Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  I was watching everyone else and didn’t see the waitress standing quietly by. Her voice was deep and soft like water moving in a cavern. I ordered the $4.50 special. In a few minutes she wheeled up a cart and began offloading dinner: ham and eggs, fried catfish, fried perch fingerlings, fried shrimp, chunks of barbecued beef, fried chicken, French fries, hush puppies, a broad bowl of cole slaw, another of lemon, a quart of ice tea, a quart of ice, and an entire loaf of factory-wrapped white bread. The table was covered.

  “Call me if y’all want any more.” She wasn’t joking. I quenched the thirst and then—slowly—went to the eating. I had to stand to reach plates across the table, but I intended to do the supper in. It was all Southern fried and good, except the Southern-style sweetened ice tea; still I took care of a quart of it. As I ate, making up for meals lost, the Old-Woman-in-the-Shoe house flashed before me, lightning in darkness. I had no moral right to eat so much. But I did. Headline: STOMACH PUMP FAILS TO REVIVE TRAVELER.

  The loaf of bread lay unopened when I finally abandoned the meal. At the register, I paid a man who looked as if he’d been chipped out of Georgia chert. The Swamp Guinea. I asked about the name. He spoke of himself in the third person like the Wizard of Oz. “The Swamp Guinea only tells regulars.”

  “I’d be one, Mr. Guinea, if I didn’t live in Missouri.”

  “Y’all from the North? Here, I got somethin’ for you.” He went to the office and returned with a 45 rpm record. “It’s my daughter singin’. A little promotion we did. Take it along.” Later, I heard a husky north Georgia voice let go a down-home lyric rendering of Swamp Guinea’s menu:

  That’s all you can eat

  For a dollar fifty,

  Hey! The barbecue’s nifty!

  And so on through the fried chicken and potatoes.

  As I left, the Swamp Guinea, a former antique dealer whose name was Rudell Burroughs, said, “The nickname don’t mean anything. Just made it up. Tried to figure a good one so we can franchise someday.”

  The frogs, high and low, shrilled and bellowed from the trees and ponds. It was cool going into Athens, a city suffering from a nasty case of the sprawls. On the University of Georgia campus, I tried to walk down Swamp Guinea’s supper. Everywhere couples entwined like moonflower vines, each waiting for the blossom that opens only once.

  17

  THE Baptists have a way with church names in the South. The road out of Athens went past Baby Farms Church, and in the last several days I’d seen Baptist churches called Sinking Creek, Little Doe, Sweet Home. Along the blue highways, I saw few churches that could have been banks (First Church of Whatever, United Church of So-and-so) or athletic stadiums (Memorial Park Church of the Etcetera).

  That morning, down on route 20 near Conyers, Georgia, while I ate breakfast in the Smyrna Presbyterian Church cemetery, I read the Scotch-Irish names on tombstones and listened to the radio. A stained-glass voice beating repentence into the ungraced at 95.6 megahertz a second may have influenced what happened next.

  Again on the road, I noticed an old-style water tower—the kind on stilts with a conical lid—topped by a cross. Even in the Bible Belt, that was out of place. Then I saw the tank stood on the grounds of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. I turned up the drive of magnolias.

  Built into a high wall, off the arched gateway, was a small bookshop. And there were books inside, but also jams and jellies, bread, sand castings, window hangings, religious pictures, rosaries, and plaques saying “Have you not seen Him in the things He has made?”

  A monk, about sixty, in the white tunic and black scapular of the Trappist, watched me open The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography of the Trappist father, Thomas Merton. Years ago I had started it only to put it down. “That’s one you should read,” he said in a voice like a truck in low gear.

  “Did you ever meet Merton?”

  “Meet Merton?” The tone was both raw and humorous, rough and inviting. “I knew Merton. I started out at the monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky, where Merton wrote that book. I came from there in nineteen forty-seven to help build this place out of pasture and woods. We put up everything you see except the old barn. That was here. We built as we could. Did the work ourselves with only a little help in architecture and circuitry.”

  “Were you a carpenter or tradesman of some kind?”

  “Tradesman. That’s it. I traded stock on Wall Street for twenty years.”

  That meant he had to be nearly eighty. He seemed a character out of Lost Horizon. “Why did you give up Wall Street to become a monk?”

  He cleared his throat and shifted down. “Look—talking about the spiritual life is a lot of crap. You just live it.”

  Idling tourists must have pestered him with that question for thirty years. I felt simple and abashed.

  “Why don’t you go inside to the Retreat House and tell the Guestmaster to invite you to lunch? You can ask your question in there.”

  “Lunch?” I had thought the gates demarked a forbidden ground where the secret and medieval life went on.

  “Go tell him. He’s Father Francis. Through the gate, follow the walk.”

  “Lunch?”

  “What’s your name, lad?” I almost said Lunch, but I got it right. He said, “My name used to be Bill.” Used to be. It sounded strange, as if he’d said, “I used to be a Bill too.” Later, I learned that was just what he did mean. All the monks used to be someone else. “I’m Brother Pius now.”

  So I went through to the other side of the stone walls. Pius! What was wrong with Brother Bill? I felt guilty. I was here out of curiosity, a spiritual voyeur, an ecclesiastical window peeper. What’s more, such cloistered spirituality made me suspicious. Dubious about men who sought changelessness to release them from uncertainty and turmoil, I questioned a faith that has to be protected by illusory immutability. Intimidated by ignorance of Trappist beliefs, I was uneasy about what I imagined went on in a monastery. I mean, I’ve read Chaucer. Monasteries, I knew, were remnants from the Dark Ages—dying vestiges of medievalism—and monks were religious atavisms. Why would a sane man sequester himself? Renounce the world? How could he serve a religion that makes so much of love among peoples and then keep to himself? Still, I wanted to see the strange rites that must occur inside. But why would they let me in?

  I found the Retreat Lodge. A man, small and gray, moving up and down the halls, disappeared in one door, hurried out another, popped up here, then vanished again like Alice’s Wonderland rabbit. Somehow he came up behind me. He spoke the way he moved: dartingly. “Are you here for lunch?”

  “I’d like to be.”

  “Yes, yes. Fine. That’s fine. Yes.”

  He scurried away a few steps then scurried back. “There’s a reading room. Make yourself comfortable. I’ve got to tell the cook you’ll be with us. That’s fine.” He was through the door, down the hall.

  On a desk I saw a flyer that said “Come aside for a while.” Aside. In the reading room there was only a single shelf of worn books, but I found the Merton and took it to a balcony overlooking a small, enclosed garden. Quiet and cool. No voices, no steps, nothing but a towhee in the bush whistling a one-note monotony. Aside.

  I sat and stared into the trees, the book open across my legs. The monks had spoken as if they had met me long ago, as if I’d said years back, “I’ll be there someday. Don’t wait up.” I began reading The Seven Storey Mountain. Here is Merton’s response to his first visit to a Trappist monastery:

  The logic of the Cistercian life was, then, the complete opposite to the logic of the world, in which men put themselves forward, so that the most excellent is the one who stands out, the one who is eminent above the rest, who attracts attention.

  But what was the answer to this paradox? Simply that the monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for this personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, and the spiritual, interior o
rder, of union with God, the principle of all perfection.

  The passage brought something back, something from long ago: three times I had seen Heat-Moon disappear when he sought the deepest union. Here was no Whitman celebrating himself, finding no sweeter fat than what sticks to his own bones.

  An hour later, Brother Francis called me to lunch. The meal was a strange combination of monastic spareness and a Little League picnic: on a plain white plate, boiled cabbage, a boiled potato, figs, rye bread, and hotdog; raspberry Kool-Aid to drink. No second helpings. Swamp Guinea’s was a world away.

  I was the only non-Catholic at the table of four other guests and three monks. While the conversation rambled over papal encyclicals and the chances of the Atlanta Braves, I watched the monks closely, knowing they might talk a good ballgame, but, sooner or later, they would betray their medievalism by lapsing into Latin or intoning a prayer. All I had to do was watch. They would try to root the heresy out of me or sell an indulgence. But they ate their hotdogs with ketchup or mustard and their lips turned Kool-Aid blue just like mine. Then, as if to a tolling only they heard, they rose and disappeared, the other guests with them. Alone again.

  On the balcony I read more Merton until Father Anthony Delisi, a man with a dark, Latin face, asked if I’d like to see the monastery. As we walked, he answered novice questions about the order. Cistercians, trying to return to a basic simplicity, separated from the Benedictine order in 1098. In 1664, the Trappists, wishing to move even closer to pure necessity and unadorned worship, formed a suborder within the Cistercians.

  The monastery grounds and buildings showed the Trappist desire for directness in the clarity of line, the openness, in the unclutter. It reminded me of the Shaker village. The buildings were concrete with touches of brick, stone, and unfinished wood, everything free of decoration except the geometry of stained glass in the chapel.

  “Some find our place austere,” Father Anthony said.

  “Then I’ll take austerity.”

  “The purpose is freedom—for body and mind. Simplicity is flexible. It endures well. Without so many things around, we have more time.”

  He showed the subsistence industries: raising Black Angus, growing hay and vegetables and houseplants and bonsai, baking bread. Recently the brothers had started fabricating stained-glass windows for churches and synagogues after monks learned the craft while constructing windows for their own sanctuary.

  “The brothers do all the work without any help from outside?”

  “Almost. The majority practice a trade as part of the daily routine. Of course, the spiritual life is our real work. But we have to have bakers and plumbers and haycutters. We get up at three-forty-five and go to bed at eight-thirty. In between, we attend services, eat, and spend four hours a day at manual labor, and still take time for the hardest work—reflection.”

  “I thought Trappist life was exceedingly strict. Severe, you might say.”

  “You can see we’re not disco priests on the streets. But some restrictions have eased. When I first came, we lived under the rule of silence and spoke only through sign language.”

  “Which one? I know some signs of the Plains Indians.”

  “I’ve forgotten most of it now. Words I remember are pictorial signs. Here, what am I saying?” His right fingers wiggled over his left palm.

  “Run up the hill and get a pail of water.”

  “No, no. ‘The dog chased the cat into the church.’”

  “I think you misspelled dog. It has four thumb wiggles, not two. Any complexity of thought, I take it, had to occur between man and God rather than between monks.”

  “Maybe. But you just don’t talk as much if you have to use fingers. We don’t waste words today. In the refectory, for instance, we still observe to a degree a monastic silence. But now, as we eat, a brother will read to us.”

  “Scripture and Biblical commentary? Things like the Holy Fathers?”

  “We just finished Nicholas and Alexandra. We began Understanding Media not long ago but voted it out. We vote on books to be read, then vote again one-third and two-thirds of the way through to see if we’re interested in continuing. Had trouble understanding McLuhan.”

  As we walked the grounds, Father Anthony introduced the monks. They were friendly in a plain and open manner, unsanctimonious, and not outwardly pious. They did not, as Whitman says, “make me sick discussing their duty to God”; neither were they, to use Merton’s word, “disinfected” men. Yet the older ones appeared a decade or more younger than men of their ages I was accustomed to seeing. Twisted or hanging faces were few. And, I must say, there was a life, a spirit, in the old who moved slowly. I realized I was trying to catch in their faces something I wouldn’t see outside the walls—something hidden, transcendental, even mystical. But I noticed only a quietude, and I felt that more than saw it.

  I asked to see a dormitory. He didn’t answer immediately. Instead he picked up a leaf and twirled it. “Nothing’s secret about the rooms, but some brothers don’t want disturbance. The opportunity for uninterrupted devotion and reflection is the reason many come here. Monastic means ‘living alone.’” He was almost apologetic. “The brothers you’ve met are ones whose duties put them before visitors. But others prefer solitude. One lives alone in the woods. It’s his choice. A few still keep the rule of silence. You must understand the importance of quiet to us.”

  “A noisy man doesn’t hear God?”

  “I wouldn’t presume to answer that.”

  “There is something else then—something I’d like if it’s permitted.”

  “We don’t copy manuscripts by hand.”

  “I know—you’ve got a brother who repairs Xerox machines. No, that’s not it. I’d like to talk with a brother about why he became a monk. You must get tired of the question, but still, I’d like to ask again.”

  “Are you staying the night?”

  “Never crossed my mind.”

  “After dinner, I’ll try to send someone around. Won’t be easy.”

  The evening meal was vegetable soup, peas, rice, bread, vanilla pudding. Again, just enough. At the table, talk turned toward a Savannah visitor recuperating from a coronary bypass who had come to see his novitiate son. Although the conversation was alternately serious and jocular, the man’s quiet presence, the impending farewell between father and son, touched us all. Once more the silent tolling. This time I rose with them.

  Father Anthony asked me to join him at vespers. On the way to the chapel, we didn’t talk. I think he was preparing. I remembered my denim and suspenders. “My clothes,” I said.

  He didn’t break stride or turn his head. “How could that matter? But singing on key does. Can you?”

  “Never could.”

  “Don’t sing loud then. God doesn’t mind. I do.”

  The monks filed noiselessly into the great, open sanctum and sat facing each other from both sides of the choir. At a signal I didn’t perceive, they all stood to begin the antiphonal chanting of plainsong. Only younger ones and I looked at the hymnals. The sixty-five monks filled the church with a fine and deep tone of the cantus planus, and the setting sun warmed the stained glass. It could have been the year 1278.

  I looked at the faces. Quietude. What burned in those men that didn’t burn in me? A difference of focus or something outside me? A lack or too much of something? To my right a monk sat transfixed, eyes unblinking, and his lips, the tiniest I’d ever seen on a man, never moved. I thought if I could know where he was, then I would know this place.

  There was nothing but song and silences. No sermon, no promise of salvation, no threat of damnation, no exhortation to better conduct. I’m not an authority, God knows, but if there is a way to talk into the Great Primal Ears—if Ears there be—music and silence must be the best way.

  Afterwards, I returned to the balcony. Empty but for the sounds of dusk coming on: tree frogs, whippoorwills, crickets. I’ve read that Hindus count three hundred thirty million gods. Their point isn’t t
he accuracy of the count but rather the multiplicity of the godhead. That night, if you listened, it seemed everywhere. I sat staring and felt “strong upon me,” as Whitman has it, “the life that does not exhibit itself.” Someone behind, someone tall, said my name.

  18

  HE used to be Patrolman Patrick Duffy. Now he was usually just Brother Patrick. A name didn’t count for much anyway. Angular, sinewy, red beard, shaved head, white tunic. Distinctly medieval in spite of the waffle-soled hiking boots. About him was an unacademic, unpietistic energy—the kind that the men who made Christianity must have possessed. Quite capable of driving snakes out of Ireland, or anywhere else for that matter.

  “I hear you have questions,” he said. None of the usual feeling out before a conversation on a sensitive topic begins. A frontal assault man.

  I picked it up. “Tell me why a man becomes a Trappist monk. Answers I heard today sounded like catechism recited a thousand times.”

  “It isn’t an easy question—or at least the answer isn’t easy.”

  “Tell me how it happened to you. How you got here.”

  “I’ve been here five years. I was a policeman in Brooklyn—Bedford-Stuyvesant. On my way to becoming a ghetto cop. Did it for seven years. Before that, I was an Army medic. Attended St. Francis College part-time and worked in the Brooklyn Public Library. And education has come in other ways too. I hitched around the country in nineteen fifty-seven and again in ’fifty-eight. Went to Central America on the second trip and spent time in Honduras.”

  “Jack Kerouac? On the Road?”

  “Something like that. I came back to New York and worked as a sandhog digging subway tunnels in Manhattan. Then I got seaman’s papers to go into the merchant marine—listen, papers are hard to come by. I had to scramble to get them, then I never used them.”

  “Why not?”