William Least Heat-Moon writes another road-trip book

Back in 1982, William Least Heat-Moon wrote one of the great books about the road, “Blue Highways: A Journey into America.”

The 13,000-mile itinerary of “Blue Highways” didn’t follow Route 66. But the author’s willingness to explore the nation’s backroads and its people — and his refusal to patronize the interstates and fast-food joints — contained an aesthetic that’s familiar to modern-day Route 66 aficionados.

“Blue Highways” became a major best-seller and still sold 25,000 copies a year more than 15 years after its publication. It’s regarded as one of the best travel books ever written, and it helped blaze a trail for Route 66’s eventual renaissance.

Now, Least Heat-Moon has a new book coming out on Wednesday, titled “Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey” (582 pages, $27.99). The Los Angeles Times Books section describes the new volume:

… [T]his is a far more directed work involving a series of planned trips: tracing the route of the Ouachita River from Arkansas into Louisiana, paralleling a “Forgotten Expedition” sent out by Thomas Jefferson; searching for the lost Florida in the state’s panhandle, perhaps a step ahead of its extinction through development; tracking down ghostly lights in Missouri while investigating an early 20th century murder; examining Route 40, a series of linked roads that were “the Ur-Mother of American transcontinental highways,” precursor to the interstate system (and more significant than the much-touted Route 66); venturing into the great north woods of Maine, loosely in the steps of Henry David Thoreau; and motoring by ship down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, whose continued existence may be, by Heat-Moon’s report, an open question.

The reviewer, Art Winslow, seemed to like it:

Despite his vision of a society that has depleted far too much (forests, aquifers, coastlines) through its excesses, Heat-Moon’s sense of humor remains intact. Before entering the vastness of Maine’s north woods, he watches as a man uses a wetted finger to draw a map on the top of a bar, only to see his directions evaporate.

That’s very much within his probabilistic idea of travel — a quoz is anything “strange, incongruous, or peculiar,” which offers Heat-Moon great latitude. For him, the journey includes the nation’s largest gated community (chopped into an Arkansas mountaintop), a publicly financed road to nowhere (a drug smugglers’ landing strip in Florida), “worship centers” with “the architectural lines of an auto-body shop” (Oklahoma) and, in the stretches between churches, “miles of abandoned buildings, of decaying house trailers steadily vanishing under glomerations of cast-off appliances,” including “one remarkable stack of refrigerators topped by a ragged American flag flapping a conqueror’s tired glory over the rummage.”

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