The magic of the moment that the momentum of the circle, made up of love and vitality. reached the empty chair filled by John Dwyer's guitar, paused for a moment to refresh itself with the reason that it had come together and then reignited, is a wonderful description of how magic musical moments, under the right condition, can even be silence.

This is a wonderful idea for a thread. I would have been "here" sooner but I have been down in Los Angeles working. I finished at midnight on Monday-Tuesday and during the night drove the 400+ miles home just because I love being on the road at night. I guess I always have. This time, I was driving a truck and had a tray full of CDs. It was eight or nine hours of my favorite music.

It may have been twenty years ago that I left Fruita, CO, about an hour or two before a summer morning dawn heading west to Green River, Utah. That time, though, I was on a motorcycle and the reason I was riding in the night was that I wanted to complete the trip before the sun got up too high and the road across the high desert landscape started to bake. It's 110 miles from Fruita to to Green River and at that time there were no services available along that entire stretch even though it is an Interstate. It is a very lonely stretch of real estate.

When I started the bike, I tuned the CB to Channel 19. Since there was no traffic on the road, I didn't expect to hear anything. It was more force of habit than anything else. I set the radio's squelch so that I didn't pick up any static that would destroy the quiet of the fading night and I headed west.

As the sky behind me turned to cobalt blue, the color in the rocky landscape was just starting to become visible. Black silhouettes were being filled in with grays, then purple, and then reds and greens. It was like watching creation. I could see six or eight miles ahead and there wasn't anything else moving on the road or I would have seen their headlights. I didn't know it but there was an eighteen wheeler heading towards me, still out of sight, and I am guessing that the driver must have been at the wheel all night.

When he did come up over a rise a half dozen miles or so ahead of me, I didn't pay any attention and I don't think he paid me any particular notice. At a closing speed of somewwhere between 130 to 150 miles per hour, it didn't take long until we had flashed by each other. I'll bet that if he saw me at all, he certainly didn't see the small CB antenna jutting up from my luggage rack.

That driver must have been so overcome at that pre-dawn moment by the expanse of desert and the length of the road ahead and behind that he felt he had to express it somehow. He picked up his CB mike and began singing a song that he obviously believed expressed the emotions he was feeling. He emptied his heart into his CB microiphone and poured his feelings out into what he must have believed to be an empty landscape. When he got to the line, "The moon has gone behind a cloud / I'm so lonesome I could cry", I was as moved by the unselfconscious performance of that unknown trucker as I have ever been listening to any performance of any kind.

Sourdough