Uncommon Carriers [Paperback]

There are two places in the world -- home and everywhere else, and everywhere else is the same.'

"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.

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. Here, he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation. 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.

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, it is an engaging essay nonetheless, as 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 y 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, BK, this is the best of McPhee's books about people and this is the best there is. Highly recommended. prisrob 6-10-06

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. He 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 reversed to provide a drainage route. Efficient delivery techniques can allow Nova Scotia lobster to underprice their Swedish cousins - for a Nobel dinner! After riding the coal train to a power-generating station, he totals up what has been achieved. Twenty-three thousand coal trains emerge from the Powder River Basin each year. This is the equivalent of thirty-four thousand miles of rolling coal "going off as units to become carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide" and other pollutants to air-condition a population so needful of comfort that it consumes more coal in the summer than in the winter.

McPhee's mastery of language and observational skills make him the leading essayist in the US. He's kept that title for a long time, and this book demonstrates why. Always clear and interesting, this collection exhibits fully his enduring skills. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

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.

One 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