Cultural critic and historian Daniel Boorstin has written: "The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience." By this account William Least Heat-Moon is a vibrant example of the traveler! We loved Blue Highways: A Journey into America where he took us along on a 12,000 mile trip following back roads, gifting us with a treasure-trove of impressions of diverse people and places. In this classic along with PrairyErth and River-Horse, Least Heat-Moon revealed America to be a country that defies generalities and retains its amazing capacity to nourish dreams.
Here, There, Elsewhere brings together his short-form travel pieces published between 1983 and 2011. Least Heat-Moon confesses: "To me, a road map is the printed lyrics to a siren's song where highways and rivers are like stanzas, and the little circles indicating towns are notes — some flat, some sharp, a few off-key. To begin a journey is to hunt for its tune, its melody, its harmonics, and to follow along from stanza to stanza."
Least Heat-Moon's jaunts take him to rural Japan, the Yucatan, rustic Oregon, the Orkney Islands, the England-Wales border, and down the great Mississippi on the Delta Queen steamboat. Reading these travel pieces, we sense that the author still loves the open road and the chance to sing his own song. And we on our part are ready to follow where he leads in order to partake of the wonders he sees and describes.
