46 pages • 1 hour read
William Least Heat-MoonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Heat-Moon deliberates which road to take on his eastward path. One road heads south through Ohio on the south shore of Lake Erie, while another goes through Canada along the north shore of Lake Erie. He chooses the latter. He re-enters the US just north of Niagara Falls, New York, and detours into a New York town called Lewiston before driving farther east to visit a friend who lives on Canandaigua Lake, one of the famous Finger Lakes.
The friend’s name is Scott Chisholm, and, like Heat-Moon, he is of both Native and European descent. The two men’s dialogue is often sarcastic and jabbing, illustrating that they are good friends and alike in many respects. The first morning of Heat-Moon’s visit, Chisholm enlists Heat-Moon’s help building a stone wall. The grueling job takes all day, but Heat-Moon feels refreshed and invigorated by it. He also realizes that the wall will likely still stand long after the two men have passed from the earth.
While visiting Chisholm, Heat-Moon takes a slight detour to spend the day with the Masucci family, an elderly husband and wife who occupy a small farm. These are folks of Italian heritage, and the ensuing conversations revolve around their experiences as immigrants in the new world, mainly in Rochester, New York. Like many other figures in the book, the Masuccis’ story is one of near constant adaptation to change. Also like the others, their story teaches Heat-Moon about the power of perseverance.
After three days with Chisolm in Cheshire, New York, Heat-Moon hits the road again. He traverses the entire state of New York, passes through the Adirondack Mountains, and lands in Woodstock, Vermont. He immediately likes the town and feels that he finally has found a place where the past and present exist harmoniously. However, he also notices that many of the tourists appear wealthy, and he questions his first impressions of Woodstock’s authenticity.
From Woodstock, Heat-Moon travels into a small town called Melvin Village, New Hampshire, where he meets the town’s unofficial historian, an elderly woman named Marion Horner Robie. As Robie shares her abbreviated life story, her experience once again illustrates the world’s rapid change across just one person’s lifetime. Heat-Moon finds her anecdotes entertaining, and this lifts his mood. Her story also inspires the author’s self-reflection. Lastly, speaking with another town resident, Tom Hunter, the author learns about the harvest and production of maple syrup.
The previous chapter concludes with Heat-Moon landing in Central New York at the home of his friend Scott Chisholm. Like many of the regions Heat-Moon visits, this has a significant Native American history. Chisholm lives near Canandaigua Lake, one of the famed Finger Lakes, all of which have Native American names.
Helping Chisholm build a stone wall, Heat-Moon notices that the stones seem to find their own natural fit. He says, “Then a strange thing happened. We could feel an urging in the rocks, a behest to be put in just so” and that after a time, “the rocks were moving us” (306-07). This recalls the idea that some unforeseen metaphysical force governs Heat-Moon’s actions, much as when, in Chapter 2, he discovers he had been retracing the passage of his long-deceased ancestor, William Trogdon.
When the wall is finally complete, Heat-Moon realizes its deeper significance: “Maybe nothing else he or I had done or would do would last as long as that wall” (307). The remark suggests that the entire effort, guided by unseen but perceptible forces, was to achieve some level of permanence. The simple labor refreshes his spirit and reinvigorates him to continue his journey, but his insight echoes one of the book’s larger themes: the ways in which humanity seeks permanence in a constantly changing universe.
Arriving in Woodstock, Vermont, the author’s immediate impression is that the town exemplifies a balance between historical preservation and modern commerce: “[N]ew businesses had come to use the old buildings in new ways so that Woodstock wasn’t a restoration or even a renovation, but rather a town—like the best English villages—with a continuous and evident past” (325). However, the longer he spends in the town, the more he wonders if this is nothing more than an artifice to appease wealthy tourists. Heat-Moon’s comment that “if the village had a fault, it lay in both a hubris about its picturesqueness and in its visitors with new money and new facades” (325). While not an outright claim that this town is fake, this remark implies that, at least to some extent, the town is a consumer product.