Blue Highways, Leaves of Grass and the Parkdale Library
I don't know what exactly I expected to find at the library that summer. Rows of gleaming shelves and neatly stacked books, probably. No sound but the humming of fluorescent lights and the thump of rubber stamps. The librarians would be demure types - soft-spoken and intellectual. I thought of the place itself as a sort of solemn temple to the written word. With these images in mind, I was startled by my first glimpse of the employees' workroom. As it turns out, librarians read the People magazines before they go on display, and complain to each other about bratty kids that file through, and they leave sticky bottles of Mountain Dew in the refrigerator. Such are the secret lives of the people who used to strike fear into the hearts of my second-grade classmates.
For me, it was a slightly jarring introduction to the working world. I was starting my first summer job, and, after hours, reading Blue Highways and thinking about journeys. William Least Heat Moon crossed the country over fifteen years ago, devouring Walt Whitman and "gathering the minds of men" (410). I was crossing a small threshold of reality, gathering observations on the behavior of men. He turned his back on the trials of life and I was watching its eccentricities; he was growing cynical and I am still completely green. Yet to me in June 1999, our journeys seemed almost identical. So as Least Heat Moon studied Leaves of Grass, I studied this road diary and tried to follow its winding philosophy.
It was the philosophy that came in handy - especially the parts that Least Heat Moon picked up on his way from the book and from the people. Among other things, Whitman wrote, "I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait" (396). Useful advice, as it turned out: arguing with the methods at Parkdale Branch Library is a waste of time if you can just sit back and watch. My fellow student assistant Molly, for example, was a variety show by herself. She was an impish thing, with a wheat-colored ponytail and an arc of bangs over her forehead. Her face was square and freckled; her eyes never opened more than halfway, as if she were perpetually examining something.
"C'mon," she would say, "lemme show you how to sort magazines," and then I was being pulled to the racks and nudged onto a footstool with her interrogating me all the while. "How d'you like it so far?" she asked. "It's nice enough, I guess," she answered herself, "but I'm outta here in August, thank God." And so on, until we had finished whatever it was I needed to learn. She was most animated around five, when another student, Matt, got ready to leave. "Adios, amigos!" he always said, and she would reply with a "Sayonara!" Sometimes they worked their way through over a dozen languages this way, laughing and growing louder with each goodbye. "That boy's a bitch," she told me happily after he had gone, and I just nodded because I didn't know how else to respond. I was the Marcy to her Peppermint Patty.
Least Heat Moon learned from one Miz Alice of Smith Island, Maryland, that having "the sense to let everyone else live different" (410) is the hardest thing of all. Somehow enough of us have that sense, and thank goodness; without the variation that once colored America (and that still exists in muted tones), there would be no magical blue-highway towns, no circus troupes of characters like the ones I found at Parkdale. Millie, the children's librarian, struck me as one of the oddest - she seemed from another era with her spotless white pumps and full skirts and bobbed hair.
Millie would have been best cast as a 1950's schoolteacher. "Would you girls and boys like to join the reading club?" she'd primly ask the scrappy kids who had only come in to paw through our videos. She tended to pout when another librarian corrected her on something, as if she'd fancied herself in charge of this dust-jacketed corner of the world. Marty, my boss, was another story: when I arrived he'd just dyed his hair firefly yellow and had it cut in a buzz. For weeks he wore loud tropical shirts and told everyone it was his tribute to summer. Far from being laid-back or fun loving, though, he spent much of his time enforcing time limits for the computers, and re-alphabetizing the books I'd shelved. Then there was Charlene, the red-haired college student in her late fifties, and Roxana in her flowered peasant skirts, who was taking time off from earning a dual degree in clarinet and Spanish. I didn't have to drive thousands of miles to meet types like these - I found them in the middle of Forest Park.
Least Heat Moon's other mentor named Walter this time de la Mare said that "things are the mind's mute looking-glass" (227). This led our wandering hero to conclude that he was "a man looking at himself by looking at what he looks at" (228). Many of his musings throughout the journey were a little cryptic, but this one especially puzzled me. If self-identity is based on the things we perceive, then is each of our personalities formed as a result of chance? because what we look at is no more than what is there to see. Surely man controls his own mind, and is more than a reflection of his surroundings and if not, might there at least be a Fate somewhere making sure the right people collide?
I believe there is, and last summer she made me collide with a refreshing book on selfdiscovery and a whole mess of refreshing people, crazy though they were. In late August all the students at Parkdale left one by one, and each week we had one installment of a goodbye party. Marty made his specialty (Mountain Dew bundt cake). Millie smiled maternally and told the college students to be careful and call their mothers often. On her last day, Molly drove away blaring her horn and flashing her lights in exhilaration. As for me (like Whitman, a mere witness), I was wondering if these people were really who I saw them to be, and if they would be a part of me because of the time we spent together.
An old Jerseyman to William Least Heat Moon, explaining his faith in the force of nature and in mankind: "...then say I believe... because it is absurd" (392). It is, indeed, absurd. And so I too believe.
Works Cited
Heat Moon, William Least. Blue Highways : A Journey into America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1982.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia, 1900.
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