His voice competes with the roar of the engine as he barks down at me from the driver's seat of his big rig truck. 'Where you headed?'� he asks.

Gazing around at the yellow flat mirage heat of western Arizona I look up at him and say, 'Anywhere but here.'�

'Well, hop in then.'�

Interstate 40 growls under our feet and the horizon stays out ahead of us, gray in the distant and steadily brighter blue up above. 'Boring country,'� I mutter.

'Yeah, but you get used to it,'� says the trucker. 'So what are you doing out here in the middle of this desert, kid? You know you could die out here on foot like that.'�

I tell him I was just trying to see more of the country when my car broke down outside of Lake Havasu. He yells over the engine, 'That's too bad, nothin' worse than havin' to ditch a good car.'�

'Well, it wasn't really a good car.'�

'In that case,'� he replies, 'you did the right thing.'�

Driving quietly for a minute stirs up this uncomfortable cloud between us and he cracks a window and cranks up some music to try to blow it away. Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone is playing and we both smile casually to ourselves. Trucker chimes in and says, 'Name's Hall, Sam Hall.'�

'Sam Hall?'� I laugh and say, 'I like your song, Sam Hall.'�

He looks perplexed and says, 'How's that?'�

'You don't know Sam Hall?'�

'No, I don't.'�

I tell him it was a song by Johnny Cash, the chorus says, 'Well, my name it is Sam Hall and I hate you one and all'�damn your eyes.'�

Sam laughs and I introduce myself. Silence ensues once again and the radio sings Life in the Fast Lane by the Eagles. I clear my throat and say, 'So where are you heading, Sam?'�

'I'm supposed to be taking a shipment of cell phones out to Fresno, but don't you worry about that, it's not very interesting.'�

Over the next couple of hours we shoot the bull and find common ground. Talk about old actors and musicians and eventually cross some threshold into the subject of war. Sam says, 'I suppose what gets me down the worst is how stupid I feel. In the beginning I thought this whole thing was a good idea, I even celebrated when they made the decision to attack Iraq, and then more and more stories started to pile up. I saw the news about the abuse of those Iraqi prisoners piled up into naked cheerleader pyramids or the total absence of weapons of mass destruction. By now I think you'd have to be a total fool not to see the truth. We've been lied to and now we're over there fighting a war that no one believes in. '�

'Not even the politicians,'� I add, 'they're just too stubborn to give up now that we're in this deep.'�

'Exactly, it's the Vietnam of the twenty-first century, except no one is protesting it with the old hippie vigor. Maybe we're afraid of being gunned down like those college students at Kent State back in the '70s or maybe we're all just too jaded and pessimistic to try. The last go 'round proved to be a dismal failure, so we figure, 'Why bother?' A while back I really started to feel awful about this business and, you know, it got me wishing I could do something about it.'�

I ask him if he came up with any ideas.

'Maybe, I guess we'll see.'�

Not sure what that means. It was somewhere on the other side of Needles when he really broke down. Sam says, 'You know my kid brother was over there. Malcolm was his name.'�

The fact that he is speaking in the past tense makes me shift awkwardly in my seat. Sam continues, 'When the kid enlisted he was all fire and brimstone to save America from terrorism. And I admired him for it. Over time his letters got fewer and farther between. Then I get one that says the men in his squad are losing faith. He tells me that they are starting to bicker and fight over nothing and someone said that he hoped he would catch a bullet in the next skirmish because America has forgotten about them. They all wanted it to be over.'�

Sam goes quiet and turns up the music.

The radio says, 'I have become'� Comfortably numb'�'�

A few minutes later he turns it back down and says, 'That's what they do to you, kid. They take your best intentions and use them against you just to get you in a place no one in their right mind would ever want to go. But you're young and full of anger and ambition and too stupid to realize you're gettin' hung out to dry.'�

A question pops into my head, but I hesitate to ask it. Sam sees right through me and says, 'Go ahead, kid, it won't bother me.'�

'All right,'� I fire ahead, 'can I ask how he died?'�

'Shot in the back. It happened after they started running low on funds, some budget-master wouldn't front the cash to keep our boys in armor and the powers that be wouldn't see fit to bring them home. So we ended up with kids forced to fight out there without the protection they needed to do it. If he had the right vest he would have been all right, instead a bullet went through Malcolm's shoulder blade, collapsed his lung and he died choking on his own blood.'�

Silence again. Music gets louder. Radio sings, 'The drink will pour and the blood will spill'�'� Time rolls by, cue Sam, he says, 'It pisses me off, Kid. See, it's never some trust fund brat over there taking enemy fire. It's always somebody like my little brother. Someone from Boondock, Texas with barely a penny to his name hears a promise of college funds and an exciting future. This creepy propaganda pumps through televisions and recruitment officers visiting high schools and setting up kiosks in malls. They go after the kids that want a way out of the same lifestyle that kills their parents a little every day and they end up getting shot in the back over it all. It has to stop.'�

Silence again. The radio is singing, 'I fell into a ring of fire'�'�

'That's what gave me the idea,'� Sam says.

'What idea?'�

He appears to change the subject, lets out a long huff and lights up a cigarette, and then says, 'Have you ever thought about the responsibility of a truck driver?'�

'Sure,'� I reply, 'you have a ton of weight behind you that is difficult to control, wind makes the trailer fly erratic and I even read that the air pressure in the tires on these rigs is so high that if they were to blow it could blast a car next to it fifteen feet away into oncoming traffic.'�

'That's all true, sure, but I am talking about what we haul. Put it this way, if you can tell me one modern necessity that hasn't been shipped on a truck at some point I will give you my life's savings.'�

Sweet, free money, this should be easy. I start listing things, grocery supplies are shipped on refrigerated trucks, medical supplies are brought to hospitals in big trailers from larger factories and everything we use on a regular basis in the bathroom comes off of a truck as well. Maybe this will be a little harder than I thought.

'There you have it,'� Sam says, 'in a few seconds you have already demonstrated that without truckers all of the people in this country would have no food, no medicine and no means to bathe, brush their teeth or wipe their asses after putting in their time on the can.'�

'So what's your point?'�

'Are you already giving up on my life savings?'�

'Let's see,'� I say, 'what about cars?'�

'Cars are shipped on the backs of those weird framework trailers and even the trucks that pull them are pulled in on the backs of other trucks.'�

Now I'm growing excited I say, 'Not to mention the roads that those trucks travel in order to ship their products around the country. Those supplies are brought to the road construction companies on trailers. The supplies that build the vehicles those same companies used to build those roads are shipped by truck drivers. Construction supplies for the building the skyscraper corporations that sneer down on the blue collar workers are brought in by big rigs. It doesn't end, the more I think about it the more I realize that anyone would be hard pressed to even think of one thing that hasn't been on a truck at least once. What about natural resources, where do they fit in?'�

'Water is generally moved through pipes and canals to water treatment plants. However, those pipes were brought in by big rigs and those canals were constructed using concrete shipped in by truckers. Not to mention the fact that bottled water, a precious commodity these days, is shipped by delivery trucks. That's not even including every water cooler in every office in America that is replenished by some delivery boy once a week. Then there are trees, every tree cut down in this country to be used for home construction or paper production is brought to its destination by a log truck.'�

'And speaking of paper,'� I say, 'any mail that goes farther than the city limits, say across country, is loaded up in a large trailer and brought to a post office in Jersey or Washington or Florida or whatever.'�

'Any other resources you're wondering about?'�

'What about electricity? Surely that is independent of the trucking industry.'�

Sam replies, 'Partially, see you're thinking too simply, you're imagining someone loading live electricity onto a trailer and driving it down to the plant. This is, of course, ridiculous. However, what a lot of people don't know is that power plants have to run on an alternate fuel source in order to generate electricity. People have dabbled in varying forms of renewable energy like hydro-electric power or those weird windmill things you see in the hills of central California. In all cases, electricity is generated by machines and all machines need something to keep them moving. To this day, the most common system is a simple furnace they keep burning with large amounts of coal. And guess where the coal comes from?'�

'I get it,'� I reply, 'your money is safe. You could even go so far as to say that without trucks the power plants would never have been built in the first place.'�

'Right-o, kid. So now you get my meaning when I talk about the responsibility of a truck driver. One more thing, military supplies. Guns, ammunition, body armor, boots, helmets, armored cars, helicopters, tanks'�everything that is keeping this war going is shipped out by large manufacturing corporations on the backs of the truckers before being loaded onto cargo ships and brought overseas to the battlefield. Why if the truck drivers really got together on this thing we could end the war.'�

He laughs like he's joking but I feel strangely suspicious. I think about this shipment he is supposed to be taking to Fresno. Fresno, California is north and we're still heading west. 'Sam, where are we right now?'�

'The Mojave,'� he replies.

'Desert? I thought you were going to Fresno.'�

Sam laughs, 'I told you I was supposed to be going to Fresno.'�

Now the CB radio chimes in, a garbled voice on the other end says, 'Black Dog, you out there, Black Dog? Come back.'�

Black Dog, Sam Hall, grips the receiver and pins down a long gray button saying, 'Yessiree, Black Dog is here. All present and accounted for. That you, Jack Flash? Over.'�

'It's me, are we on schedule? Over.'�

We're pulling into this open land fill miles away from civilization. Trucks are dumping their loads right into a deep quarry-ravine filled with the remnants of a functioning society. Discarded wrappers and fast food orders, toilet paper, condoms and coffee filters span the horizon. A truck has backed up to the rim and a man is shoveling designer shoes and women's blouses and men's ties out of his trailer right down into the pit. Looking around I can't even see the desert anymore, it's nothing but tires and cargo trailers and exhaust fumes. All around me are what looks to be a few hundred thousand engines roaring in unison, shaking the hot sand beneath my feet. Some people laugh and rejoice as they pour their shipments down the proverbial drain. Others just park and shut off their rigs altogether. Everyone is there holding the country hostage with its need. A tattooed woman stands on top of her trailer and drops a banner that says, 'United we Stand.'�

Sam leans close and shouts over the big rig crowd noise, 'What do you think? A thing o' beauty, ain't it?'�

I stay quiet.

'See,'� he says, 'it started out as a way to make this war finally come to an end. I got on the horn and talked to a few buddies of mine about meeting out here and putting a stop to things. You know, hold a few military supplies hostage ' a political statement. Never coulda guessed things would've snowballed from there the way they have. It broke up into cells, each one with a different leader. I headed up mobile phones and media appliances. Jack Flash got all the food people out here. Now the leaders are arranging us into groups. The military vehicles and arsenals have already formed a ring around the perimeter, just in case someone should try to attack. Next layer in we have fuel followed by construction supplies and automobiles and it breaks down from there. Closer to the middle we're hanging on to the food and water and medical supplies because we're not sure how long we'll be out here.'�

'Sam, what is the point of all this?'�

'Simple, we're tired of being taken for granted. We're tired of this country favoring the suits without realizing that their chairman and CEOs and presidents would be nothing without people like us. Tired of someone getting a phone call and making an economic decision to send soldiers in half-dressed, well if the bosses have to stand naked then maybe they'll finally bring our boys home. If the president is naked maybe he'll finally start to think like a human being. We want America to realize that the so-called little people aren't so little.'�

He takes a long drag on a cigarette and says, 'Can't you just imagine it? First the looting will start. Then the gas will run out and they'll have no means of replenishing service stations. After that, food will diminish and businesses will shut down. In a few weeks there will be riots in the streets and every possible action our government might take will be out of their reach. The police will have no gasoline to fuel their vehicles and neither will the National Guard. Helicopters and smaller planes might be useful for a while but they will eventually run dry as well. In time, this government will realize how crippled it truly is and anarchy will set in. When the people of this country have finally, totally lost faith in their leaders and the White House has been toppled that is when we will return. We'll give the people what they want and we will establish a new order that does not offer the highest benefits to the least important jobs. That is when we will see to it that entertainers and athletes are not paid salaries equaling the gross-national product of some Third World countries while police officers and teachers and fire fighters and factory workers ' all the people that keep the heart of this country pumping ' are left out in the cold on a half-pension and forced early retirement. We're out here to realign America's backward value system.'�

'What about when the president calls for aid from our allies?'� I ask.

'Let him try, in time he will have no electricity to run a press conference and his people will have no power to watch one. When England answers with aid there will be no trucks to move the supplies they've offered. When Canada sends in their trucks to help out they will be shocked to find out how many of them are already here with me, those that are not out in here in the desert will be shocked to find out how short their trip is when they have no gas to keep it rolling. Kid, we have this country in a stranglehold. I wish I could say I'm sorry it has come to this, but I'm not.'�

United we stood, united they tore us apart.

Taking a few steps back I slowly walk away. In a fog I'm just wandering around this city of cold storage trailers, loggers, tankers and towers. These trucks have arranged themselves into grids and intersections like urban streets and all of the locals are camped out on their roofs to watch the sun set. Wandering off I hear one last thing from Sam Hall, something about how people told him he would never amount to anything when he became a truck driver. I hear something about how I can feel free to wander around, but I can never leave.

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