Before his expedition around the country began, William Least Heat Moon experienced two significant life-changing events. His wife abandoned him after being separated for nine months, and he lost his job teaching English at a college in Missouri, due to declining enrollment (3). In essence, his life was going no where. Being in a situation where many people may find their life hopeless, William Least Heat Moon decides that, "a man that couldn't make things go right could at least go" (3). By go, he did not want to walk out of life; he wanted to start a new beginning. Moon felt that if he started all over again, he would find some meaning to his life.

Throughout Blue Highways, the circular travel Moon took around the nation happened in a van. He named this van Ghost Dancing, that he interprets to, "a symbol alluding to ceremonies of the 1980's in which the Plains Indians danced away the

Moon begins to make sense of his journey with the spiritual words of Smokey the Monk, a New York policeman. Smokey had become fascinated with intense spiritual experiences of one kind or another. At the age of seventeen, he had thought about becoming a monk but did not realize this dream until twenty-five years later. He had felt incompleteness in his life. "That's when I started traveling. I learned to travel, then traveled to learn. Later, when I was riding a radio car in Brooklyn, I began to want a life - and mortality - based not so much on constraint but on aspiration toward a deeper spiritual life" (84). Moon learns that he will discover for himself the right time before he becomes spiritually involved in his liveliness.

Moon's most compelling experience springs from his stopover in Selma, Alabama. Here he encounters a part of life that never wants to change. At the beginning of the chapter, Moon comes to Selma to see whether Martin Luther King's famous march has changed anything. In a bar, he encounters a white woman and man, Bernita and Ray. He learns from them that the only thing that has changed is the way they do business. Their views on the changes in Selma are surprising, yet uncommon. White people still view black people negatively.

On his journey along the blue highways of the road maps, Moon discovers the forgotten people of America as well as tampers with his own morals and beliefs. Avoiding the large cities, he focuses his attention on the forgotten civilizations. He encounters many towns, one being Nameless, Tennessee. Moon comes to capture the cordiality of the people here. He learns that "it's always those who live on little who are the ones to ask you to dinner" (31). While crossing across the Texas desert, he picks up a dirt-poor Mexican hitchhiker who speaks almost no English, but has no trouble communicating. With the little English that he knows, he mentions how his fa

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1302
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)