The "Blue Highways" of NYC

I just finished reading the amazing book Blue Highways, a travel memoir by Missourian William Least-Heat Moon.

A contemporary classic, the book chronicles a three-month cross-country odyssey that Moon took in 1978 after he had lost his job and wife. Armed with little more than some savings and a truck that he owned call Ghost Dancing, Moon drove a circle around the southern, western, northern, and eastern parts of the USA on the "blue highways" -- the secondary highways on the maps shown in blue that were distinct from the main highways marked in red. 

Published in 1982, the book spent 42 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list. And it holds up as a deep, profound tale about this country more than 40 years later. 

On his adventures, Moon encounters brutal racial segregation in the south, monks in the desert, the small towns of the west and northwest -- including several spots where Lewis and Clark once roamed -- the absolute blankness of the Plains and Prairie states, and the bustling seafaring and fishing life of New England.

And he even makes it to NYC -- briefly.

In his travels, Moon was determined to avoid going into any major cities. He wanted to visit the towns and places that were, we would say today, "off the grid", away from the cosmopolitan bustle of a metropolis. He was fascinated by people who made their lives away from the main arteries and gathering places of American life -- and, as you might imagine, he encounters some really interesting characters in these places.

Moon didn't stop for long in NYC but he did manage to capture the equivalent of the city's "blue highways", the places in the five boroughs where most of the city's residents and visitors never travel to -- or through. He writes about driving into southern Queens and Staten Island from Long Island (after having taken a ferry across the Sound from Connecticut): 

    "... Things raced past like the jumpy images of a nickelodeon: abandoned and stripped cars on the shoulders, two hitchhiking females that nobody could stop to pick up, a billboard EAT SAUSAGE AND BE HAPPY, low-flying jumbos into Kennedy International, the racetrack at Ozone Park, bulldozed piles of dirt to fill the marsh at Jamaica Bay, long and straight Flatbush Avenue, Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, the World Trade Center like stumps in the yellow velvet sky. Then a windingly protracted ascent up the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (the Silver Gate of the East coast) with its world longest center span, and below the bay where the Great Eastern, the Monitor, the Bonhomme Richard, and the Half Moon sailed. 

    The low sun turned the Upper Bay orange. Freighters rode at anchor or headed to the Atlantic, and to the north, in the distance, a little glint of coppery green that was the Statue of Liberty. I slowed to gawk and got a horn; the driver passed in a gaseous cloud and held aloft a middle digit opinion.

    The lanes descended and shot me across Staten Island; just before it was too late, I pulled out of the oppression of traffic and drove down Richmond Avenue to find the bridge across Arthur Kill into Perth Amboy, the city (if you follow your nose) that gets to you before you get to it. I don't know how I lost my way on a thoroughfare as big as Richmond, but I did. I could smell Perth Amboy, but I couldn't find it. Instead, I found Great Kills, Eltingville, Huguenot Park, Princess Bay, and Tottenville. I asked directions from a nervous teenager who was either turning his engine or stealing someone's distributor.

    Just as darkness was complete, I reached New Jersey ..."

As you can see from this passage, Moon is a great writer and wordsmith. Even though his time on the NYC "blue highways" is brief, he brilliantly captures the "other side" of NYC, the more obscure, ignored, downtrodden parts of the five boroughs, far away from the glamour of Manhattan, the bustling hives of Brooklyn, the leafy suburbs of the Bronx and northern Queens, and the so-called "inner cities" (It's just a shame he didn't make it to Broad Channel!) He finds not "the real NYC" as some might call it but the NYC of the fringes, the other NYC that people who rather not travel to and forget. 

Obviously his observation of the World Trade Centers makes you shudder a bit but it's still beautiful how it existed and is forever burnished this is beautifully captured moment in time.

Read Blue Highways and you'll encounter many other such moments -- an amazing read!