He slept in the van all but 3 days of the trip. He had a paper atlas, a little over $400 in cash and a few gas company credit cards and off he went traveling 13,000 miles in 83 days. His luxuries were a 35mm camera, a microcassette recorder, notebooks, pens, and two books: Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. A Sears portable toilet, a sleeping bag, Coleman cooler, backpacking stove, a small sack of a kitchen pot, skillet, and utensils, and a trunk with clothes. It is merely a raft that will take him on this adventure. He mentions the van build in only two sentences of his 400+ page book. He put carpet down, added some insulation, used plywood paneling for walls and ceiling, and built a cot sized rustic platform for his foam mat. He converted the “clangy tin box” himself. “It came equipped with power nothing and drove like what it was: a truck.” (Heat-Moon 1982 p 9). A month later, on March 20th, he began his epic 13,000 mile journey.Ī few years earlier, he sold his 4 cylinder Austin and bought a new 1975 half ton Ford Econoline Van for $3,647. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go. What should he do? That night was when the road trip idea formed. 3) So here he was, 38 years old, lost his job and his wife. This was nine months after he was separated from his wife, and when he called her with the news that his teaching position was ending she let slip that she was now with “Rick or Dick or Chick. The story starts on February 17th, 1978 when Heat-Moon learned that his position as an English professor at Stephens College, a private women’s college in Columbia, Missouri. Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon is one of the best American road trip stories.
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