However, the most exciting members of this parade of growling, gnashing work beasts are the much smaller Dodge, Fargo, and DeSoto vehicles of the Turks themselves. Darting recklessly in and out of the paths of the more arrogant and high-riding Volvos and Mercedes-Benz trucks, the Turks' ten-wheelers are driven with an intensity once reserved for their Allah-directed battle horses. Gaily adorned with silk tassels, rainbow-colored beads, tinsel, and hand-painted frills, flowers, and scenes of mountain homes and big-eyed children, their vehicles are wonderfully wacky misfits in the conservative world of commerce and trade. As I have found the people themselves to be, their trucks seem to take a mischievous delight in not conforming to the rules of a modern society.

Combine all these would-be vehicular warriors with the incessant curiosity and hospitality of the masses packed along the road shoulders, and you will have some idea of the maelstrom of human energy and encounters I was immersed in during the first 150 kilometers east of the Bosporus Strait.

Let's take a look at just three of probably a dozen different persons who managed to wave me off my feet during one day in a stretch between the cities of Adapazari and Bolu.

First to shout "Gel! Gel!" (Come here!) at my passing figure was tassle-haired 34-year-old Acip. As did most Turks, he mistook me for a German, but was all the more excited to find I was of a much less common species--the Americans. He is what is jokingly referred to here as a "Turk -Deutsch." As have millions of Turkish men, he has spent most of his adulthood working in Germany and has thus begun to look and act more Western than Eastern.

In our stocking feet, and over the usual Turkish breakfast of pickled black olives, hard boiled eggs, heavily-sugared tea in tulip-shaped glasses, honey, bread, and bitter yogurt mixed in cold water, Acip revealed that we were in his father's home where he had returned for a brief visit. Although he, his wife, and three children were now able to live a modern lifestyle, as a result of his employment in faraway "Deutschland," they were hardly able to enjoy it because of homesickness. The cold and rains of Hamburg only added to his and his wife's sense of isolation. Like it or not, he knew that his aging "baba" (father), "anne" (mother), and "Turkiye" (Turkey), would never be fully his again: his children had been born in Germany, and it would be all too foolish to ever leave behind the privileges of the little ones' German citizenship.

Lunch, and my next insight into this society, were in the town of Duzce, in the insurance offices of 21-year-old Birol's father. Between heaping plates of rice topped with fried goat kidneys, mutton meatballs stewed in peppers, and honeycovered apricots, the soft-spoken Birol described how last year, as a university student, he had been imprisoned for six months for passing out socialist literature. In addition to giving up any hope of a college degree, he was still under police surveillance. Also, he had been beaten with a whip during his imprisonment.

Later, as I packed my notes to leave, a co-worker asked to see my notepad. He scratched out the word "Lenin" that Birol had written while emphasizing some point. It would be "hayir guzel" (no good) for me if the military or police found such words on my person, he warned.

My dinner "host" for the day was to ride up from behind in the dark on a big old bicycle to invite me to tea in the tire repair shack where he worked the night shift alone. Thickly mustachioed, wide-chested, and handsomely iron-jawed, 20-year-old Aydin was the fiercely proud son of Russian parents who had fled the communists when he was a small boy.

At one point, while stuffing ourselves with cantaloupe and a rough, flat bread smeared with red rose-petal-flavored honey and goat milk curds, he pointed to a poster of fur-capped Russians with curved swords leaping high above pony-tailed maidens. Making a fist, he shouted that he would love nothing more than to be a free and fighting Cossack of his Caucasus homeland. Then he reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a grease-smeared harmonica, wiped it across his leather vest, and blew through it a Russian dance tune that would have had the maidens leaping, too.

When the harmonica at last became silent and the floor stopped shaking from the pounding of heels, Aydin invited me to give up the road for the night and try sleeping on a cot in the back of the shack. I accepted. It hardly seemed sensible to turn down three offers of bed and shelter in one day. And besides, the world could do without one more misfit for at least a few hours.

Steven