Blue Highways: A Journey into America

Much of Heat-Moon’s wandering is unintended, and he often drifts freely. The only real guiding intentions are his desire to visit places with odd or interesting names, and his aversion to the interstate system. The rest is random—but on several occasions, Heat-Moon questions that randomness. The best example is early in the book when he visits William Trogdon’s gravesite. Multiple times, Heat-Moon implies that something unseen is guiding him there, and he mentions that “[c]ommon sense said to turn back, but the old sense in the blood was stronger” (48).

While Heat-Moon does not directly name such moments as fate, the suggestion is clear. At another point in the same chapter, Heat-Moon notices “a herring gull, a glare of feathers, put a wingtip a few feet to the left of Ghost Dancing, and, wings steady, accompanied me across” (54). Heat-Moon is cautious to call the gull anything more than what it is, but the context of this image illustrates that Heat-Moon is open to the idea of signs and omens, and he sometimes interprets natural events as though they were cosmically ordained.