After twenty five years of driving a taxi through the streets of New York City, Sam Garrety has had enough. Fed up with the accumulation of abuses from passengers, city traffic, and the bureaucratic Taxi Commission, he's ready to quit. The loss of his cat, Dupree, a rescue from the street, and the only family he has, begins a day of unfortunate events that leaves him at the end of his night shift parked across the street from the Lincoln Tunnel. He shuts off the engine to Mellow Yellow, his '72 Checker cab with over 300,000 miles on her. There, he sits, staring up the street, an avenue that will take him uptown toward his one room flat and the same, every-day, mundane lifestyle. Here before him, as well, is a crossroad, a life altering decision that suddenly comes to mind in the form of two directions that otherwise would have been two insignificant patches of asphalt. Well-traveled and diseased with the trappings of countless, congested rush hours and their mayhem, the intersection held no more appeal other than that of its intended use--a way to someplace else. For Sam, the Lincoln Tunnel is a way out, not a way back in. He starts the engine, turns the wheel left and drives west. With $8000 in the taxi's safe, he doesn't stop until he reaches the Navaho Reservation in Arizona. There he's greeted with the allure of the desert, the endearing love of D'Ozilgaii Sanderson, and unfortunately for him, the wrath of three troublesome teenagers. He's thrown into the trunk of his taxi and taken into no man's land deep within Monument Valley. Left there to walk out of the desert on his own, Sam searches within himself for survival and a way back to civilization.