Coming Full Circle in Blue Highways
In his traveling diary, Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon takes a trip to various destinations of unknown worth. His American back roads tour is characterized by the pattern of taking a journey that follows a circle. Least Heat Moon's circular journey is both literal and spiritual. His travels circle the nation, and he gathers history and personality from all corners of America. More importantly, however, Least Heat Moon sets out to fully explore and find himself. He provides the audience with the simple explanation of the circular nature of his journey because "following a circle would give a purpose&emdash;to come around again&emdash;where taking a line would not"(Least Heat Moon 3). Immediately, the reader is faced with William Least Heat Moon's goal to find himself and the wisdom of others.
Before his journey began, Least Heat Moon experienced two significant life-changing events. First, the author was abandoned by his wife after being separated for nine months. Then, as a result of declining enrollment, he lost his job teaching English at the University of Missouri. At a time when some people might consider their situation hopeless and consider the extreme act of taking their own life, William Least Heat Moon decides to take a meandering adventure on America's country roads to try to find the "forgotten people" with genuine character and interesting stories. He begins his journey at "zero," the very beginning of his circular adventure. Least Heat Moon reasons that "a man that couldn't make things go right could at least go"(3).
Because of the life-changing events he experienced, William Least Heat Moon just wanted to go. He felt that if things couldn't go right for him, he could chuck routine. He didn't want to walk out on his life. He wanted to start a new beginning. He felt that if he started all over again, he would find some meaning to his life. While traveling the back roads, he connects with all corners of life. According to Gene Lyons, Least Heat Moon travels to places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected(63).
The circular path of the blue highways less traveled has a spiritual meaning. The journey is the author's last ditch effort to regain some understanding and find the meaning of his heritage. The author symbolizes his ancestors, the Plains Indians, by naming his van Ghost Dancing. The circular path, in a way, can be described as a ghost dance.
He makes sense of his journey with the additional spiritual words of a New York policeman turned monk. He, too, had become fascinated with intense spiritual experiences of one kind or another. At the age of seventeen, he had thought about becoming a monk but did not realize this dream until 25 years later. He had felt an incompleteness in his life and "that's when I started traveling. I learned to travel, then traveled to learn. Later, when I was riding a radio car in Brooklyn, I began to want a life&emdash;and morality&emdash;based not so much on constraint but on aspiration toward a deeper spiritual life"(Least Heat Moon 84).
Through his journey, William Least Heat Moon gains the knowledge and wisdom he began searching for at the beginning of his trip. His circular journey around America on its country backroads allowed Least Heat Moon to find some of the characters that he believed America had forgotten about or even lost.
By the end of the book, his circle had come full turn, but he 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"(Least Heat Moon 411).
In a sense, the author's adventure allowes him to become a "Full Moon."
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