34 years ago, William Least Heat-Moon left "home" in a retrofitted camper-van, and his travels around America became the memoir
Blue Highways. Two months ago, I cracked the cover and started following him. I'm about half way through.
I was about to leave on my own cross-country trip with an over-zealous stack of literature, when Levon recommended the book to me. I read slowly, careful to stay ahead of his journey so his musings didn't influence my musings. Today, as I read, he described the exact crossing of eastern Arizona's Chiricahua mountains that I performed in late August, down to the exact gravel road that took both of us on a hair-raising trip up and over.
Driving through Steinbeck country was one thing, a sentimental trip through vicariously familiar territory, but reading a description of somewhere you've been, someone sharing an experience with you, is a different story. Maybe Heat-Moon will cross paths with me again before the book is done.
"I crossed into Arizona and followed a numberless, broken road. A small wooden sign with an arrow pointing west:
PORTAL
PARADISE
In the desert flatness, the road began twisting for no apparent reason, tacking toward the Chiricahuas. It had to be a dead end - there could be no opening in that sheer stone obtrusion, that invasion of mountain, looked as if it had stridden out of the Sierra Madres, had seen the New Mexican desert, and stopped cold in its Precambrian tracks.
The pavement made yet another right-angle turn, and a deep rift in the vertical face of the Chiricahuas opened, hidden until the last moment. How could this place be? The desert always seems to hold something aside.
...
After four miles, the pavement stopped and the road turned to a horrendously stony slope that twisted sharply up into the mountain forest. A sign: Impassable to trailers. ... Higher and higher the road, hanging precariously to the mountain edge as if tacked on; the truck swung around sharp turns, and all I could see was sky and cloud. It was like flying.
Then, far above the southern Arizona desert, snow lay in shaded depressions. Finally, at eight thousand feet, I came to what must have been the summit. Pines were bigger on the western slope, but the descent was no less rocky or steep. And it went on and on. I thought: Why couldn't this curse of a road just be a nightmare? Why couldn't I wake to find myself groggy and warm, curled like a snail in my sleeping bag?"
- William Least Heat-Moon,
Blue Highways
