The Bookworm: Uncommon Carriers

Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee. 248 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2006.

The hum of a truck stop in the dead of the night is one of the sonic emblems of America, right up there with the bombs in air, the rutilant rockets, and the stern impassioned stress. You have not heard the sound of creature comfort until you have heard hundreds of huddled trucks idling through the night.

Not only did it take me a while to read Uncommon Carriers (I started it three weeks ago, on the flight to Minneapolis, and have only been able to pick at it while home), it seems like it’s taken me forever to get to it in my reading queue. I bought it in August during a visit to Skylight, right after attending the Abbot Kinney Festival in Venice. It’s sat on my bookshelf since, almost languishing, and I’ve been eager to read it. I’d never heard of McPhee until reading a piece of his in In Fact. He impressed me, so I’ve wanted to read one of his books.

Let me put it this way: McPhee is my new idol. The guy is an incredible writer, and Uncommon Carriers is a showcase of his mastery.

The book is a collection of seven essays on, of course, uncommon carriers: the people and trivialities behind the trains, ships, planes, and trucks that transport goods. Ironically, the carriers McPhee profiles are not so uncommon, but the way he approaches each reintroduces and paints them in a new light. He rides shotgun with a long-haul truck driver for two essays, follows lobsters from Nova Scotia to UPS’ state-of-the-art processing facility in Nashville, travels with train operators as they haul coal through Kansas and Nebraska, visits a miniature boat training pond for captains of ship transports, and traveled the Illinois River on a barge. In each piece he profiles the people he meets, participates in what he’s reporting (which is cool), and covers all the minutiae and seemingly obscure details. McPhee, much like Michael Perry, is apparently famous for making the most mundane and tedious subjects interesting. On the back cover is this review blurb from Sean Cronin of the Denver Post: “Is there any subject McPhee cannot make interesting? is the refrain. No, is the answer.”

That’s one of the reasons I loved this book: it was so fucking interesting. McPhee tapped into some great material, and the organization was pitch-perfect.

The only uninteresting essay was “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” It was an outline of a sailing voyage McPhee took from Concord, Massachusetts to Manchester, New Hampshire, a somewhat nerdy retracing of a similar trip Henry David Thoreau took with his brother in 1839, a voyage that became the subject of Thoreau’s first book. Not only was McPhee following Thoreau’s route, but he was trying to outline the changes that have taken place on and around the river since. Truthfully, it was an okay read, but it just didn’t interest me as much as the other essays.

True to his age (78), McPhee sometimes uses antiquated spellings. Most notably, for me, was his use of the umlaut. Preëmployment. Coördination. That’s old school. Also probably true to his age, McPhee is a bit of a horndog. He often interviewed young and exceptionably attractive women, and described them as such. I have no problem with this, especially since I, too, am keen to exceptionally attractive women, and I suppose a basic description is necessary (this isn’t newspaper journalism, where simple names are good enough). But I thought it was a little creepy how McPhee made an effort to let the reader know how he felt about these women.

New words I learned: As mentioned above, McPhee is a great writer. Not only is he able to craft beautiful description and weave awesome prose, he stupefies me with his precise word choice. The guy must be a walking dictionary. He’s not pretentious with his vocabulary (or expertise with reference books) as some writers are, who showcase their word power to dazzle and emasculate others. McPhee is precise, choosing the right word that means the right thing for the right place. I admire that a lot, even though it sometimes makes me feel like a second grader. So, without further ado, here are the new words I learned. All definitions courtesy of my MacBook dictionary.

Umbria: “a region in central Italy, in the valley of the Tiber River; capital, Perugia.” Seiche: “a temporary disturbance or oscillation in the water level of a lake or partially enclosed body of water, esp. one caused by changes in atmospheric pressure.” Hatteras: referring to Cape Hatteras; “a peninsula in eastern North Carolina, often called "the Graveyard of the Atlantic" because of the treacherous waters around.” Vicuñas: “a wild relative of the llama, inhabiting mountainous regions of South America and valued for its fine silky wool.” Ullage: “the amount by which a container falls short of being full.” Centime: “a monetary unit of Switzerland and certain other countries (including France, Belgium, and Luxembourg until the introduction of the euro), equal to one hundredth of a franc or other decimal currency unit.” Quixotic (kudos to the person who can pronounce it): “exceedingly idealistic; unrealistic and impractical.” Hawsepipe: “an inclined pipe leading from a hawsehole to the side of a ship, containing the shank of the anchor when the anchor is raised.” Piton: “a peg or spike driven into a rock or crack to support a climber or a rope.” Monofilament: “a single strand of man-made fiber”; like a fishing line. Autochthonous: “(of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists.” Areal: adjective of “area.” Artifice: “clever or cunning devices or expedients, esp. as used to trick or deceive others.” Moraines: “a mass of rocks and sediment carried down and deposited by a glacier, typically as ridges at its edges or extremity.” Debouch: “emerge from a narrow or confined space into a wide, open area.” Churlish: “rude in a mean-spirited and surly way.” Occluded: “stop, close up, or obstruct (an opening, orifice, or passage).” Sachem: “(among some American Indian peoples) a chief or leader.” Apothegm: “a concise saying or maxim; an aphorism.” Antediluvian: “of or belonging to the time before the biblical Flood.” Collocation: the meaning for McPhee’s use is “the action of placing things side by side or in position.” Riprap: “loose stone used to form a foundation for a breakwater or other structure.” Verdure: “lush green vegetation.” Avuncular: “of or relating to an uncle.” Norden bombsight: Not a word, but something McPhee referenced and I was curious about (I’m always curious about things I don’t know). A Norden bombsight, according to Wikipedia, is “a bombsight used by the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, and the United States Air Force in the Korean and the Vietnam Wars to aid the crew of bomber aircraft in dropping bombs accurately.” Sesame: “a tall annual herbaceous plant of tropical and subtropical areas of the Old World, cultivated for its oil-rich seeds.” Orogeny: “a process in which a section of the earth's crust is folded and deformed by lateral compression to form a mountain range.” Sateen: “a cotton fabric woven like satin with a glossy surface.” Gelid: “icy; extremely cold,” just like it is outside right now. Desuetude: “a state of disuse.” Inhume: “bury.” Mephistophelian (used in the line, “There was a lot of Mephistophelian facial hair — the caterpillar sideburns, the full beard, the mustache as bilateral semaphore.”): “an evil spirit to whom Faust, in the German legend, sold his soul.” Arteriosclerotic: “the thickening and hardening of the walls of the arteries, occurring typically in old age.” Raceme: “a flower cluster with the separate flowers attached by short equal stalks at equal distances along a central stem. The flowers at the base of the central stem develop first.” Saurian: “of or like a lizard.” Demurrage: “a charge payable to the owner of a chartered ship in respect of failure to load or discharge the ship within the time agreed.” Cordillera: “a system or group of parallel mountain ranges together with the intervening plateaus and other features, esp. in the Andes or the Rockies.” Drumlins: “a low oval mound or small hill, typically one of a group, consisting of compacted boulder clay molded by past glacial action.” Tessellate: McPhee’s use means “cover (a plane surface) by repeated use of a single shape, without gaps or overlapping.” Antithetical: “directly opposed or contrasted; mutually incompatible.”