Free Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

got in the U.S. Navy starts acting up if I don’t rest it. Hurt it fighting Communism.”
    “What’s your name?”
    I started to say Standing Bull. Some Indians believe that to give your name is to put yourself in a stranger’s power. But because he already might have run a license check, I told the truth. He pronounced the first name as “Wim.”
    “Wim, I’ve logged your machine in. Maybe you’re innocent, but just bein’ near the dam makes you suspect if anything happens tonight.”
    “Happens? What do you mean happens?”
    “Been trouble around the dam. Things rollin’ into the reservoir, gas drums knocked over. Always happens after dark.”
    “I heard something about midnight—don’t know what.”
    He looked a moment as if to assess. “Garrantee one thing, Wim. This boy wouldn’t sleep up here mongst the whangdoodles withouten his peace of mind.”
    “Peace of mind?”
    “Peace of mind.” He tapped a thumb on the butt of his pistol. “Go ahead on and stay tonight. I’d sure secure those doors though.”
    Before I fell asleep again, I remembered the red men who walked backwards and brushed out their tracks so no dead soul could follow.

5
    W HEN I opened the side door of my rig, it was there, all over the place—in the trees, on the ground, over the water. Sunlight. In Chapel Hill I’d seen a bumper sticker: IF GOD ISN’T A TARHEEL, WHY IS THE SKY CAROLINA BLUE ? From a tall elm, a mockingbird knocked out a manic of quodlibets. I took towel and soap and went down to Sandy Creek below the dam and knelt on a flat rock slanting into the water and washed. You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad. In the truck I laid out a breakfast of bread, cheese, raisins, and tomato juice.
    Then to the road. I bought supplies at Siler City, where the grocery sold twenty-two kinds of chewing tobacco: Blood Hound, Brown’s Mule, Red Coon, Red Horse, Red Fox, Red Juice, Black Maria, Big Man, Cannonball, Bull’s Eye (“Hits the Spot”); also fifteen brands of snuff in three sizes, the largest big enough to give the whole county a snort.
    Highway 421 dropped out of the Piedmont hills onto the broad coastal plain where the pines were taller, the soil tan rather than orange, and black men rode tractors around and around square fields of tobacco and cotton as they plowed wavelets into the earth. At the center of many fields were small, fenced cemeteries under a big pine. All day farmers circled the acres, the white tombstones an axis for their planters, while tree roots reached into eye sockets and ribcages in the old boxes below.
    Near Dunn, North Carolina, I pulled up at a cemetery to eat lunch in the warm air. Last names on the markers were Smith and Barefoot and Bumpass. All around, the buds, no more than tiny fists, were beginning to break the tight bindings and unclench. A woman of age and size, her white legs blue-veined like Italian marble columns, stooped to trowel a circle of sprouts growing in the hollow center of a large oak dead from heart rot.
    I thought about “whangdoodles” in the night, about how they too were gifts of the road in their rupture of order, their break of throttling security; they were a challenge to step out and shake one’s own skeleton at the world.
    Highway 13 took me across fields lying flat as a flounder, broken only by broad squares of pine. Unpainted sharecropper cabins were slipping off their blocks, and, although brick veneer bungalows had replaced some, to the side of even the new houses collard patches remained. Tar-papered and asphalt-shingled curing barns, each with a propane tank to give heat for drying tobacco, were all about the fields, and bleached signs on barns near the road advertised flour or fertilizer or a long-dead cotton buyer. Acre after acre. Only the pines kept bright-leaf tobacco fields from sweeping like waves all the way to the coast.
    Along the highway, generations of feet had worn narrow depressions in the