ironton, which at one time supplied the pig iron used to build industrial America.  That seamlessly fits with Johnny Cash and The Legend of John Henry's Hammer.  Below is the live recording from his famous Folsom Prison concert.

If you want to know more about Ironton

City of Ironton
Ironton Rally on the River
Ironton Tribune (newspaper)
Ohio University Southern
Wikipedia: Ironton

Next up:  The Ohio River Towns (Franklin Furnace, New Boston, Portsmouth, Friendship, Manchester, Utopia)