The movement of materials and goods through transportation brings material objects and the making of forms of value into the infrastructure of roadways, vehicles, and into the intimate labor of driving and handling. The movements of commodities are thus stitched together and interwoven with the country’s roadways and these trajectories form mysterious narratives: Joe, who lives in Idaho, drives sunglasses made in Taiwan from Los Angeles along Interstate highways through Wyoming and Montana. In Bozeman, they are unloaded at a centralized distribution center and then categorized and transported by local vehicles to a variety of shops where a customer makes a selection in front of a round rack dotted with mirrors. Or, concrete is transported from a main distributor to a retailer and finally sold to a customer who uses it to build a new brick wall around his property, thus completing a trajectory that circumscribes the macro and the micro. Transportation, in these narratives, is produced by and aids in generating the fastidious movement of global capitalism, grounding all the rhetoric and projected notions of corporate development to the intimate level of bodies and the weight of trucks on the road. Speeding along a highway, the intangible power of capital meets the tangible sweat of movement and labor.

Based on the networks and infrastructures of trucking and roadways, Active_Trucking maps and notates idiosyncratic aspects of this system. Acquiring information from a variety of sources including trucking companies, notes from excursions on the road and interviews with truckers in the Los Angeles area Active_Trucking seeks to present narratives about the existing system and structure of trucking in the United States and give form to these infrastructural expressions as both economical and alchemical. We are particularly interested in the movements and intersections that occur on the roads of the US both as material embodiments of trade policies, that is, as an example of the constantly negotiated abstract dynamics of transport and markets that have significant local impact, and the mythic fantasies of the open road and the desire for freedom. In the spaces of the highway, we imagine narratives of "Free Trade" intersecting with Easy Rider: multiple narratives that mark the road both as a site for cultural mores and economic activity. The labor of the trucker, the mechanics of trucks, and the workings of dispatchers and related transport companies, feature as efficient systems always on the edge of disruption, distraction, and delay according to the complications of laboring bodies fixated on the roadway. As Lawrence J. Ouellet muses:

“As a truck driver I experienced a wide range of emotions and feelings, maybe more than people in most other jobs. I had episodes of utter boredom and times of depression at the thought that this life might be my fate. There were periods of great stress, jobs so physically demanding that I wondered if I could make it through the next shift, and work so devoid of joy that getting out of bed in the morning was a supreme act of will. The bleakness of concrete and smog at high noon, traffic jams on urban freeways, and mindless and seemingly endless thirty-minute circles from quarries to construction sites and back numbed my mind. Driving long hours was tiring: at times I felt at the brink of exhaustion. Yet trucking has another side: Driving can be a source of great joy, satisfaction, and even enchantment. As a trucker, I probably saw more sunrises and sunsets than most people see in their lifetimes. I drove across mountains and prairies, deserts and farmlands, and through the paradise that is the Pacific Northwest. There were nights of magic: crossing the snow-covered Cascades under a full moon so bright that I could drive with my headlights off; a summer moonrise over Alberta wheat fields; two a.m. on Highway 99, windows down and the air full of the smells of the Valley’s farms and ranches.” (Pedal to the Metal, pg. 3)

Initiated in 1956 by President Eisenhower, the Interstate System was built to facilitate the movement of transportation across the entire country, and today consists of over 65,000 miles of roadway through all 50 states, including Puerto Rico. In addition to transportation, the Interstate System was developed to facilitate the movements of troops and other military exercises, as well as providing a method of evacuation from city centers in times of disaster. While literally linking the country together through these roadways, the infrastructure of transportation was also seen as critical to the development of a market structure that enables the movements of goods to all corners of the country. Within the logic of capitalism, this movement is generally understood as politically neutral; something that benefits the population as a whole and provides opportunity. In this way, roads are not only about getting from place to place, but are infrastructural devices for the nurturing of capital movement. The roads, however, remain a complex and conflicted site. The Interstate System is technically a public space, built and maintained by tax dollars, and theoretically facilitates travel and transport according to the will of citizens. At the same time, the mythology of the highway runs throughout popular culture as a conduit of free expression and spirit. The highway becomes a space of pure fantasy… a space of escape and wandering, exemplified notoriously in Kerouac’s writings – “Just as we rolled in Iowa City he saw another truck coming behind us, and because he had to turn off at Iowa City he blinked his tail lights at the other guy and slowed down for me to jump out, which I did with my bag, and the other truck, acknowledging this exchange, stopped for me, and once again, in the twink of nothing, I was in another big high cab, all set to go hundreds of miles across the night, and was I happy!…” In the space of mythic highway narratives, the practicalities of movement and transportation is juxtaposed with the performative digressions of individual will and imagination. To get behind the wheel then is to enter a system of banal functionality and the potentiality of total oblivion: “I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.” (On the Road, pg. 19-20)

The recent transportation of plastic resin by Stagecoach Cartage and Distribution from El Paso to Hermosillo, Mexico highlights the ongoing politics of the road. Although Mexican trucks frequently cross into the U.S. since NAFTA, the transport was the first crossing of a US truck into Mexico. “Today is historic. We’re giving U.S. trucking companies the opportunity to compete in a new market that they have never before been allowed to penetrate,” said John H. Hill, FMCSA Administrator. “These opportunities will help reduce costs for American consumers and businesses while increasing trade efficiency at the border and maintaining safety on America’s highways.” An FMCSA news release stated that “thousands of Mexican commercial trucks operate every day in U.S. cities like San Diego and El Paso and last year made more than 4 million crossings into border commercial zones, which extend approximately 20-25 miles into the United States. U.S. commercial trucks, however, have never had the authority to operate in Mexico.” (The Trucker, 9/15/07) This instance of movement within the infrastructure of transportation becomes entangled with ideological debates about border security and immigration and trade policy and economic development. The rather modest act of driving a truck loaded with resin across the border carries implications that resonate through multiple zones, both economic and cultural, which echo with the actions of illegal trafficking, smuggling, and other pirated and black forms of market movements. The Interstate is thus haunted, not only with Kerouac’s subjective dissipations, but also with political and social turmoil.