BLUE HIGHWAY

In 1982, William Least-Heat Moon wrote a book titled “Blue Highways.” At the time he was an English professor at the University of Missouri who had just been laid off. He spent the next year driving the blue highways, the back roads of his road atlas. “Blue Highways” was the story of that journey and it topped the New York Times best seller list for eight months. 

Yesterday I woke up in Ocala, FL with a date to keep in Pensacola last night. From south Florida my return trip north had been over the same boring interstate that I travelled heading south. So I took Least-Heat’s lead, dropped off I-75 and turned west toward the coast on a Blue Highway; I can’t remember its name.

Very quickly the grim interstate business of semi’s, billboards, lane changers and rumble strips was changed out for pasture land, dairy cows, fields of fresh baled hay and stands of slash pine. My Blue Highway was a two-lane ribbon that required attention to detail, not the auto-pilot driving that goes on, on the big highway. Unexpected intersections, nondescript side roads, oncoming traffic passing with inches of my door handle, tractors pulling hay wagons, passing between yellow lines; there was too much, too close, for a relaxing cruise. 

I hadn’t eaten breakfast. There was an apple and a small can of mixed nuts in the milk crate I keep on the passenger seat. But that’s not breakfast and I wanted breakfast. In the next town, I’d find a picturesque, local kitchen, rub shoulders with locals and find a story. I missed the city limits sign and the water tower didn’t have any identification either so I started looking for something with a name, and for a restaurant. The filling station had a Subway sandwich shop and another one had a Hardy’s but no real-deal, restaurant. The next town was the same. Twenty miles later I stopped at the Exxon. I asked the lady behind the counter if there was a restaurant where I could get breakfast. With an Indian or Pakistani accent, she told me there was a McDonalds up the street. I told her I didn’t want fast food and she gave me the palms turned up, wide eyed, “I don’t know” look. I was hungry for breakfast but I’d eat apples and nuts before I compromised myself to fast food. 

More miles, more double yellow lines, another dairy and another stand of slash pine; Mayo, Florida. I drove by the high school and up the main street, several blocks of well kept, old brick buildings. On the left I saw a storefront that was recessed back off the curb, with a neon “Open” sign in the window and a big sign over the door that read, Meme’s Diner; it looked good to me. Inside the floor was waxed concrete and the fixtures looked new. The walls were the freshly painted, old brick walls of the building next door. 

I sat down and while I was ordering, other people began to filter in. They knew each other and sat across the room at a round table. When the waitress pulled us all into a 3-way conversation I invited myself to the round table. Bertha had moved to Florida from upstate New York but she’s been here for a long time. Wayne’s kids had graduated from high school in Mayo. I asked if local kids moved off to big cities for excitement and better paying jobs or did they believe, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home.” They reflected on it and after some discussion decided it was some of both. 

“What should I know about Mayo?” I asked. They liked their little town. When pressed, they couldn’t nail down anything in particular but it was clear in their language and their manner. They liked the schools, their leaders and Meme’s Diner for sure. Our breakfast came and we enjoyed that together. When I finished, I bid them well and thanked them for the hospitality. On the way out, I took a photo of Meme’s from across the street. A few blocks later the small town atmosphere dissolved and I was back into the pines and hay fields.

A few hours later, cresting the bridge and dropping down into Apalachicola, the atmosphere had changed considerably. No more dairies or hay fields, a sandy beach was all that separated my Blue Highway from the Gulf of Mexico. This place was about shrimp boats and tourism. I stopped long enough for a shrimp basket at the corner sea food grill and to pick up a jar of Tupelo Honey at a specialty store on Market Street. Tupelo trees in the swamps above Apalachicola bloom for just a few weeks in the spring. Bee keepers clean out their hives and relocate them to the swamp so the honey will be pure, from the tupelo. It is the standard by which all honey is measured. Once the blooms fall, the harvest is over and the bees are moved to work on another nectar source and it will be a year before there is more Tupelo honey.

At one time, along the Gulf of Mexico, Apalachicola ranked second as a sea port only to New Orleans. The river runs all the way to Atlanta and cotton warehouses lined both sides of Market street. Now days it’s fishing, shopping and the beach. The northern gulf still produces wild, yellow sponges and you can pick them up for a reasonable price as well. I didn’t have time to go wander around the boat landing on the river but maybe I’ll come back again, another day. It was dark, raining and cold when I reached Pensacola but I was on time and a familiar, friendly face was waiting there.