Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"20th-Century Dreams" by Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert
The writer-and-artist team's new bout of cultural nausea is like a tabloid that might be sold at the Whitney Museum.
By Charles Taylor
[12/09/99]

Reviews
"Fortune's Rocks" by Anita Shreve
It takes place in the late 19th century, but the sexy feminism in this novel is very late 20th century.
By Sarah Harrison Smith
[12/08/99]

Ivory Tower
Memories of an Aggie Bonfire boy
Texas A&M's annual ritual, which killed 12 this year, is not just a football rally. It's a homoerotic rite of passage.
By Dave Morris
[12/08/99]

Classics Book Group: Galway Kinnell on Emily Dickinson

By Galway Kinnell
[12/07/99]

Blackballed
A white sports fan wrestles with basketball's racial taboos.
By Sallie Tisdale
[12/07/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Born William Trogdon, in Kansas City, Mo., Least Heat-Moon found his pen name early on, when his scoutmaster father, of Osage descent, christened himself "Heat Moon," William's brother "Little Heat Moon" and William "Least Heat Moon." (The hyphen, he says, came later, after he'd been addressed as "Mr. Moon" one too many times.) He spent his early adulthood as a knockabout academic, piling up four degrees, which led to a long stretch of teaching at the University of Missouri, until a February day in 1978 when a) he lost his job, and b) he lost his wife of 11 years. "That night," he wrote in "Blue Highways," "as I lay wondering whether I would get sleep or explosion, I got the idea instead. A man who couldn't make things go right could at least go." What followed was the circuitous three-month journey around the country that fostered "Blue Highways"; and in one way or another, Least Heat-Moon has been going ever since.

River Horse: A Voyage across America By William Least Heat-Moon Houghton Mifflin Company, 384 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Blue Highways: A Journey into America By William Least Heat-Moon Little, Brown & Company, 448 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

This interview was conducted just prior to the final event of Least Heat-Moon's 18-city tour for his third book, "River Horse: A Voyage Across America": a book signing at his hometown saloon, the Flat Branch Pub & Brewery in Columbia, Mo. "River Horse," which chronicles Least Heat-Moon's 1995 boat trip across America via its lakes and rivers, from New York Harbor to Astoria, Ore., is as hefty and ambitious a work as his previous books -- an adventure-strewn peek at America through the back door. Readers seeking the languorous, porch-talking passages of those previous books, however, may be disappointed by "River Horse." This is an epic travelogue, propelled not just by river currents but by the objectives of destination, and casts Least Heat-Moon alongside a bevy of copilots whom he merged into a single companion character named Pilotis ("my Pylades, my Pythia, my Pytheas") -- a far cry from the more lyrical solo travels that have thus far defined him.

The type of traveling you do in "River Horse," where you're intent on reaching a specific destination, is by definition different from the meandering you did in "Blue Highways." How did that affect the nature of the voyage?

It dictated so much of what we had to do -- we didn't have a schedule, as such, but we needed to try to make a certain number of miles each day because we had to catch the snow-melt at its peak to be able to get up the Missouri River in Montana. So this is less of a digressive book than the other two books. The reviewers seem to want me to keep writing "Blue Highways" over and over again, but I'll never write "Blue Highways" again -- I did it once, so why would I do it again? Yes, people don't appear as fully as they do in the other books, but that was a necessity because we just didn't have the time.

What some of the reviewers are failing to see is that the real characters of this book are not so much the people living on the river but the rivers themselves -- they're so much what I wanted to encounter on this trip. I wanted to find America's waterways -- or at least 18 of them. With "Blue Highways," I wasn't interested in meeting the highways, of course, but meeting people along those highways. On this trip, I wanted to meet the rivers.

Of the two types of traveling -- the epic and the lyrical -- do you have a personal preference?

I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there's not a particular, set, goal. Sometimes I may set a goal for a trip, not really caring if I get there or not but knowing, as I try, that a lot of good things will happen -- interesting things. Traveling with a destination and a time frame is not the way I prefer to do it. But this one time, to accomplish what we did, it was fine.

On this voyage you were accompanied by a copilot -- and sometimes other friends -- the entire way. Did those extra presences affect the nature of the trip as well?

It did several things, one of which was to keep me from getting too damn lonely, which is what typically happens to me when I'm alone. Beyond that, having somebody along both helps and hinders perceptions. I choose for my copilots people who are articulate, and who could hopefully see things that I might not see -- they served as another pair of eyes. But they were also, at times, distractions. Anybody's a distraction. Charley, in "Travels with Charley," is a distraction for Steinbeck. But for me, on this trip, they were necessary distractions. I simply couldn't make it without a copilot.

Next page | When travel writers lie