Uncommon Carriers [Hardcover]

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 McPhee quotes one of the operators of these horribly complicated sorting processes thusly: "We become a partner with the companies. We run these businesses like they're our own." Once again, here are living examples of the lesson my first boss tried to teach me in that little diner. Finally, we get a look at the country's coal trains, moving millions of tons of coal a year on mile long freight trains from coal mines in Wyoming to energy facilities around the country.

The only chapter that didn't quite work for me was McPhee's discussion of his 5-days canoeing up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, following the footsteps of John and Henry Thoreau. Although well-written and evocative of a time long past this chapter just didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Nevertheless, the clarity of McPhee's writing is well worth the minor diversion.

Fans of McPhee won't need me to convince them to read "Uncommon Carriers". For those new to McPhee all of his books are worthy of reading (and in many cases re-reading). After reading Uncommon Carriers you won't look at a truck, train, or tank vessel without thinking about those people who treat these huge vessels and the cargo they carry as if they were their own. Highly recommended.

L. Fleisig

"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 five days in a canoe, retracing the route Henry David Thoreau wrote about in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Though there is no freight involved, the canoeists encounter a terrain much changed since the 19th century. This piece was a disappointment. It is well written, but not up to his par, in my opinion.

John McPhee ends his book by revisiting with Don Ainsworth thirty-six months after he had first left him. As he says, "If you have crossed the American continent in the world's most beautiful truck, you prefer not to leave it forever". Yes, suh, sweetie, this is the best of McPhee's books about people and this is the best there is. Highly recommended.
prisrob 6-11-06

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.

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