William Least Heat Moon’s book on his travels across America, following the blue highway system – the unofficial name for the many non-interstate byways that traverse our country is still inspiring some thirty years after the book was written.

I am at an age where I could be out exploring the country, a dream that almost came true where it not for having taken a position with the NYS Assembly.

I wanted to see and experience many of the things Heat-Moon had experienced, and travel across my country in my pickup truck. I love the blue highways, and I also love to see the farms and broken-down motels that have all but been forgotten as cars travel in excess of 65 MPH on the superhighways.

This book looks at how rural America had changed 15 years after the interstate system bypassed it, providing little more then a quick way to get from one major destination to another major destination. Whole towns where abandoned as we switched over to the interstates, and much of our true social fabric of small-town America disappeared. Heat-Moon saw the changes while the world was changing, and I now see the results.

Heat-Moon had an amazing talent at documenting what he saw in his journeys. He wrote down his experiences and documented the people he met in ways I could only dream of writing. He had a magic touch at reaching out to a variety of cultures, and taking them in with his pen. He brought us part of an era, and took us to places that no longer exist. He also taught that there where many places for you and I to live in, experience, and hope.

I immensely enjoyed reading this book, and hope you too will consider taking his journey by reading his book. Maybe I will never get a chance in my life to go and experience as many diverse things as he did in his lifetime, but through reading about such experiences, he took me there. Indeed, you may be left with a great deal of sadness after reading this book when you realize the world he so eloquently documented does not exist anymore, and has been largely forgotten.