A Storyteller’s Highway

by

Paul Clark

      

In 1971, Steven Spielberg made his first commercial splash when he directed a made-for-TV movie called “Duel.” For 90 minutes, including commercial breaks, Spielberg presented an almost dialogue-free chase between the unseen driver of a semi-trailer and a befuddled and terrified Dennis Weaver, driving a 1970 Plymouth Valiant through winding and desolate roads of California.

In 1975, one of the oddest novelty pop songs of the Top 40 era reached number one—“Convoy” by C.W. McCall. “Convoy” simultaneously took advantage of the craze for citizen band radio and, possibly, killed off the craze. Who can forget these immortal lyrics?

Cause we gotta mighty convoy, rockin' through the night
Yeah we gotta mighty convoy, ain't she a beautiful sight?
Come on an' join our convoy, ain't nothin' gonna git in our way
We're gonna roll this truckin' convoy, cross the USA
Convoy . . .  

These two quintessentially American cultural events, in cinema and music, roughly correspond with my high school years, so I was unduly influenced by them. I remember sometime before I got my driver’s license telling my parents that I wanted to be a long-distance truck driver. I can’t specifically say that I was inspired by media to want to drive a truck. I was probably at least as much inspired by the fact that I lived in a house with 10 other people, and the notion of driving by myself, all over the country, self-sufficient in my tractor trailer, sure looked good at the time. (My desire to be a truck driver came after my desire to be a priest or a farmer; the desire for each of these vocations lasted only a couple of weeks, as I recall. Several decades later, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my life.)

I hadn’t thought of Spielberg’s movie, or C.W. McCall’s song, (or my desire to drive a truck, for that matter) for years until the other day when I sat down to re-read "I-80 Nebraska M.490-M.205," the last story in John Sayles 1979 collection, The Anarchists Convention. Published in The Atlantic magazine in 1975, Sayles’ story about a renegade trucker in Nebraska won the O. Henry Award for best short story that year.

In May of 1975, I was a junior in high school. I read the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s and Rolling Stone, subscribing to them all. The choice of magazines showed progress on my part—when I was in 7th and 8th grade, I subscribed to Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and Popular Mechanics. What’s odd about my magazine choices, especially in grade school, is that I’ve never been particularly political and I’ve never been mechanical. Of course, I’ve always needed to have a variety of reading material at hand. Subscribing to a lot of magazines was one way to ensure that something new to read would show up at my doorstep every day.

I don’t remember actually reading “I-80 Nebraska M.490-M.205” in The Atlantic. But a few years after the story came out, when I was working at a book store, I read Sayles’ first two novels, The Pride of the Bimbos and Union Dues. One night, I was at a party at the apartment of friends—they ran an antiquarian book business out of their apartment, specializing in first editions of American fiction. I pulled a copy a Sayles’ story collection from the shelf and paged to the back—

“This is that Alabama Rebel, this is that Alabama Rebel, do I have a copy?”

“Ahh, 10-4 on that, Alabama Rebel.”

“This is that Alabama Rebel westbound on 80, ah, what’s your handle, buddy and where you coming from?”

“This is that, ah, Toby Trucker, eastbound for that big O town, round about the 445 marker.”

“I copy you clear, Toby Trucker. How’s about that Smokey Bear situation up by that Lincoln town?”

“Ah, you’ll have to hold her back a little through there, Alabama Rebel, ah, place id crawling with Smokies like usual. Saw three of em’s lights up on the overpass just after the airport there.”

“And how ’bout that Lincoln weight station, they got those scales open?”

“Ah, negative on that, Alabama Rebel, I went by the lights was off, probably still in business back to that North Platte town.”

“They don’t get you coming they get you going. How bout that you-know-who, any sign of him tonight? That Ryder P. Moses?”

“Negative on that, thank God. Guy gives me the creeps.”

And it goes on. I laughed at first—the folksy “handles” the truckers gave themselves; the references to state troopers as “Smokey Bear”; the rest of the truckers’ idiom. But in the midst of a party, I leaned against the bookcase and read the whole thing. I then remembered reading it in the magazine, a few years back. At the time of the party, Sayles had made a name for himself with the release of his first movie, “The Return of the Secaucus 7” so he was somewhat “hot” as a writer and a moviemaker. What enraptured me was the rhythm of the story; the dialogue is all snatches of conversation over CBs. Except for one short scene, the characters in the story are never together—they connect over 300 miles of Nebraska highway through their radios. I was reading the story in a crowded smoky city apartment, but I had been transported to a dark highway where truckers dominate the road and alleviate boredom by intimidating “civilians”, i.e., non-truckers, not unlike what happened to Dennis Weaver’s character in “Duel.”

But the truckers have a nemesis of their own—Ryder P. Moses—an infamous trucker, sort of a Voldemort of the highways, who comes into and spectacularly out of these truckers’ lives over a two-week period. Moses is a secular highway preacher, monopolizing the airwaves with amphetamine-nourished monologues.

It’s still fun to re-read the story. If you lived through the 70s, all the CB talk will come back to you in a mish-mash of memories from movies and T.V. shows like “The Dukes of Hazzard.” If you didn’t live through the 70s, the language may seem as quaint and odd as, oh, the language of the Beats in the 50s.

I bought the book that night at the party and read through all the stories over the next couple of days. At the time, Sayles had only directed one movie. But reading the book now, and considering them in context with Sayles’ other movies over the years, it’s clear that one of Sayles’ strengths as a storyteller is conveying what it’s like to be part of a group. Sayles writes about several diverse groups in this collection—female temporary workers in “Home for Wayfarers”; aging anarchists in “At the Anarchists’ Convention”; undocumented Mexican restaurant workers in “Old Spanish Days”; the employees and customers at a movie theatre that is switching from running classics to running adult movies in “Children of the Silver Screen.” By packing so many characters in just a few pages, and often with just one or two key scenes of action—a difficult bowling shot; feeble septuagenarians linking arms in protest in a hotel ballroom; a frenzied dinner hour at a restaurant; a desolate stretch of road with a speeding trucker hauling a trailer of dead cows—Sayles relies on just a few choice but just right words to animate each character.

In the process, he proves himself quite an accomplished storyteller—in a literary way, not a cinematic way. Sayles obviously enjoys telling his stories. I can’t say it’s unfortunate that he has turned his storytelling energies to movies in the last two decades. Since The Anarchists’ Convention was published, Sayles came out with only one other novel and one story collection. That’s okay. One of the reasons we have bookshelves is to make it easier to go back in time to find those stories told in words that we once loved.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it