In William Least Heat-Moon’s book, Blue Highways, he describes how he took to the open road after learning his wife was cheating on him and that he had lost his job. Heat-Moon got in a van and traveled the backroads across the country to look for a purpose. His reasoning for his travels were that it was “that time when the pull of the blue highway is the strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself” (Heat-Moon 1). His idea of the road refutes Russell Sanders’ claim because William Least Heat-Moon argues change does not mean ruin. He says changing your lifestyle and traveling the open road does not cause ruin, whereas Sanders argues migration ruins the land and communities in which we live. Heat-Moon says, “With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected” (5). Heat-Moon’s ideas align with Rushdie and Emerson’s as well. Heat-Moon agrees that the open road is a place to find yourself, start over, and have new experiences one could not experience at home.
Another character who travels the road to find something new is Jack Kerouac: