Blue Highways

There are times for taking freeways, and there are times for blue highways.  That's a term from William Least Heat-Moon, who coined it in his book by the same name.  Blue highways are the two-lane blacktops, the backroads that go through the small towns (and sometimes large ones).  For speed there's the freeway, where the semi trucks hustled you along and the land rolls by like moving theater flats with painted trees and barns.  They'll get you where you're going.  The blue highways will get you there, too, but you take your chances with slow cars and farm vehicles and road repair.  I drive them when I need time to think things out, to feel the places I'm driving through, the crossroads and curves and towns and everything crowding down to the shoulder where I can linger over it with my eyes as I pass. The interstates are all about getting there; blue highways are about the journey.


Most of the time when I drive north to Minnesota I take the freeway, I-35.  But there are times, if I'm driving alone and time isn't an issue, that I deliberately avoid it, as I did this past week when I left Maryville and caught Route One Sixty Nine in Mt. Ayre, Iowa, an hour northeast of here.  

The route is one of the old trunk routes that funneled cars through the country before freeways were built. It comes up through Wichita, Kansas City and St. Joseph, before heading north, unspooling itself through the small Iowa towns with their tall grain elevators and corrugated metal corn cribs, faded “Butler” stenciling on the sides, their brick stores and courthouses and red-brick Lutheran and Catholic churches.  On the map, Iowa counties look deceptively predictable and uncomplicated, like evenly stacked rows of square blocks.  Small green signs marked their boundaries:  Union, Madison, Dallas, Boone.  There is a clarity in the wide fields and straight gravel roads, the neat little towns with their white houses that throw back the sunlight like bright mirrors.  Up in Minnesota the route gets more diverse and complicated, dropping from the prairie into the heavily wooded Minnesota River Valley, following the river northeast into the western suburbs of Minneapolis before it's final run into the north woods of Minnesota.  The sky is a strip of clouded-flecked blue between the trees and the horizon is the next bend in the road.  And all the way the air is getting steadily cooler and drier. 


My way back started on Monday after a few days visiting my mother and sister.  I decided to follow the Mississippi all the way down to southern Iowa, then cut west across the state to Maryville, a longer trip of nearly one thousand miles that took a day and a half.  Along the way, besides seeing some beautiful scenery, I stumbled over some great places to eat such as Emily's Luncheon in Webster, Wisconsin, where customers sit at tables in the dining room while Marilyn makes and serves a homemade meal from her kitchen.  It was the best road breakfast I've ever eaten and I told her so. "I'll take that as a compliment," she said with a slight smile.  Or the Stockholm Pie Company in the little river town of Stockholm, WI, where I had a piece of French Silk pie and coffee during an afternoon pause in traveling.  I saw barges on the river, deer and bear peering out of the edges of the woods, and enough blacktop under my wheels to bring a satisfied end to the summer.