As a favor for his friend who gave him a loan, a man takes on a rider, Kevin, on his trip from his tortuous and disarrayed life in San Fransisco to Denver where his pregnant wife-to-be, Chris, waits for him. Kevin, a laconic, pot-head health freak, and the driver spend much of first leg of the 1600 mile trip in silence as Kevin is largely unresponsive to the drivers conversation making. After stopping at a small and sparsely patronized diner in Nevada one morning, a man named Sammy pulls up with a van-load of prostitutes. The driver wrestles with “an odd kind of horniness resulting from being up all night driving and thinking.” Back and on the road, and still “too wired up to get any sleep,” the driver suggests they stop at a nearby town in mid-Nevada where he could have some beer to relax himself. Kevin protests, remarking that he’s not comfortable with drinking and driving and that he’d rather hitch, to which the driver responds, “Go ahead,” but that they haven’t seen another car on the road for in hundreds of miles. 

They arrive at a hotel near the border of Nevada and Utah, a notorious casino and whorehouse, where the driver pays for a room. In returning to the car for Kevin, finds a note on the car’s dashboard saying that Kevin decided to hitch a ride, along with a $20 bill for his portion of the gas. It begins to snow. After returning inside the hotel to sulk, the driver takes to the roads in search of Kevin, noting that he’d likely freeze to death. After crawling the snow-layered streets at 10 mph, 5 miles down the road, the driver happens upon Kevin who eagerly jumps back into the car out of the cold. After the two exchange words, the driver remarking that he’d just saved Kevin’s life, they continue on their trek to Colorado, the driver desperately eager to see Chris and, in a few months, his daughter.