Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Houses on stilts and a few doublewides rose from the damp flats like toadstools. Next to one mobile home was a partly built steel boat longer than the trailer. I turned back and stopped at the Palisades Filling Station, a building with a chimney of round river stones, to ask the way to the boat. Inside you could buy sorghum and honey in hand-labeled quarts, peacock feathers, or framed Renoir reproductions. On the walls, counters, doors, high and low, were signs: DONT LEAN ON GLASS, NO CREDIT, NO CHECKS, NO PETS INSIDE, KEEP OUT. By a row of windows opening to the water, a woman dipped river perch in cornmeal batter and dropped them, crackling, into a skillet. I forgot why I’d stopped and asked to buy a fish dinner.

  “That’s our supper you’re wantin’. But I can heat you up one of them sandwiches in the microwave radio oven.”

  The dry sandwiches, wrapped in plastic, had started to warp like old lumber. “Actually,” I said, “I just wanted to ask a couple of questions.”

  “Questions?” For some reason, she looked behind herself.

  “How do I get to that steel boat being built up the river?”

  “Past the pumps and down the dirt road. You said questions.”

  “What goes on in the cave across the highway—the one fenced off and posted with U.S. Government signs?”

  “Some time ago they tested a gun in there soldiers used in Veet-Nam. I heard so. But years before it was a gas station and diner. Even had slot machines in the back. That cave’s seen it all.”

  I followed the road to the boat. The big hull, a smooth skin of steel plates fused like a surgeon’s sutures, sat on concrete blocks in drydock fashion. The door of the trailer opened and a man stepped out. He seemed made of cut and welded steel too. I said, “I’m looking for the shipwright.”

  “You’re looking at him.”

  11

  BILL Hammond’s first boat was an ice cake on the Wabash River near Peru, Indiana, where he grew up. In the thirties, he was fascinated with the shanty boats of the mussel hunters, those people who poled their boats up and down the Wabash and lived and gave birth and died, too, on the water, while they dug mussels to sell to button makers. Although landless and among the poorest in northern Indiana, they owned their houseboats and took them wherever they went. Hammond never forgot that community of free and mobile people.

  “Saw your boat from the highway,” I said. “I didn’t much like my Navy time, but I loved the ships. Do you mind?”

  His expression relaxed. “You’ll walk off before I get tired of talking boats. This one’s Bluebill. She’s sixty-four feet and six inches. Almost as long as the Santa Maria.”

  “Have you built all of her yourself?”

  “Hull, deck, superstructure, and now I’m starting on the innards. We bought the engines, prop, and some special fittings. Rosemary, my wife, helps with everything. I’m finishing the water and holding tanks now. If you want an insider’s view, I’ll put you in the fresh water tank and let you lay the concrete coating on.”

  “Concrete?”

  “Only thing that doesn’t give drinking water a bad flavor. Tar tastes, plastic tastes, steel tastes rusty. Stainless is too expensive.”

  “Are you a boat builder? I mean, do you build for a living?”

  “Rosy says I live to build boats. I’m an architect’s representative. I make sure the structure’s put up according to the blueprints. But I was a Navy shipfitter during the war. That’s where I learned to cut steel.”

  “You’re an acetylene wizard. The hull looks like one piece.”

  “It is.” He winked. “Now. Ten feet longer than our trailer and twice the square footage. Built better in every detail. She’s a real mobile home.”

  A woman waved from the trailer. “Time for supper,” he said. “Come in and put your feet under our table.”

  Rosemary Hammond, a jolly woman, used to be a schoolteacher, but she was now the librarian in Danville. Hammond called her “the brains.” She set out baked chicken, spinach, mashed potatoes, radishes, pickles, hot tea. Above the table was a sign I read aloud: “A boat is a hole in the water surrounded by wood into which one pours money.”

  “And your life,” Mrs. Hammond added.

  “We started building six years ago,” Hammond said, “and I reckoned on finishing in two years. Three times longer than I figured with a couple more to go. Shot for a star, but I think I hit the moon.”

  “He’s worked weekends, vacations, and evenings. Whenever we do get away for a while, it’s to look for boat fittings. In Louisiana, we found exactly the right prop with the right pitch. Bent, but cheap for a propeller. Sometimes, though, I wonder if Bluebill will ever be finished.” She looked out at the darkening sky. “But some April when the redbuds are in bloom, we’ll sell this old trailer and sail Bluebill right out of the valley.”

  “We almost sailed out in April of ’seventy-two before I’d even started the boat,” Hammond said. “The Kentucky came up higher and higher, slipped under the trailer—this trailer—and raised it off the blocks. We stood up on the highway and watched it float away. I already had the idea of building Bluebill, but if I hadn’t, I’d have got the notion from the trailer’s cruise.”

  “We’d just sold a beautiful home up on Herrington Lake to move to this riverbank to be close to a boat still only in Bill’s mind. I watched our trailer float off, and I wondered what we’d done.”

  2. Rosemary and Bill Hammond in Brooklyn Bridge, Kentucky

  “How do you get started on a boat that big?”

  “By slipping into things, not knowing quite where you’re going. We built a sixteen-foot runabout several years ago from a kit. Before that, we rebuilt a Grumman laminated canoe in the fifties. And once I started a sailboat but quit when I ran out of money for two pieces of marine plywood, although I think the real reason was I lost interest.”

  “How have you kept interest in Bluebill over six years?”

  “Ask how he’s kept interest in his salaried job over six years. He lives and sleeps that boat. Cuts steel in his dreams and wakes up exhausted.”

  “A seventy-seven-thousand-pound dream?”

  “A seventy-seven-thousand-pound way of life,” she corrected. “Sailing, ports of call, sitting on deck with fishing poles—that’s the dream still to come.”

  Hammond said, “It’s flat beautiful here in the spring.” He was thinking of what was to come. “Our first trip’s going to be three miles upriver to Lock Seven. Later, a one-hundred-thirteen-mile shakedown to the Ohio. From the Ohio we can go to the Gulf, the Great Lakes, the Atlantic, the Rockies. We might even load her on a freighter and ship her to the Mediterranean.”

  “Old sailors never die,” Mrs. Hammond said, “they just weigh anchor.”

  “What about the name Bluebill? Work turning Bill blue in the face?”

  “More like black and blue,” she said. “No, we named her after a dry-docked sailing yacht we saw in Rhode Island during World War Two when we were young marrieds. It gave us a dream.”

  “Ought to name her Red Rosy,” Hammond said. “Rosy gets one pair of red feet whenever we weld. About once a month, I get a curve or angle I can’t clamp properly for welding. So Rosy stands on the plate or pushes it up into position with her feet. That steel gets warm underfoot.”

  “We run through a lot of sneakers—sneakers and liniment.”

  “How do you know your forty-ton hole in the water’s going to float?”

  “Bluebill was designed by C. A. Coleman, a Lexington architect, and Joseph Kobel, a well-known New York builder, looked over the plans and provided specifications.”

  “So the answer is faith,” Mrs. Hammond said.

  “Was faith. We hired a crane to turn her over. I built the hull upside down. Not long after she was top-side up, highwater took her off the blocks. She floated even better than our trailer.”

  “She was just a hull and deck then, but she was so beautiful on that muddy water,” Mrs. Hammond said. “I knew then why we’d built a life out of building a boat.”

&nb
sp; Hammond and I went out in the darkness to go aboard Bluebill. Charley, the orange tomcat, shot up the ladder to show his trim for the nautical life. The Franklin stove was in place, and the cabins, wheelhouse, and galley were divided off; otherwise, I had to imagine a finished Bluebill.

  Through scattered clouds, moonlight wobbled on the silent river currents, and shadows lay against the high palisades on the opposite bank. Thunder rumbled low in the west, and from the far trees a dog moaned and shook in its chain. I asked whether the river would be big enough for Bluebill.

  “Years ago, before the railroads took over, packet boats, eighty-five feet and longer, hauled tobacco, hemp, whiskey, corn. And slaves and tourists. The Shakers that lived up on the hill loved river boats. This Kentucky was the main highway.” He looked again at the river. “There’s enough water out there for the boat all right. But for me, maybe not enough space.”

  “Dreams take up a lot of space?”

  “All you’ll give them.”

  12

  AS best I could determine, it was coincidental that the next morning, Good Friday, I was on my way to eat breakfast in the Trustees’ Hall of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, a colony of charitable people known somewhat whimsically as “Shakers.” Before the utopian dreams of Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Brook Farm, and the Oneida community, the Shakers (inventors of the wooden clothespin) worked toward their millennium and became America’s most successful utopians. They lived apart yet not separate and earned a name (said William Dean Howells, who visited them at Shirley, Massachusetts, in 1875) not just for ecstatic worship but also for brisk commerce in applesauce, flatbrooms, and punctually sprouting seeds.

  The last of these celibate Kentuckians died in 1923, but a nonprofit group restored the Society’s 1805 village at Pleasant Hill and served singular meals of traditional Kentucky cuisine. Travelers, whom the Society called “the world’s people,” had stopped here to eat and sleep for nearly a century and a half.

  On a typically Shaker single street stood the three-story brick Trustees’ Hall, an 1839 building of spare and harmonious design the Believers used as a countinghouse and inn. Rich guests paid moderately and the poor not at all. One Shaker even spoke of tramps who looked as if “the Pit had vomited [them] up” coming to stay—especially in cold weather; because of their interpretation of scripture, the Society said to all, “We make you kindly welcome.”

  I took a sideboard breakfast of scrambled eggs, thick-cut bacon, sausage, grits, peaches, figs, grapefruit, tomato juice, milk, and pumpkin muffins. An inappropriate place for gluttony, but I lost my restraint. From my table I looked through long windows onto a tomato patch from the year before; a meadowlark let loose a piece of plaintive song in the mist, and a recognition moved in my memory as if I’d been here before.

  After breakfast, I walked the scrupulous simplicity of the old halls. At the front door, a broad twin stairway with a sinuous walnut handrail coiled up to the third story. Generations of hands had polished the wood to the texture of plumskin. Inside one of the white-walled rooms, a woman, forlorn in the quiet economy of things, sat staring numbly through the miasma of her cigarette into the March grayness. On a chair lay a Successful Marketing magazine. Her flesh looked as if it had been dumped into her stripy dress the way grain gets dumped into a feed sack. She jarred the lean Shaker lines. I imagined her in the company of Mrs. Butterworth and Betty Crocker and Mr. Coffee, only now to find herself alone.

  From a window on the third floor, where grim watchers had assured Shaker celibacy, I saw far to the east a yellow smear from a power generating plant smokestack. Some historians attribute the decline of the United Believers to their unnatural views on procreation and cite the Shaker song:

  Come life, Shaker life,

  Come life eternal;

  Shake, shake out of me

  All that is carnal.

  But, since the Kentucky Shakers disappeared at the time of widespread electrification, maybe the lure of a 110/220 way of life kept new blood away from Pleasant Hill. After all, even the inventive people themselves (circular saw and washing machine) had to check a love of ingeniously useful mechanical gadgets and to guard against (as Howells said) “the impulse of the age toward a scientific, a sensuous, an aesthetic life.” The yellowed sky gave me the sense the Shakers were right and that I was standing in the future in that hundred-thirty-nine-year-old building. Because they cared more about adapting to the cosmos than to a society bereft of restraint, the Shakers—like the red man—could love craft and yet never become materialists.

  13

  THE highway took me through Danville, where I saw a pillared antebellum mansion with a trailer court on the front lawn. Route 127 ran down a long valley of pastures and fields edged by low, rocky bluffs and split by a stream the color of muskmelon. In the distance rose the foothills of the Appalachians, old mountains that once separated the Atlantic from the shallow inland sea now the middle of America. The licks came out of the hills, the fields got smaller, and there were little sawmills cutting hardwoods into pallets, crates, fenceposts. The houses shrank, and their colors changed from white to pastels to iridescents to no paint at all. The lawns went from Vertagreen bluegrass to thin fescue to hard-packed dirt glinting with fragments of glass, and the lawn ornaments changed from birdbaths to plastic flamingoes and donkeys to broken-down automobiles with raised hoods like tombstones. On the porches stood long-legged wringer washers and ruined sofas, and, by the front doors, washtubs hung like coats of arms.

  A cold drizzle fell as I wound around into the slopes of the Cumberland Mountains. Clouds like smudged charcoal turned the afternoon to dusk, and the only relief from the gloom came from a fiddler on the radio who ripped out “Turkey Bone Buzzer.”

  At Ida, a sign in front of a church announced the Easter sermon: “Welcome All God’s Children: Thieves, Liars, Gossips, Bigots, Adulterers, Children.” I felt welcome. Also in Ida was one of those hitching posts in the form of a crouching livery boy reaching up to take the master’s reins; but the face of this iron Negro had been painted white and his eyes Nordic blue. Ida, on the southern edge of Appalachia, a place (they said) where change comes slowly or not at all, had a church welcoming everyone and a family displaying integrated lawn decorations.

  I lost the light at Bug, Kentucky, and, two miles later, at a fork in the road with three rickety taverns in the crotch, I crossed into Tennessee. Since I had left Lexington, the Kentucky counties had been dry, kept that way, I was told, by an unwritten covenant between Bible Belt fundamentalists and moonshiners. Yet, in two dry counties, half the routine police reports in newspapers listed cases of public drunkenness. A man I spoke with did not hold moonshiners responsible; rather, he believed the problem lay with bootleggers who brought in factory whiskey. Insobriety wasn’t the worst of it; people have to know where to buy bootleg, and that requires cooperation from public officials. The solution, he said, was state liquor stores that would kill bootlegging and put an end to the corruption while doing little harm to the long tradition of the moonshiners—reasonably industrious men who pursue a business older than the Federal Revenue Department. “Shine’s paid for a lot of college education in these hills,” he said, “but don’t try to tell me that about bootleg.”

  Tennessee 42 mostly kept to the crests of the steep ridges, the road twisting like tendrils of a wild grapevine. Some of the curves were so sharp I had to look out the side window to steer through them. At last the mountains opened, and I came into Livingston, Tennessee, a homely town. Things were closed but for a highway grocery where I walked the fluorescent aisles more for entertainment than need. Had I come for lard, I’d have been in the right place: seven brands in five sizes, including one thirty-eight-pound drum.

  I drove back to the square and pulled up for the night in front of the Overton County Courthouse. Adolescents cruised in half-mufflered heaps; a man adjusted a television in the appliance store window; a cat rubbed against my leg; windows went dark one by
one. I think someone even unplugged the red blinker light after I went to bed. And that’s how I spent my evening in Livingston, Tennessee.

  14

  HAD it not been raining hard that morning on the Livingston square, I never would have learned of Nameless, Tennessee. Waiting for the rain to ease, I lay on my bunk and read the atlas to pass time rather than to see where I might go. In Kentucky were towns with fine names like Boreing, Bear Wallow, Decoy, Subtle, Mud Lick, Mummie, Neon; Belcher was just down the road from Mouthcard, and Minnie only ten miles from Mousie.

  I looked at Tennessee. Turtletown eight miles from Ducktown. And also: Peavine, Wheel, Milky Way, Love Joy, Dull, Weakly, Fly, Spot, Miser Station, Only, McBurg, Peeled Chestnut, Clouds, Topsy, Isoline. And the best of all, Nameless. The logic! I was heading east, and Nameless lay forty-five miles west. I decided to go anyway.

  The rain stopped, but things looked saturated, even bricks. In Gainesboro, a hill town with a square of businesses around the Jackson County Courthouse, I stopped for directions and breakfast. There is one almost infallible way to find honest food at just prices in blue-highway America: count the wall calendars in a cafe.

  No calendar: Same as an interstate pit stop.

  One calendar: Preprocessed food assembled in New Jersey.

  Two calendars: Only if fish trophies present.

  Three calendars: Can’t miss on the farm-boy breakfasts.

  Four calendars: Try the ho-made pie too.

  Five calendars: Keep it under your hat, or they’ll franchise.

  One time I found a six-calendar cafe in the Ozarks, which served fried chicken, peach pie, and chocolate malts, that left me searching for another ever since. I’ve never seen a seven-calendar place. But old-time travelers—road men in a day when cars had running boards and lunchroom windows said AIR COOLED in blue letters with icicles dripping from the tops—those travelers have told me the golden legends of seven-calendar cafes.