A Conversation Between Philip Caputo and William Least Heat-Moon

The road book has a long and glorious history in the annals of literature, starting perhaps with "The Odyssey" (assuming you're willing to consider the sea as a road). One of the newest entrants in the genre is "The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, From Key West to the Arctic Ocean" by Philip Caputo (Holt). Mr. Caputo is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of "A Rumor of War," a memoir of the Vietnam War. His new book chronicles his trip in an Airstream trailer from one corner of North America to the other.

Recently, Mr. Caputo traveled to Missouri to compare notes with one of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time, William Least Heat-Moon, the author of "Blue Highways" and "PrairyErth (A Deep Map)." His latest book is "Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road" (Little, Brown), a collection of short essays plucked from 30-plus years of travel. They had a wide-ranging conversation, condensed and edited here, covering their many years of travel.

The Road Book

PHILIP CAPUTO: The road book is a peculiarly American genre. I don't know of any Italian road books or British road books or French road books or Spanish road books. Maybe "Don Quixote" would qualify as a Spanish road book. Why do you think that is?

WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: My theory is it comes from the historic fact we are all from the other side of the planet. I know there are American Indian tribes that deny that, but I think archaeology and anthropology show that all of the so-called Native American tribes did indeed come from the Eastern Hemisphere. We're all the descendants of travelers. And with the exception of people of African descent, virtually all of our ancestors came here wanting to find better territory. I think it's genetic memory functioning — when life gets this way or that way, and we're not really happy with it, what do we do? Put a kit bag over one shoulder and head out for the road because that's where solutions might lie. Somewhere out there is an answer to why a life is as it is.

CAPUTO: One of the things that's impressed me about traveling in this country — and I've done a lot of world traveling, as you have, too — is not only the size of the country but the variety of the landscape, which is like nothing I have ever seen anywhere else. I mean you can be in Arizona or New Mexico and think you're in North Africa, and not terribly far away it might look like the Swiss Alps, and someplace else — say, the Dakotas — looks like Ukraine.

HEAT-MOON: American topography is so incredibly diverse. If you're traveling by auto, the windshield becomes a kind of movie. And we're going to go out on the road, and we're going to meet people who don't think the way we do. And listen to someone who doesn't think the way we do, we may learn something that could be useful, as well as something downright interesting.

CAPUTO: Yeah, I think one of the things I got out of this particular journey was running into people who will change your perspective, who will change the way you looked at things. And sometimes I think not just for the moment either, but permanently. And I think you're right, that the country is big enough and varied enough, not only in its geographical landscape but its social landscape, that if I do travel to northwest Washington from southeast Georgia, or vice versa, I'm not going to run into somebody who thinks exactly the way I do and sees the world the same as I do.

I think one of the things that happens on the road is that you leave behind a lot of your own inhibitions, your own baggage. And if you let yourself, you become more open to these encounters and these experiences, and you can really learn something. And you have to be open I think, too, to the serendipitous moments. Like when I ran into this Lakota shaman named Ansel Wooden Knife. And the way I met him was I just happened to be in a diner that was serving something called "Indian tacos," which I had never heard of before. It's basically your Mexican taco but made with Indian fry bread. And I was asking the cook about them and he says, "Oh, you've got to talk to Ansel; he invented them. And he's sold them all over the country, and he's quite a guy."

I looked him up, and here I discovered this guy who is a terrifically successful small-business man. He was elected to the small-business hall of fame in South Dakota. He has a kind of Horatio Alger story because he was brought up in a log cabin on the Rosebud Reservation, one of 12 children.

And he astonished me when he told me that at age 9 he was plucked off the reservation, against his parents' wishes, and sent to Philadelphia to live with a white family. Essentially he said that they wanted us Indian kids to become white kids. And he kept running away for three years off and on until they said he was incorrigible, and they sent him back to the reservation — whereupon he returned to his original culture. That's how he became a Lakota sun dancer and a shaman.

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