Uncommon Carriers

Interesting and well written

If it's by Mc Phee l'll buy it, and I have always liked it. Enough said.

John McPhee is the ultimate observer. He has an uncanny ability to reveal interesting details in the most mundane surroundings. Much of what he discloses are things we often overlook. Better yet, he imparts what he sees with impressive clarity and delightful wit. He draws on extensive experience, from purposely stalling aircraft [Table of Contents] to great ships roaming the seas [Looking For A Ship]. The underlying theme of this volume is a bit more ground-based, as he joins truckers, bargemen, train engineers and his son-in-law. With these companions, he exposes a bit more of our world to us. McPhee may not be able to engage in "talking shop" with the men he deals with in this book, but he's a master at "listening shop". What he hears from them is conveyed to us in a way that puts us right next to him, attending closely. Most of this book is about massive conveyors and who operates them. McPhee opens with an account of Don Ainsworth's huge truck, 20 metres long carrying 36 tonnes of various "hazmat" over US roads. McPhee rides Illinois River barges, watching 15 of them stretch over 300 metres before his perch in the pilot house. A driving snowstorm doesn't intrude as he sits in the cab of a diesel locomotive pulling over two kilometres of coal-filled cars. One conveyer doesn't even move on its own. Instead, a network of ramps and moving belts shifts cargo from one carrier to another in the great UPS transhipment centre between two runways in Kentucky's major airport. Lest you don't consider the distance between aircraft runways sufficiently impressive, to walk around the building entails a hike of 8 kilometres. It is fifteen times the size of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, Spain. The manager has to ask directions if he strolls through the facility. Not everything in this collection is about great size or great speed. The coal train, for example, must move at less than 2 metres per second at one point. McPhee is even allowed to do his own driving, although under direction. He "drives" a 12 metre long model ship in a lake near the French Alps. Ship captains from around the world gather in Port Revel to learn the finer points of maneuvering. Docking and close navigation require precise knowledge of water and wind conditions and how these act on the ship. The ship itself will exhibit its own characteristics, which must also be mastered. In one exercise McPhee relates, not one captain passed the test. Scaling down yet further, McPhee performs a modern update of Henry David Thoreau's journey on New England rivers. The essay may seem a non-sequitor to the theme of the book, but it truly fits as a comparison to how the pace of travel has changed. McPhee's observational powers reach well beyond the given moment. His description of eastern Washington State declares it could be like Umbria in Italy - "just add water". The Illinois River's bizarre history is recalled - having flowed north for millions of years, it was r

John McPhee is a national treasure. Through 28 books, he has brought participatory journalism to high art, bringing us stories of interesting people doing interesting things. This time, he takes a series of essays first published in New Yorker magazine, all addressing aspects of transportation of cargo, and presents them in "Uncommon Carriers." McPhee includes stories on trucking hazardous material, barging on the Illinois River, a school for oil tanker captains and the coals trains carrying coal from Wyoming the southeastern coal-fired power plants. As always, McPhee makes it fascinating. Partly, it's because he finds such fascinating characters. Trucker Don Ainsworth, for example. Partly, it's because he finds such fascinating tidbits. Rabbis who assure kosher truck transport, for example. But mostly it's because he finds and tells of fascinating subjects. Ranging from 1.3 mile long coal trains to 1,100 foot long strings of barges pushed up the narrow Illinois River, you have to ask how he finds out about this stuff. Would-be writers could do worse then study a McPhee paragraph, or analyze the organization of subjects across an essay. McPhee's skills include the ability to make it all seem effortless. When you consider the welter of detail he brings to each subject, without ever overwhelming the reader, your respect for his skills will grow. And I admit to a certain envy about how much fun McPhee gets to have. The book includes a tangentially related essay; McPhee and his son-in-law retrace the path of Henry David Thoreau and his brother in 1839 up an abandoned commercial waterway. The abandoned locks and channels of the canal system on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers speak to another time and another definition of commerce. The contrast between McPhee's writing and Thoreau's couldn't be stronger. "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" is nearly unreadable; McPhee's writing is impeccable. Another outstanding collection of essays from America's greatest living expository writer. Highly recommended.

McPhee relates his experiences in a number of situations - attending ship-handling school, riding in an 18-wheeler, going up the Illinois River on a barge, following lobsters to UPS' Louisville air-hub, and taking a coal train from Wyoming to Georgia. Each instance (except riding the 18-wheeler - I drive a 22-wheeler) built my understanding and respect for those involved. 1)Ship-handling is much more complex than I had imagined - wind, waves reflected from other ships and/or the shoreline, water depth, and the inertial lags involved all make it an exercise in Newtonian mechanics best left to others. 2)I am already familiar with truck-driving, and can attest that McPhee reports accurately. However, limiting his experience to one owner-operator misses the frustration associated with many other driving jobs - eg. difficulty getting time off when wanted, driving odd hours that mess up one's circadian rhythms, wasting untold hours waiting to load/unload or get an assignment - all of which combine to create 100%+ annual driver turnover. On the other hand, it also affords a great way to see the U.S. 3)After earlier reading about ship-handling I was prepared for the skill required to pilot barges up/down U.S. rivers. The barge "train" that McPhee rode was 1,145 feet long - passing other barges, avoiding bridge support columns - at night and in sometimes strong currents and winding rivers! Clearly easier said than done. And the deckhands are only paid $80-119/12-hour day while being out 2-4 weeks at a time! 4)McPhee follows Nova Scotia lobsters (trucked every 5-6 days) to the UPS air hub in Louisville, KY. (30 hour trip), and from there sorted and sent on their way on one of 100 planes - even to Paris. We also learn that there are 120 miles of belts and monorails within the sorting facility (stacked 10-15 levels high in some locations), that UPS has established its own university to help attract workers, and warehouses/repairs goods for a number of manufacturers in nearby facilities. 5)Western winds can sometimes lift an empty coal car, says McPhee. Unit coal trains (about 65 cars - 1.5 miles) almost always go entirely to a single plant. They are filled at .4 mph (115 tons/car), and emptied at 3 mph. The trains rarely go up/down a grade exceeding 1.2%, and their length sometimes requires braking with the front engines going downhill as the rear engines continue to push the last cars up the other side of the same hill. Supplying the Macon, Georgia plant (burns about 1,300 tons/hour) entails 35 unit coal trains - either coming or going.

"The most beautiful truck on earth-Don Ainsworth's present sapphire-drawn convexing elongate stainless steel mirror- get s smidgen over six miles to the gallon. As its sole owner, he not only counts it calories with respect to it gross weight but with regard to the differing fuel structures of the states it traverses. It is much better to take Idaho fuel than phony-assed Oregon fuel. The Idaho fuel includes all the taxes. The Oregon fuel did not. Oregon feints with an attractive price at the pump, but then shoots an uppercut into the ton-mileage." In "Uncommon Carriers" we come to know Don Ainsworth, the intelligent, fastidious owner-driver of a meticulously kept 18-wheeler. And, we are privy to all of his first hand knowledge about trucking and life in general. John McPhee rides from Atlanta to Washington state with Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, five-axle, and eighteen wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmets. John McPhee's writing carries us along in the seat with Don and John, and I have a new hero now, Don Ainsworth. A trucker worth his weight in gold, and like Reader's Digest's old series, "a most unforgettable character". This book is "a grown-up version of every young boy's and girl's, I might add, fantasy life," This is John McPhee's 28th novel. What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. He attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for 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. We learn that some tank wash facilities, where the containers of food-transporting trucks are flushed out between hauls, have a rabbi standing by to assure they are kosher. It is bad luck to utter the word lapin (rabbit) on a French ship. There is a subculture of more than 100,000 "train watchers" in this country, and there are more transients hopping illegal rides on freight trains today than there were during the 1930s. In the most fascinating piece, McPhee visits the UPS hub at the Louisville, Kentucky, airport, where 5,000 workers sort a million packages every night. The building, with four million square feet of floor space and five miles of exterior walls, houses an almost entirely automated skein of conveyors where "packages containing everything from Jockey shorts to live lobsters find their rightful destination in minutes--a sort of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory for the world of mail-order commerce." John McPhee and his son-in-law spend fiv

Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote that "to do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably." The focus of John McPhee's excellent new book, Uncommon Carriers, is on people who do uncommon things remarkably well. On my first, nervous day in the ocean shipping industry (an industry that carries most of the world's cargo in international trade) my boss took me to a run down diner in lower Manhattan. We sat at the counter and the waiter came up to us with a fish in his hand. "You have to have the fish. Look at this. The boss picked it out at the market this morning. You have to have this." After he walked away my boss told me that in our business I was going to be entrusted with other people's cargo. He said that as long as I treated that cargo, and my job, like that waiter treated that fish, I'd eventually learn how to do my job the right way. I could have quit then and there because I've probably never had a better lesson about how to do a job right than I got at that lunch. "Uncommon Carriers" is about a group of people who transport other people's cargo as if it were "their fish". It is a fascinating look at the people and methods by which we get food on our tables, heat in our furnaces and clothes on our back. I've admired McPhee since I read his wonderful overview of life in the liner shipping industry, "Looking for a Ship". He has a way of taking complicated processes or procedures that are little known to the general public and writing about them in a way that the general public, and even I, can understand. When it comes to describing the people who operate these machines, McPhee doesn't get in the way of the voice of his protagonists. He lets their natural eloquence come through. Uncommon Carriers begins and ends with a look at Don Ainsworth and his sixty-five foot, five-axle chemical tanker truck that carries all sorts of hazardous chemicals throughout the United States. Ainsworth treats his rig with the pride and concern a parent treats his or her first child. He makes sure it is immaculate and only uses filtered water to clean it. He prides himself on being able to navigate the steepest descents without resort to his brakes. Rather, like a chess player he plans his downshifting (over 18 gears) in such a way as to keep the rig at an appropriately safe speed. Next we travel to Grenoble, France where masters of huge containerships or tankers spend a week in an advanced simulation exercise using large models of their vessels that sharpen their skills as they navigate the world's oceans. As with Ainsworth, McPhee provides us with the voices of these international seamen as they dissect their performance. McPhee goes on to include chapters on a tug and barge-master moving a tremendous amount of tonnage on the narrow confines of the Illinois River; a walk through the enormous air cargo sorting facility at UPS's facility at the airport in Louisville, Kentucky. It is here that