The bridge: a great silver harp laid over the dark Hudson River against a warm but remote night sky. We crossed on foot, pausing to glance down over the side into the swirling suicidal currents, green-blue, icy-froth, and depthless, and the river so wide, the Palisades jutting its forearms in challenge for an arm wrestle with the New York shore. One cliff followed another and extended all the way up to the Tappan Zee Bridge, which looked thin, distant, barely visible, a ghost structure veiled in mists.

I remembered sitting upriver as a boy, with George and Louie and Mike and Earl and others, roasting hot dogs in a big trestle fire, and I now mentally waved to my own childhood - a yearning boy figure squatting on the shore, peering into the future in which I now stood, yet unable to see me. If we met now, would I like what I saw of myself? Was I the man I'd hoped at thirteen to become? I was trying to live out the boy's dream as best as I knew how. I just needed a little time to make it come true, I told myself.

On the Jersey side, in Fort Lee, I faced the immense vehicular river pouring out of the eastern city of my birth into the western night.The road wasn't beautiful. There weren't old Hudsons jammed with bop kids in T-shirts, or rickety old Dust Bowl jalopies piled with Beverly Hillbillies, or haggard Grapes of Wrath Joads in rumpled caps, or any of the highway fantasies I'd had. It was an eight-lane monotonous hemorrhage of steel and exhaust pipelined into ultimate darkness - though in fact we were going back in time, not forward, losing time as we moved west. We watched the Mars-red sun sink below the horizon. A chill wind gusted up our jackets, which we zipped up to the nose to protect our throats, and we shrugged and hopped in a desperate roadside dance to stay warm.

Right off, the wind chill had us up on toes, pirouetting thumbs out, auditioning for the drivers, hoping, praying, but no one stopped, and after an hour of this it didn't look like we were ever going to leave Jersey. Then, suddenly, in that skittish, fateful way that a road will remind us that we are on it only by its whim and that alone - and whether or not we get further will depend purely on luck seasoned heavily with determination, chance, and superstition - a rig so huge, so powerful, so bent on being a rig made for transcontinental travel (and so why ever would it bother to stop from its barreling flight down an overcrowded road merely to pick up two shlubs like us?) pulled over majestically onto the shoulder of the road and rolled to a stop. Then it just stood there with its signal lights blinking. George and I gaped back with uncertain hope, and then George's face contorted in that funny awestruck look he'd get, and shouted, "Holy shit! A ride! Let's go!" and we were pounding gravel to that rig like an end sweep in the season's climax game. From the rig came a sharp bugling steam-whistle blast of acknowledgment - its horn, I guess, only it sounded more like the prehistoric mating honk of a Tyrannosaurus rex - and when we got up to the cabin, George grabbed the big door handle that took both hands to jerk wide, tugged, jumped in, and I followed. We were high up there like in an airplane pilot's cabin, behind a huge dashboard, and the driver was this skinny, wiry, rooster-looking grizzled guy in his forties, with a baseball cap emblazoned with the words NAVY SEAL in grease-smudged tall gold letters

He shouted from an orthodontically challenged mouth of snaggled, slime-coated teeth linked by yawning strands of repugnant spittle: "Well, that took you damn long enough! What the hell were you thinking about?!" which we each needed time to think over and reply to, which seemed to only make him madder. He was angry as hell, shaking his head in virulent wonder, shouting, "What the fuck!!" and pushed down on his gears, throwing the rig into drive. He stomped and released his gas and hydraulic brakes as he walked the immense machine back onto the road, howling: "You look like a couple of first-timers. Well, if you gonna stick your thumb out and some road dog's dumb'nuff to pull over, the least you gotta do is - you boys listening to this? - "

"Yes, sir!" we yelled back.

"Good! You put your thumb out, you take your ride - so take your ride, boys, take your ride, goddammit. I could tell you was new. You boys new at this?"

"First time!" I shouted.

"Well, OK then, you coulda said so. Truck stops, no driver's gonna wait forever while you figure out what made him do it, even though it was your own thumb that flagged him down in the first place. You reading me on that?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Good. Because most truckers will not stop to pick you up off the road like I did. You know how goddamned lucky you are to be sittin' up here with me? You gotta go get your lifts around the truck stops. You got that boys?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Good! How far are you going?"

"Far as you'll take us," shouted George.

That upset him.

"I asked you how far you going?"

"Colorado," I shouted.