Uncommon Carriers

The world of 18 wheelers, river barges, UPS jets, ocean tankers, coal trains, etc. is much more interesting than you would think! In each chapter John McPhee recounts his experience aboard one of these forms of transportation along with details about the complexities of the trade and the skills required for success. I was inspired to read the book after enjoying parts of it in the New Yorker where individual chapters were previously published.

I'd really give this 3.5 stars. There are 6 parts/chapters in which McPhee travels along with operators of a semi-truck, two parts on barges/tows, a coal train, inside the UPS hub, and one incongruent chapter on a trip up the Merrimack River in a canoe, retracing the steps of HD Thoreau. That part was uncharacteristically poorly written, and didn't fit in at all with the remainder of the book; one wonders if the loose pages of his journal accidentally got sent into the publisher... The parts on transportation involving semis, coal trains, and the UPS hub were very interesting and well written, however, were more choppy and left you wanting a more thorough reading. The parts on the tows/barges were not as clear to me as I would have liked, I felt a little lost in all the terminology, without ample explanation. Overall this could have been a much better book had the canoe trip been tossed out, and had much more depth been added to the whole thing. Not one of McPhee's finest, though it did have a lot of potential. This was my first McPhee book that was not directly or indirectly geology related, and while it didn't quite meet my expectations, I don't think I will give up on him. His ability to make anything and everything interesting is truly amazing.

I've been reading John McPhee since the 80's and enjoy his writing which by definition makes me an old fart. I found this to be interesting and learned a few things. It was nice to be listening to it as a Book on Cd and have him talk about the Merrimack as I was driving by it.

I loved this book. I actually read the sections when they appeared in The New Yorker. I assume few changes were made. McPhee must have the best job in the world getting to ride with an over-the-road trucker across the United States; traveling down the Illinois River on a towboat and linked barges (something I've always really wanted to do down the Mississippi with a friend of mine]; and following freight trains from the cab. Talk about your Walter Mitty! His articles and books are filled with juicy little tidbits of detail that I just love reading about. I love going to locks on the Mississippi and watching the towboats shepherd their charges down the river and through the locks. Another good site to watch is Starved Rock State Park along the Illinois river. Here's my review on the towboat going down the Illinois section of McPhee's book: The Illinois River is third in freight carried, following the Mississippi and the Ohio. It's a relatively straight river except for some "corkscrew" bends near Pekin. The barges that navigate the Illinois can be huge. The Billy Joe Boling that McPhee is riding (some people get all the fun) is pushing a toe longer than the new Queen Mary 2, the longest ocean liner ever built. Maneuvering such a "vessel" takes skill and sang-froid. At its widest point, this collection of barges and towboat is four times longer than the river's 300 foot width. The Illinois is an autocthonous river (a word I learned from Founding Fish but will probably forget) beginning not far from Chicago. This particular barge string has fifteen barges wired together carrying pig iron, steel and fertilizer. The ones with pig iron appear empty, but the iron is so heavy and the river channel only nine feet deep at its minimum, that the barges can only be loaded to about 10 per cent of capacity. The steel cable holding the barges together is about an inch thick and the deck hands need to constantly monitor the tension of the wire.. The barges and tug at the stern become almost a rigid unit. The pilot has to steer this mass carefully between railroad bridge pilings and other obstructions. The pilot "is steering the Queen Mary up an undersized river and he is luxuriating in six feet of clearnace." Meanwhile at the stern, behind the stern rail of the towboat, only ten feet away, is the riverbank. This assumes no unusual current changes. On the Mississippi, a tow can consists of as many as forty-nine barges and be two hundred and fifty feet wide. When they arrive at the Illinois, the consist needs to be broken up into smaller groups. Just by way of comparison, a fifteen barge tow can carry as much as 870 eighteen wheelers on the highway. All captains have to start as deckhands, and it's not unstressful. One physician who had been asked to study how pilots and captains handled stress, had to leave the boat because he couldn't handle the stress. The river is rarely empty and you can count on being approached by another thousand-foot tow coming at you down the river. Downstream tows always have the right of way. Hold spots, where a tow can be headed into the bank to wait for a downstream tow to pass, are plotted ahead of time and serve like railroad sidings. There is no dispatcher and the captains call traffic themselves announcing their location. A large tow will burn about one gallon each two hundred feet or twenty-four hundred gallons of diesel fuel per day. Measured by fuel consumed per ton-mile, barges are "two and a half times more efficient than a freight train, nearly nine times more efficient than a truck." There aren't too many locks on the Illinois as the river drops only about ninety feet, but watching a tow go through one can provide hours of entertainment. I remember sitting at the lock across from Starved Rock State Park as a long tow broke into two sections to get through the lock. Unfortunately, pleasure boat operators being "ignorant, ignorant, ignorant," accidents happen. Much like train engineers, towboat captains fear boaters who won't get out of the way. It's impossible to steer around a small boat and the prop wash and propeller suction can be lethal to the unwary. and the section on trains: Driving a train would seem simple enough: you push the lever forward and off you go. Not so. Coal trains, of which just one power plant in Georgia requires 3 fully loaded trains per day to keep running, are usually more than one and one-half miles long and weigh 34,000 tons. They are by far the heaviest trains on the rails. The train is so long that the engine in front (these trains must have engines in front and back and often in the middle as well to adjust the strain on the couplers) will often be applying the brakes going down hill while the engines in back are pushing the cars still going up the other side of the rise. They can't go up hills, per se. A slop of even 1.5% makes the engines work hard. Twenty-three thousand coal trains leave the Powder River basin every year; that's thirty-four thousand miles of rolling coal in a never ending stream of coal for power plants. The Powder River basin coal generates less heat, i.e. fewer BTU's than eastern coal, but it has a much lower sulfur content so following stricter environmental regulations eastern mines have been dying while western ones are thriving. That's where the railroads come in. Plant Scherer in Georgia, a large power plant, usually has a one-million-ton pile of coal in reserve. To understand the revived interest in nuclear power, that pile generates the equivalent of one truckload of mined uranium. "To get a million BTUs, fuel oil costs nine dollars (before recent price increases,) natural gas six dollars, coal one-dollar-eighty-five, and nuclear fifty cents." "Plant Scherer burns the contents of thirteen hundred coal trains per year -- two thousand miles of coal cars, twelve million tons of the bedrock of Wyoming." The plant requires twelve thousand acres to store, process and burn the coal. Think about that the next time you turn the lights on.

There is a growing branch of literature which consists of nonfiction. How is that possible? The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus for her work, which consists primarily of interviews of people affected by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl or the Soviet War in Afghanistan. As for Americans, we have John McPhee, who has written a series of nonfiction works of high literary quality. I have just finished reading his Uncommon Carriers, which deals, in turn, with long-haul truckers; a place in France where ships' pilots are trained; boats that tow barges on American rivers; the parcel sorting services of UPS; and mile-and-a-half-long coal trains. In between, there is a delightful essay by the author about retracing the route of Henry David Thoreau and his brother John described in A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers--which I had read when it was first published in the New Yorker. McPhee likes to take what looks like a boring subject that nobody would write about and turn it into a gem. For instance, there is that tetralogy he wrote about American geology beginning with Basin and Range and ending with Assembling California. One would think that McPhee's books might be a tad boring, but they never are.

worth it for king truck driver don ainsworth alone. feel free to skim any of the boat-related stories, the others are solid.

About large modes of transportation (semi trucks, barges, trains, etc...) and the people who operate them on a daily basis Themes: transportation, economy, anecdotes Some sections were more interesting than others. I loved the beginning about the trucker (hilarious fellow) and the train section and the section on barges on the river were informative and interesting. A section about training to operate ships and one about a canoe trip did not thrill me. The writing style was (mostly) quite dry and this wasn't my favorite topic.

McPhee Delivers Uncommon Carriers proves again that John McPhee is the modern master of the discursive essay. Conversations with Don Ainsworth and his chemical tanker truck bookend a series of essays on the transportation trade. "Ainsworth's middle names could be 'Free Association'" writes McPhee of this kindred spirit. In addition to the tanker trade, the book reports McPhee's experiences and meditations on rail, freighter, barge, and air freight. At the center of the volume is McPhee's affectionate re-creation of Thoreau's "Five Days on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers" - a journey into the headwaters of McPhee's literary style.

McPhee can sure write! And he turns the ordinary into a fascinating read. Really enjoyed this.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author, but it doesn't seem to have an ISBN. I read this as part of my quest to understand how everything is connected to everything else, and how it is economically feasible to create very inexpensive products by shipping materials all over the world. It's a set of essays mostly about shipping modalities, but each essay goes at the subject from a different angle (or several angles). The book doesn't really answer the "how can things be so cheap?" question but it gets me a step closer to the "how everything is connected" part. My favorite chapters were: "A Fleet of One" and "A Fleet of One - II" about a guy who owns a chemical tanker. "Tight-Assed River" about small boats that push strings of barges ("longer than the Titanic") up and down the Illinois River "Out in the Sort" about the travels of live lobsters sold by a Nova Scotia company, Clearwater Seafoods (which may make you not want to eat lobster at Asian buffets any more) and the sorting facility at the UPS Worldport facility in Louisville, KY "Coal Train" about 19,000 ton coal-laden trains more than a mile long and the Union Pacific engineers, conductors, and dispatchers who get them where they're going (the dispatchers sometimes quit the job and go into air traffic controlling, because it is easier). There are also chapters about a ship-handling course that uses scale models, and a canoe trip; those are good too but they didn't fascinate me.