Google John McPhee. Pick out a few reviews of some of his 27 books. Among other things, you are likely to find nearly unanimous critical astonishment at how this master essayist repeatedly gleans riveting reporting from the seemingly banal. Is there any subject McPhee cannot make interesting? is the refrain. No, is the answer.
In his new book, “Uncommon Carriers” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 256 pages, $24), McPhee pieces together, from six sketches, a singular profile of the vessels that make up the modern system of international freight transport, as well as the people who drive them. He rides with the owner and operator of the world’s most beautiful truck, a hazardous-materials tanker, from Harrisburg, N.C., to Tacoma, Wash. He runs scale-model ocean tankers aground in the Swiss Alps. He’s in the cab with a barge pilot on the Illinois River when a real ship haltingly meets with the edge of the water. He rides a coal train and a canoe, and guides the reader through the behemoth labyrinth of a UPS sorting station.
With warm – and dry – humor, and an eye for the perfect and perfectly placed quote, McPhee creates compelling profiles of characters cast in fascinating technical roles within the dizzyingly complex system of global transport logistics. Well, that and of lonely and road- or stream-wearied men relishing occasional visual gifts from passing exhibitionist women.
“Most of what I’ve written about over the years relates to things I was interested in when I was young. This is not an example,” said McPhee of the uncommon nature of “Uncommon Carriers” in a recent phone interview from his Princeton, N.J., office. While McPhee acknowledges the difference between this and his previous works, which have dealt mainly with ideas of nature and wildness, he says all his work is bound by one common theme: “My biggest interest is in drawing pictures of people against the background of what they do.”
But while this book continues McPhee’s interest in “real people doing interesting things,” McPhee says the genesis of this book also sets it apart. It started with two letters from readers of his work. McPhee says he received a letter from a merchant mariner a long while back and became interested in the people who run commercial ocean vessels. He boarded a ship with the author of that letter, following him and his cohorts on a voyage and eventually writing the book “In Search of a Ship,” chronicling the plight of these interesting and outspoken characters.
In response to that book, Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of the world’s most beautiful truck – to the layperson: A truck is, according to Ainsworth, only a vehicle with 18 or more wheels – wrote to McPhee and invited him out on the open American road.
“I wrote back to him asking him what it was that he did,” says McPhee. Ainsworth wrote back pages and pages on a legal pad describing the hazardous materials he carried in a tanker, McPhee writes, that is so highly polished “you could part your hair in it.” After four years of communication, McPhee hopped in the cab and the opening piece in “Uncommon Carriers,” titled “A Fleet of One,” was born.
Spirit of freedom
“A Fleet of One” opens this book with the most lively of McPhee’s recent travels, and his most humorous character profile. It is here he explodes the notion of the illiterate, speed-crazed truck driver. It is also here that, in the funniest passage in the book, he dons a hat embroidered with the phrase “AMERICA – SPIRIT OF FREEDOM” and is instantaneously transformed into one of them.
McPhee stands in awe of the technical precision that runs the world around us, and takes us along for the ride as he navigates the interconnectivity of international logistics. He deftly describes the mind-boggling minutiae of shiphandling – learned again for the first time, it seems, by experienced ship pilots on a lake in the Alps that has been reconfigured as a scale-model ocean – where an almost Zen-like sense of the vessel is as important as the constant calculations in math and physics required of “licensed master of ships of any gross tons upon oceans.”
As in all of his works, the author translates his seemingly insatiable curiosity into stunningly written and remarkably accessible blueprints of even the most technical of occupations. And it is in this ability that McPhee sets himself apart from other essayists.
While his profiles certainly work best when he can form a bond with his subjects, pulling from their own mouths the large metaphors that really describe the work they do, McPhee still can pull it off without much of their help. In artfully conveying the harrowing close calls that barge drivers on the Illinois River experience daily, McPhee runs across people who resent his presence on the boat. No matter how much snuff he dips in solidarity.
A vivid impression
And in describing what might be the most complicated system of the book, if not the entire global logistics infrastructure, McPhee does exactly what has left so many readers and reviewers surprised over the years: He breathes fantastic visual life into something as boring as the UPS package sorting facility in Lexington, Ky. In reporting on, and writing this section of the book, McPhee musters one word: “bewildering.”
“I worried a lot about that description. All you could hope to do was to give an impression that worked. You could never describe something like that in a blueprint kind of way,” says McPhee, adding that all he tried to do is give a vivid impression of the place. Mission accomplished.
Like most of McPhee’s writings, “Uncommon Carriers” often reads like subcultural anthropology, concerning the language, customs, history and traditions of the chosen professions of his characters. He loves to play with other peoples’ words, looking for what he calls “bits that shine,” creating not a glossary of esoterics, but a true sense of how these people reconstruct the realities of their lives through words.
Those looking for the environmental themes of McPhee’s most well-known works will not be disappointed. He deals with nature and development directly when retracing a canoe trip taken by Henry David Thoreau in the 1830s, and punctuates the piece “Coal Train” with a kind of sidetracked explanation of how the Clean Air Act transformed the business of rail freight forever.
Though large parts of this book appeared elsewhere – in both The New Yorker, where McPhee is a staff writer, and The Atlantic Monthly – having these pieces bound in one collection gives each a deeper meaning in the context of their association.
Everything is connected in “Uncommon Carriers.” Fresh lobsters have much more in common with the American distribution of parts for Bentley luxury sedans than you might think. And when the author makes a transition from a lake in the Alps, where ocean ship handlers are honing their craft, to an American river where “towboaters” push barges through impossibly narrow channels, the reader is left in jaw-dropping awe of the technical skill it takes to navigate our domestic waterways.
In a world where the technical specialties of a few individuals go unnoticed, a world where a printer ordered over the Internet can show up on your doorstep within 24 hours, we are lucky to have in McPhee an author who is as insatiably curious to figure it all out as he is adept at retelling with a smile what he has seen.
Sean Cronin is a Denver-based freelance writer.
