As I started the engine, Wheeler said, “If you get back this way, stop in and see me. Always got beans and taters and a little piece of meat.” Down along the ridge, I wondered why it’s always those who live on little who are the ones to ask you to dinner.

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.

Trees burned so tobacco could grow so tobacco could burn.

He said, “I read not long ago—I mention this because of the license on your panel truck—that there’s a Missouri bank named after Jesse James. Now, is there any truth in that?” “It’s near where James lived.” “Well, then, may I say it might be the only honestly named bank in the country?”

"All that killed off Cambridge, but it saved old Ninety Six from being built over. It’s alive today because it died a hundred and some years ago. But nothing’s left of Cambridge as you see.”

There was nothing but song and silences. No sermon, no promise of salvation, no threat of damnation, no exhortation to better conduct. I’m not an authority, God knows, but if there is a way to talk into the Great Primal Ears—if Ears there be—music and silence must be the best way.

The roots of Cajun cookery come from Brittany and bear no resemblance to Parisian cuisine and not even much to the Creole cooking of New Orleans. Those are haute cuisines of the city, and Cajun food belongs to the country where things got mixed up over the generations. No one even knows the source of the word gumbo. Some say it derives from an African word for okra, chinggombo, while others believe it a corruption of a Choctaw word for sassafras, kombo, the key seasoning.

I picked her up at twelve. She asked about the trip, especially about Selma and how things were as I saw them. “A white man griped about changes, and a black said there weren’t enough changes to gripe about.” “That’s us too. What we want is slow coming—if it’s coming at all. Older blacks here are scared of whites and won’t do much for change if it means risk. Others don’t care as long as everything gets smothered over with politeness by whites. Young blacks see the hypocrisy—even when it’s not there. But too many of them are juked on drugs, and that’s where some of this town wants us.”

The west fire exit unexpectedly opened and sunlight poured in; like Draculas before the cross, we cried out and covered our eyes.

I was in one of the strangest pieces of topography I’d ever seen, a place, until now, completely beyond my imaginings. What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of?

I suspected that the Boss embraced one crisis after another because they gave him significance, something like tragic stature. He had so lost belief in a world outside himself that, without crisis, he had nothing worth talking about. On and on, the tolling of words revealed his expertise in living a life that baffled him.

After traveling nineteenth-century America, de Tocqueville came to believe one result of democracy was a concentration of each man’s attention upon himself.

I’ve read that Navajo, a language related to that of the Indians of Alaska and northwest Canada, has no curse words unless you consider “coyote” cursing. By comparison with other native tongues, it’s remarkably free of English and Spanish; a Navajo mechanic, for example, has more than two hundred purely Navajo terms to describe automobile parts. And it might be Navajo that will greet the first extraterrestrial ears to hear from planet Earth: on board each Voyager spacecraft traveling toward the edge of the solar system and beyond is a gold-plated, long-playing record; following an aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” is a Navajo night chant, music the conquistadors heard.

For miles at the highway edges sat little cardboard and scrapwood ramadas, each with a windblasted sign advertising jewelry and cedar beads. In another era, white men came in wagons to trade beads to Indians; now they came in stationwagons and bought beads. History may repeat, but sometimes things get turned around in the process.

But the Spider Grandmother did give two rules. To all men, not just Hopis. If you look at them, they cover everything. She said, ‘Don’t go around hurting each other,’ and she said, ‘Try to understand things.’”

She’d read about people like me and stared in a bold, contemptuous way she never would have used had she been alone. I tried to check my own irritation. She probably wasn’t a bad sort; she had her good side. Surely she had studied the Gospel According to Heloise and knew by rote the six helpful hints for removing catsup stains.

...someone else will have to do the looking. The past is for the present, the present for the future.

He seemed one of those men who wander all their lives. In him was something restless and unsatisfied and ancient. He was going everywhere, anywhere, nowhere. He belonged to no place and was at home anyplace. He understood that the Bible, in spite of its light, isn’t a particularly cheerful book, but rather one with much darkness, and he recognized that is where its power comes from.

Yet the language of the plains harks to the ocean: pioneers came in “prairie schooners” (some even rigged with sails) and spoke of the “sea of grass” and the “prairie ocean,” and they cured hangovers with calf ballocks they called “prairie oysters.” Maybe the sodbusters saw seascapes in the undulations of the grasses or in the immensity of sky or in the lack of refuge from wind and storm. Perhaps a sea crossing was still in the minds of the newest immigrants. And maybe also, their words expressed a prescient awareness of the tug between coming and going....

Until the ghost dance generation—the one that kissed the old life goodbye to face an enemy future—the tribes that dominated these grasslands for eight thousand years fought most of their battles over hunting territory. The red man ate buffalo (transubstantiation in the Indian manner), he dressed in buffalo, he imitated and talked to it, and he died for and by the sacred buffalo.

The highway, oh, the highway. No place, in theory, is boring of itself. Boredom lies only with the traveler’s limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.

In a hotel room at the geographical center of North America, a neon sign blinking red through the cold curtains, I lay quietly like a small idea in a vacant mind.

...tried to keep from looking inward, tried to reach outward, but, as Black Elk says, certain things among the shadows of a man’s life do not have to be remembered—they remember themselves.

On the road, where change is continuous and visible, time is not; rather it is something the rider only infers. Time is not the traveler’s fourth dimension—change is.

As filling stations cease to be garages and community centers, as they become nothing but expensive nozzles, they too are losing ground. But, in the past, an American traveler depended on the local grease pit boys to tell him (a) the best route to wherever; (b) the best place to eat, although librarians give better recommendations; and (c) what the townsfolk thought about whatsoever. Now, it already may be too late for a doctoral candidate to study the ways that Americans’ views of each other have been shaped while waiting for the tank to fill.

“This is about the limited capacity of men to understand because they measure time in terms of themselves. This is about men who won’t see causes and therefore can’t predict effects. This is about men who fail to realize that geographical refuge is central to our history. It’s about men who exterminate the species of the earth at the rate of one every day.”

Any projection must allow for man to change his history, a power second only to that of nature. A projection must allow for free will because only it does not despise or distrust or fear the unknown even if it knows the future is not a better place but only a different one. Any prognosis must consider that men can change their angles of vision and therefore change the future.”

...there’s only one place they can get an education—in the school of thought. Learning rules is useful but it isn’t education. Education is thinking, and thinking is looking for yourself and seeing what’s there, not what you got told was there. Then you put what you see together.

...in my season on the blue highways, the voices I heard were those of men—men who knew about stumbling not from observation as gods know it, but rather from having stumbled. For that reason, their words carried a force cloud voices could not match.

By seeing both the futility in trying to relive the old life and the danger in trying to obliterate it, man can gain the capacity to make anew. His very form depends not on repetition but upon variation from old patterns. In response to stress, biological survival requires genetic change; it necessitates a turning away from doomed replication. And what of history? Was it different? Etymology: educate, from the Latin educare, “lead out.”

To be only a nub in the eternal temporary is still to have a chance to see, a chance to pry at the mystery. What is the blue road anyway but an opportunity to poke at the unseen and a hoping the unseen will poke back?

The “right” way was worn so deeply in the earth as to be unmistakable. But without the errors, wrong turns, and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth. And worse: knowing the way made traveling it perfectly meaningless.

I can’t say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn’t known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.

John Irving’s assertion that there are, at the heart of things, only two plots, two stories: a stranger rides into town, a stranger rides out of town. Without knowing it, I had a chance for both.