William Least Heat-Moon

The author goes by the dignified name of William Least Heat-Moon, and the front cover of his book shows a tiny speck of a boat puttering serenely on a river that meanders through the green hills. I don’t think I can be entirely faulted for anticipating a read that was more sedate, less angry, and less cynical than this one turned out to be.

Some miscellaneous comments:

1) There’s no denying that the author is a very talented writer.
2) I got tired of his profanity pretty quickly.
3) The book’s dedication makes it sound like the copilot was a composite of seven different people. If so, they all had pretty much the same personality.
4) “The Photographer” is one of the main figures, but very few photographs of any worth made it into the book.
5) The author despises the partying frat boys he encounters along his way, but he and his friends sometimes act like superannuated frat boys themselves.
6) The author is angry about the environmental state of the country, and he’s not shy about sniping at those he feels are to blame. I doubt that he turned very many of his readers Green. I think he would have been more successful if he had either molded his anger into a cogent argument or had very clearly led by example. What was the environmental cost of his journey? How would he possibly have made this journey if engineers had left the wilderness alone? That last question is actually posed to him by someone he meets on his voyage. His response was weak, I thought.… (mer)

This was another buddy read with my dad, since we enjoyed PrairyErth so much. William Least Heat-Moon is an excellent writer, and there are so many beautiful turns of phrase and fascinating observations here. I did not enjoy it quite as much as PrairyErth, however. Part of that is just my attachment to the prairie (oh, I lit up when we got to his descriptions of the northern prairie in this book!), but part of it lies in Heat-Moon's attitude toward women, surely colored by the fact that this entire trip was in no small part motivated by the collapse of his relationship.

This sexist feeling isn't everywhere or even a constant theme, but it shows up often enough that it really started to drag on me. There are a couple (at least) of men who, when telling their life stories, spend a lot of time blaming women for their sorry states, and Heat-Moon listens sympathetically. Then when he picks up a young woman hitchhiking, who describes the objectively abusive home life she is fleeing, he argues with her, telling her it couldn't have been all bad, and maintains a disapproving attitude. Then there are the number of times women are described based primarily on their attractiveness, including some random speculation on what one woman (who does not flirt with him in any way) would be like in bed. YES, I GET IT. YOU ARE PROCESSING YOUR FAILED/FAILING RELATIONSHIP, BUT I AM HERE FOR THE DESCRIPTIONS OF AMERICANA, CAN WE NOT MAKE THEM SO ENTANGLED WITH YOUR FEMALE BAGGAGE, PLEASE?

That said, there was so much to love in this book. Scenes that spring to mind are the conversations on racism in the Deep South, the observations on sovereign lands in Northern Arizona, the bit on hang-gliding, the hitchhiking Seventh Day Adventist, the guy who ran a maple syrup operation. All of these tiny little hyper-local ways of life that are mostly inconceivable to people living a few states away. Amazing.… (mer)

This book was another buddy read with my dad. This has been on my shelves for YEARS, so picking this as a buddy read and reading a chapter a week was the perfect motivator to get through this. This is a deep history/reading/map of Chase County in Kansas. Heat-Moon divides the county with a grid and takes each sector as the focus for a chapter. My dad and I both grew up in Kansas, but neither of us has spent much time in Chase County. Along the way we learned about pack rats, Cottonwood trees, Sam Wood, Knute Rockne, native prairie grasses, and so much more.

Incredibly rewarding. Heat-Moon is a fantastic writer who makes thoughtful and surprising connections, and regularly writes paragraphs that stop me in my tracks. So good.… (mer)