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Uncommon Carriers ReviewHarriet 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
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