Rereadings: John McPhee's "Uncommon Carriers"

This is the fourth in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is John McPhee’s superb Uncommon Carriers (2006).

This is a book about freight transportation. Sound exciting? Well, it is. McPhee brings it alive. How? That’s one of the things I want to look at here – his technique. He’s an incomparable stylist. But first, I’ll describe the book’s contents. It consists of seven pieces, six of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Here’s a brief summary of each:

1. “A Fleet of One” – Tells about McPhee’s three-thousand-one-hundred-and-ninety mile ride with trucker Don Ainsworth, from Bankhead, Georgia, to Tacoma, Washington, aboard Ainsworth’s dazzling sixty-five-foot, five-axle, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker.

2. “The Ships of Port Revel” – Tells about McPhee’s visit to Port Revel, a ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of fifteen thousand dollars a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models.

3. “Tight-Assed River” – Tells about McPhee’s trip up the Illinois River on a towboat pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being “a good deal longer than the Titanic,” longer even than the Queen Mary 2.

4. “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” – Tells about his canoe trip up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways travelled by twenty-two-year-old Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John, in a homemade skiff 164 years earlier, the journey described in Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

5. “Out in the Sort” – Tells about his visit to UPS Air’s distribution hub at Louisville International Airport, where a million packages are processed daily.

6. “Coal Train” – Tells about his ride in the cabs of coal trains in Nebraska, Kansas, Georgia, and the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.

7. “A Fleet of One – II” – Tells about a second trip McPhee took with Don Ainsworth aboard his chemical tanker – this one an eastbound-and-westbound seven-hundred-and-fifty mile run, starting at the Western Truck Stop in Henrietta, New York. 

Okay, that’s exceedingly rough, but at least it gives you an idea of what the book is about. Now for a taste of the writing, which, for me, is the main attraction. Here’s a sample: 

And now CCTBT was about to turn into CBTCT. Its nose was close to the silo. It was moving steadily at .4 miles per hour. Scott Davis and I went out of the cab and back along the catwalk in the noise and the snow, stepping over to the second unit, and continuing along its catwalk to the far end, because the second unit was facing backward. We got into the cab there and watched. Next to us was the first of a hundred and thirty-four hoppers. The looming silo was something like a grain elevator, reaching out with great arms to the crushers that supplied it. Moving inside, the lead locomotives passed three control booths, whose bay windows were not entirely black with dust. As the first hopper drew abreast of a booth, a pair of steel sheets was lowered from above, coffering the interior of the car in the way that a dentist places baffles around a tooth he’s about to fill. Then coal dropped, explosively, between the sheets. A hundred and fifteen measured tons fell into the coal car in one second. A six-kiloton cloud shot up into the silo’s black interior. Under the crash of coal, the aluminium hopper staggered, wrenched downward, and looked as if it might flatten. From above, the baffles were lifted. The coal in the hopper was maybe five feet above the rims, a calculated fluff that would settle down. At .4 miles per hour, the second car was now in position. The baffles came down, and the coal fell. Crunch, cloud, and the next car was in position. Emerging from the silo on a slight curve, we watched twenty cars totter in the dust under the weight of falling coal before the interior of the silo passed out of sight, with more than a mile of hoppers to follow.

That’s from the penultimate section of “Coal Train,” describing train CCTBT filling up with coal at Black Thunder Mine, Wyoming. Notice the many active verbs – “moving,” “stopping,” “reaching,” “coffering,” “dropped,” “fell,” “shot,” “staggered,” “wrenched,” “lifted,” “totter.” “Coffering” is inspired! McPhee is an action writer par excellence. Notice the use of analogy (“in the way that a dentist places baffles around a tooth he’s about to fill”) to make the image clearer. Notice McPhee’s distinctive way of “being there.” He’s not just a passive observer. Moving from the cab of one locomotive to the cab of another locomotive to get a better view, he participates in the action he’s describing. Notice the compression and precision and dynamism of his description: “Then coal dropped, explosively, between the sheets”; “From above, the baffles were lifted”; “The baffles came down, and the coal fell”; and the brilliant “Crunch, cloud, and the next car was in position.” 

The book brims with surprising, original, delightful sentences:

We crossed the Columbia River and went over the Horse Heaven Hills into the Yakima Valley, apples and grapes in the Horse Heaven Hills, gators in the valley.

For the spectacular plunge in christiania turns down through the mountains from Snoqualmie Pass, Ainsworth’s gear selection was No. 14 and his foot never touched the brake.

In Lowell, nearing the Merrimack, the canal emerges from woods and, conjoining Black Brook, becomes the water hazard that divides the second and third fairways of Mount Pleasant Golf Club, John and Henry all but visible hauling their skiff from the second tee and the third green to the second green and the third tee among the putting golfers, the swinging golfers, the riding golfers in their rolling carts.

We gained momentum and went on up the west side of the river in the tailrace pool of the dam, past the bare and truly mountainous beds of the dead cascade.

Aiming now for the big piers where Interstate 93 crosses the river, we passed private homes in the trophy range, with tessellated riprap like fortress walls, and elaborate stairways, balustered white, descending the riprap in stages to dual-consoled cockpit boats tied up below.

Mark and I found the mouth of a brook coming in from under a railroad track through a very long cylindrical culvert, which we could look through as through a telescope, seeing verdure at the far end, H.D. Thoreau framed in cameo.

The weight of the envelope and speed of the loop and distance to the bag and friction on the wood all having been calculated as if by a Norden bombsight, the envelope slides forward and down, and drops into the bag, missing by a matter of inches the Tallahassee bag on one side and the Green Bay bag on the other.

One of McPhee’s maxims is “Art is where you find it.” In Uncommon Carriers, he finds it in, among other things, a towboat, a chemical tanker, a coal train, and a sixteen-foot Old Town canoe. It’s one of his finest works.