Blue Highways

I finished Blue Highways recently, and I’m not quite sure whether I liked it or not. It has many lovely stories about small towns all across America, which I loved to read about, but it’s also littered with little throw away facts about towns he drove through. It felt at times like the entire premise of the book was just an excuse to tell stories about small towns, but there’s a point of separation from the story when he just rattles off facts about a town without having stopped in it or talked to any residents. It feels like it would have been better as a collection of short stories, each with their own setting and characters instead of pulling them all into this larger narrative. I realize it’s all true, it’s just that I didn’t find his voyage all that interesting in and of itself.

Although I guess that shouldn’t be surprising, since the author/narrator didn’t really either. From the last page:

The circle almost complete, the truck ran the road like the old horse that knows the way. If the circle had come full turn, I hadn’t. I can’t say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn’t known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.

I feel a similar way about the Tour, and often replied as such if anyone asked what I had learned. That’s also why I probably won’t ever write much about the trip, save a few events. There was a more revealing passage, several pages earlier, that had also echoed what I had felt about the Tour. Looking back, it really reflects what I feel was the purpose of the trip:

In a season on the blue roads, what had I accomplished? I hadn’t sailed the Atlantic in a washtub, or crossed the Gobi by goat cart, or bicycled to Cape Horn. In my own country, I had gone out, had met, had shared. I had stood as witness.