As night falls, a furious rainstorm descends. Raindrops streak white in the headlights and pound incessantly against the cracked windshield. Just ahead, a lumber truck sits idle, its young driver waving to the oncoming traffic for help.
Zhenya pulls over and rolls down the window. "What do you need?" The driver shouts a request for a part, and Zhenya shakes his head in response. "Don't have that, sorry. I just had to have mine replaced." The drenched young man presses closer to the window and asks for a cigarette. Zhenya hands him a couple, wishes him well and eases back onto the highway.
"He's not a trucker with my company," he says, glancing in his rearview mirror. "But you've got to stop and help someone if they need it."
As often as possible, drivers try to travel together, in case anything goes wrong on the road. On overnight hauls, like the 17-hour Vladivostok-Khabarovsk trip, drivers often pull their trucks over in a group, so they can catch a few hours sleep with the security of the other trucks nearby.
"I've never had any trouble," says Zhenya about crime on the road. "But then again, what's to stop someone from standing in the middle of an empty stretch of road with a gun and making me pull over? Anything could happen." Although some of the traffic police along the road do wear bulletproof vests and carry machine guns, the highway hardly seems to be a den of thievery, with bandits lurking around every bend.
Zhenya finally pulls over at around 3 a.m. to sleep for several hours. He has been driving for 11 hours straight, along twisting detours and rocky, unpaved stretches, through jarring potholes and blinding rain. He leans against the door, his head resting on a small pillow. The sun will rise in just over three hours, and he'll set out again.
