Side Roads

“On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue.  Now even the colors are changing.  But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk – times neither day nor night – the old roads return to the sky some of its color.  Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.”   – William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

There are a few books I return to every decade or so, old friends that have accompanied me for years, surviving multiple moves and purges.  They continue to occupy space on a shelf because of a space they occupy somewhere in me, their tattered spines serving as placeholders until some internal shift tells me it is time for another visit.  The faded, dog-eared favorite I most recently plucked off my shelf is Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon.  The author, having lost his job and his marriage falling apart, sets off in an old converted truck to travel the backroads of America and find himself in the process.  I first read it sometime in my early twenties, probably more attracted to the actual travelogue than the navigation of some interior path.  I read it quite differently now, standing on the precipice of fifty.   

The backroads of my childhood would have qualified as “blue highways,” two-lane affairs of cracked and patched asphalt divided by faded yellow stripes.  Wide-open, middle-of-nowhere roads were good for summer nights with the windows rolled down, blasting the FM radio, and close brushes with curfew. Narrower, meandering lanes hugged hills and curves; beautiful on Sunday drives but deadly on Saturday nights. For those of us that grew up in the towns and farms scattered amongst these byways, it was usually not necessary to even know their names; landmarks and a general sense of direction worked just as well. 

A paper map was required if one was traveling outside the general realm of intuition and familiarity. Beyond a map’s color differences to sort out road types, there were also variations in thickness and pattern; a dashed line meaning something unpaved that would get you there eventually, usually in a cloud of dust and in need of a new suspension.   Travel in other countries might rely on a trifecta of paper maps from the local tourist office, a tattered Let’s Go guide, and a smattering of directions received in local dialects and universal gestures.  And sometimes, in deep forests and wide deserts, the agreed-upon path might be marked by nothing more than a suggestion of trail or directionless cairn.

Even after learning the symbolic language of the traveler, I would still manage to get myself lost on a regular basis.  Today, with technology and a hundred ways to pre-plan a drive or a hike, it is much harder to lose one’s way.  I will admit to wondering about the reliability of so-called “smart phones,” receiving directions beamed down from unseen locations in the sky, and leading me through sketchy alleys and down dusty gravel roads.  I will also admit to questioning my own intelligence in following that computerized voice in my phone, allowing myself to be led down these odd and quirky pathways.  And yet I may never have found those hidden side streets and unnamed back roads if I had stuck to well-traveled, well-marked thoroughfares.  And because of that technology, I may now also be more likely to venture off on some mysterious or picturesque side road just because I want to, even though the phone voice is sternly admonishing me to “redirect.”  Call it wandering with a backup plan.

It may be that I am out of practice with the experience of physically losing my way; perhaps so much that the twisting turns of the middle years induce more panic than wonder.  I have forgotten the naked, exhilarating delight of traveling by instinct. 

Maybe it makes sense to return to a paper map now and again, choosing some combination of pathways, well-traveled or not, that at least keep me moving in one direction.  At other times I may need to accept wacky and mysterious suggestions beamed down from the sky, learn to let go, and enjoy the ride.  Looking back on a half century of lived experience, perhaps I simply need a rest stop with a scenic overlook; a place to stop and think and trace forward motion amidst the turnarounds, dead ends, and meandering detours.  Perhaps I would find I am not lost in the wandering after all, that wisdom and beauty are hidden in the side roads and blue highways and back alleys of the journey.