46 pages • 1 hour read
William Least Heat-MoonBlue Highways: A Journey into America
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “South by Southwest”
After spending time with extended family, Heat-Moon realizes that such prolonged comfort and familiarity could threaten his mission: “The wanderer’s danger is to find comfort” (131). He departs from his cousin’s and heads west, passing the Mississippi and eventually reaching Texas. Once in the Lone Star state, Heat-Moon drives Texas Route 21, which he claims is “older than the mind of man” (132). Additionally, the route was once a bison herd path that turned into an American Indian trail. As with many of his chosen roads, this one has a deep history. Heat-Moon then finds his way to the Caddoan Mound, a unique geographical feature that held spiritual significance to the Native Americans of Eastern Texas.
Continuing on his way, Heat-Moon stops for a haircut in a town called Dime-Box. Like many of the towns mentioned in the book, Dime-Box’s attraction for the author was the name of the town itself. The barber is named Claud Tyler, and like others before, his education comes from observation and experience. Heat-Moon interviews the old barber, and his story boils down to humans’ ability to adapt to a changing world. Tyler’s commentary also suggests that progress and modernity oftentimes build things up only to abandon them, including whole towns.
While still in Dime-Box, Heat-Moon encounters an immigrant from Czechoslovakia and briefly mentions some of the man’s personal story and how he came to be in a place like Dime-Box. After leaving the town, Heat-Moon eventually makes his way through Austin and into West Texas. The landscape differs noticeably, and, like a naturalist, Heat-Moon gives generous description of the arid scenery. Along this route, Heat-Moon picks up another hitchhiker, this one a Spanish-speaking gentleman and WWII veteran by the name of Porfiro Sanchez. Heat-Moon also encounters a man who startles him while having a campfire one night. Heat-Moon names the man Boss of the Plains on account of his Stetson.
Among philosophical musings, and despite the universal quietude and stillness of the desert, Heat-Moon catalogues the things he sees. He traverses West Texas through El Paso, into New Mexico, all the while driving along the Rio Grande and the US-Mexican border. After a stop at an authentically western saloon in New Mexico, Heat-Moon ends the chapter in Arizona.
Chapter 4 Analysis
For the first time in the book, Heat-Moon hints at the loneliness starting to creep in upon him. After staying with family and familiar faces in Shreveport, Louisiana, he almost begrudgingly takes to the road and crosses into Texas and into the desert. He distinguishes the East from the West of the country in terms of perceptions of space. The vastness of spaces in the West, specifically in the desert, “diminish man and reduce his blindness to the immensity of the universe” (131). The human ego is thus rendered small in comparison. This is a good thing in Heat-Moon’s view.
The nature of learning and education as a theme pops up again in with Claud Tyler, the barber of Dime-Box. Once again, the man’s simplified manner is what impresses Heat-Moon. The author does not equate “simple” with “stupid,” nor does he treat the locals with condescension, nor does he narrate their stories in a demeaning way. Instead, he collects and presents their stories as something to aspire to—not necessarily in the career-minded sense but in the strictest common sense. Again, common sense is a virtue, and Heat-Moon highlights it dramatically in his interviews with people like Tyler.
Once in the desert, Heat-Moon becomes reflective, and his commentary about the desert and humans’ relation to it becomes expansive. His narrative focus turns more metaphysical, and his prose gives the desert a mystical, outsized persona of its own. It is not just a place. As Heat-Moon takes in desert night, he says, “I was there too, but my presence I felt more than saw. It was as if I had been reduced to mind, to an edge of consciousness” (150). The author realizes that the desert is in fact a presence—and in it his own presence, it is dwarfed. In this minimization, Heat-Moon seems to lose himself. It’s almost as if the desert subsumes him. At another point, the desert takes on an almost menacing quality: “There’s something about the desert that doesn’t like man, something that mocks his nesting instinct and makes his constructions look feeble and temporary” (160). While the desert has this brooding and menacing aspect, Heat-Moon leans into it. He embraces the desert and what it brings to him, and says, “Yet it’s just that inhospitableness that endears the arid rockiness, the places pointy and poisonous, to men looking for its discipline” (160).
