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Uncommon Carriers
by John Mcphee
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Synopses & Reviews Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the "tight-assed" Illinois River on a "towboat" pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being "a good deal longer than the Titanic." And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John, in a homemade skiff in 1839.
Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character.
Review: "McPhee's 28th book (after The Founding Fish) is a grown-up version of every young boy's fantasy life, as the peripatetic writer gets to ride in the passenger seat in an 18-wheel truck, tag along on a barge ride up the Illinois River and climb into the cabin of a Union Pacific coal train that's over a mile long. He even gets to be the one-man crew on a 20-ton scale model of an ocean tanker in a French pond where ship pilots go for advanced training. As always, McPhee's eye for idiosyncratic detail keeps the stories (some of which have appeared in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly) lively and frequently moves them in interesting directions. One chapter that starts out in a Nova Scotia lobster farm winds up in Louisville, Ky., where McPhee is quickly beguiled by the enormous UPS sorting facility. In a more intimate piece, he takes a canoe and retraces Thoreau's path along New England rivers, noting the modern urban sprawl as well as the wildlife. 'There are two places in the world — home and everywhere else,' the towboat captain tells McPhee, 'and everywhere else is the same.' But McPhee always uncovers the little differences that give every place its unique tale. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "Over the past few years John McPhee, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has traveled the United States by rail and road, by river and canal. Riding shotgun in Don Ainsworth's 65-foot chemical tanker, he 'fell down' Cabbage Hill in Oregon — a 2,000-foot descent over 10 miles. Towboat pilot Mel Adams took him through the Pekin wiggles on the Illinois River with five feet of clearance below the bridge. ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Travis Spalding, who works for UPS, guided him around a white box between the runways at Louisville International Airport containing 4 million square feet of floor space and maybe 50,000 pounds of torpid lobsters, and he also went up a line of Nebraskan railroad towns to Gibbon Junction over the Platte River, with Paul Fitzpatrick as conductor. 'Uncommon Carriers' is about the truckers, dispatchers, towboat crews, train drivers and trainee sea-captains whose lives revolve around shifting freight. There's a scene in the book in which a boatman goes up to the end of a towboat on the Illinois river. Halfway down he looks tiny; by the time he's reached the bow, he's an ant. The tow, pushing seven barges wired together, is much longer than the Titanic; it burns 2,400 gallons of diesel fuel a day. It is a distant relative of the mining trucks McPhee sees in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, where the coal is sawed out of the ground to make canyons several miles long, and hauled to the coal trains by vehicles so large, he writes, that their tires look 'the way bagels would look to a virus.' Some of this coal goes 1,800 miles to Georgia's Plant Scherer, the largest coal-fired power plant in the western hemisphere. If it burns more coal in summer than winter — that's for air conditioning. This is also a book about people dwarfed by their surroundings — by the systems they operate, the machinery they drive, the distances they cover. Dwarfed — but not necessarily diminished. Ainsworth, for instance, owns his own rig: a dark sapphire tractor and a chemical tanker so shiny and mirror-bright that you could part your hair in it. He reads the Wall Street Journal, collects boots and is something of a philosopher. When he has the exterior of his rig washed, he goes to places that use 'either reverse-osmosis or deionized rinse water'; it costs him double, but there are no streaks on the finish. 'This,' he says, 'is as close as a man will ever know what it feels like to be a really gorgeous woman.' After he washes the interior of his tanker, he's free to pick up another load of hazmats. They are chemicals such as WD-40 concentrate, parts degreaser, surfactant, a soap used in making bricks, weed killers, paint thinners, latex for plywood, latex for the dye that turns brown cardboard white — things you never knew existed. He won't carry cashew-nutshell oil, which goes into anything that requires friction, such as brake pads. 'I believe it harms my barrel,' he says. Ainsworth is a very, very good driver. Like Ainsworth — indeed, like most of the experts he encounters — McPhee is also very good at what he does. He has written about geology in the past, and he deals with this stratum of American civilization in a deceptively neutral tone, as if he were describing tectonic plates: His prose has a tendency to stack up and roll on by like a two-mile boxcar railroad engine passing an impatient four-wheeler at a crossing. What fascinates McPhee, apart from the lives of the men and women he meets, is their oddly coded language. He likes that hard-crust jargon, with its acronyms and labels, not least, I think, because it reflects the dignified efforts of men and women to encompass and express facets of an alien world much larger than ourselves. Very gently, and without any superfluous comment, McPhee portrays ours as a Rabelaisian economy, a web of bloated, fundamentally brainless systems ingeniously devised to serve the world's appetites. One moment it's coal; the next, it's those lobsters I mentioned, who are kept alive at a steady temperature to prevent them from wanting to molt and are sold all year round, all over the world, via the UPS hub in Kentucky — a hub maintained by drowsy students who work nights to pay for college. McPhee's uncommon carriers are, in their way, witness to the wilderness that is America, even to this day. In this absorbing and deceptively simple book, he goes back to Thoreau, paddling his way up a river that has already been worked over and abandoned by economic man; but I found myself thinking about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the moment when America was still a vast unknown. What has become of this humongous space? What's in it? Not mammoths, as Jefferson might have guessed. Just torpid lobsters, sleepy people. Jason Goodwin is the author of 'Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire' and a mystery novel, 'The Janissary Tree.'" Reviewed by Jason Goodwin, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Book News Annotation: Prolific (he's written 27 other books) and still energetic at 75,
McPhee here turns his attention to the experiences of people who
work in freight transportation--those whose travel is not at all
"virtual." He offers a personalized view of what goes on as stuff of
all types gets transported via roads and trucks, boats, trains, and
planes.
Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Synopsis: Here, at his adventurous best, the author chronicles his eight years of being out and about with people who work in freight transportation. The prose is distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character. About the Author JOHN McPHEE is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of twenty-seven books, all published by FSG. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780374280390
- Author:
- Mcphee, John
- Publisher:
- Farrar Straus Giroux
- Author:
- McPhee, John
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Essays
- Subject:
- Transportation
- Subject:
- Freight and freightage
- Subject:
- General Transportation
- Publication Date:
- May 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 248
- Dimensions:
- 8.36x6.20x.94 in. .88 lbs.
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