It's just harder to see the country from the interstate because of the speed you're traveling at. It's not as easy as blue highways being good and interstates bad. It's a case of sightseers versus people-seers.' A traveler is after the means - they go at a slower pace and enter into the lives of people they meet. 'A tourist is a person to whom the ends are the most important - to reach a goal, like Yellowstone, by a set time. There's an old distinction between the two ways of getting anywhere, and he thinks it's still accurate. There's too much country to get jammed up.' 'If you stay off the interstates and away from the national parks this summer, you'll be okay. 'There are more than three million road miles out there, counting gravel roads and everything,' says Least Heat-Moon in a voice like a handful of gravel itself. Yet the idea of the blue highways remains: a place where you can lose yourself. The past fades and colors change, and the Rand-McNally atlas now paints the interstates blue and the minor routes gray and black. The title came from the old maps, which showed the main highways in red and the back roads in blue. His book about the trip, published under his Sioux name William Least Heat-Moon and called Blue Highways, became an unexpected hit, its popularity fueled by those seeking nostalgia, vicarious experience or simply a manual for their own voyages. In 1978, after he lost his job teaching English and split up with his first wife, Trogdon went on a long journey to such places as Brooklyn Bridge, Ky., Nameless, Tenn., Klickitat, Wash., and Ninety Six, S.C. When he began traveling by himself, he took instead the roads with curves and bumps, and when he did he noticed a quietude that made it easier to see and sense the land.

They went to Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington, San Francisco, New Orleans - enough so the young Trogdon got his fill of following the main lines. 'My father liked to get on the highway and travel its length. 'Our home in Kansas City was the hub of the wheel, and each year we went up one spoke,' he says. When Bill Trogdon was a kid in the late 1940s and early '50s, his family would go on vacation during the last two weeks of August.

Heat moon blue highways