PRAIRYERETH: A DEEP MAP
William Least Heat-Moon
Houghton-Mifflin: Boston, 1991
625 pp.$24.95
There is a New American Romanticism afoot. It can be seen in a growing interest in what remains of our rural countryside and what survives of our small towns, in the past and future of Native Americans, in our folklore and tradition, in nonelitist poetry and song. The immense popularity of country-western music is a part of that New Romanticism, and so are television programs like Northern Exposure and Evening Shade, Ethnic festivals, historical pageants, civic anniversaries, ceremony, and celebration are the surface manifestation of much deeper interests and appreciation of the past and its memories. The fine arts are showing the shift, too--more poetry, less drama, disenchantment with the culture centers of the cities and a growing interest in the bucolic.
Deep within the movement, as we are, it is hard to know exactly where it is (in its earliest stages or already in decline), very difficult to know where it is headed, perhaps impossible to know where it started and who started it. It might have arisen within the gentle mid western humor of Garrson Keillor or the exoteric regionalism of Ian Frazier, both of whom stand on the windblown soil swells of the prairie-Plains and yet speak to the overblown literary swells of New York City.
Almost certainly William Least Heat Moon has had a hand in the New American Romanticism with his enormously successful Blue Highways (1982), a warm, humorous, simple conversation about a long, easy circling of the United States on two-lane, nearly forgotten highways--those marked in blue lines on most state maps. In that rambling monologue, Least Heat-Moon saw the small details of the large mosaic of America--the number of calendars in small-town cafes, the opinions of those whose opinions don't count, dogs, trees, filling stations and cheap motels well off the interstate highway system. Least Heat Moon drifted, almost without design, from town to town, café to café-Dime Box, Texas, Darlington, South Carolina, Palmyra, New York. In a sea of humanity Americans he sought out the individuals; Kermit Pell, Alice Venable Middleton, Arthur O Bakke, Kendrick Fritz.
In Blue Highways, Least Heat-Moon took us from state to state, region to region, thousands of miles passing beneath the tires of his 1975 Ford Econoline van, dubbed "Ghost Dancing", prairies,
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