UNCOMMON CARRIERS

John McPhee, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, US$11.20

“There are two places in the world – home and everywhere else, and everywhere else is the same.”

These are the words of Don Ainsworth, a truck diver in the US who is the subject of John McPhee’s first essay in Uncommon Carriers. Ainsworth is a philosophy spouting-owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, five-axle, 18-wheel chemical tanker, or, as McPhee describes it, “a tractor of such dark sapphire that only bright sunlight could bring forth its colour, a stainless-steel double conical trailer perfectly mirroring the world around it. You could part your hair in the side of this truck.”

We learn a lot in these essays. Ainsworth’s truck “gets a smidgen over six miles to the gallon. As its sole owner, he not only counts its calories with respect to its gross weight, but with regard to the differing fuel structures of the states it traverses. It is much better to take Idaho fuel than phoney-assed Oregon fuel. The Idaho fuel includes all the taxes. The Oregon fuel did not. Oregon feints with an attractive price at the pump, but then shoots an uppercut into the ton-mileage.”

The book is about freight transportation from Illinois River towboats to the UPS Air distribution hub. It contains gems such as “Lobsters are to Christmas dinners in France what turkeys are in America. On the eve of Christmas Eve, planes heading east for Paris have almost infinitely more lobsters in them than human beings.”

And the humour can be broad. In “Coal Train”, McPhee rides in the cab of a train one and a half miles long. As they cross the state line between Nebraska and Kansas, the driver tells McPhee: “Your intelligence goes up ten points when you cross that line. Back there, you go barefoot, screw your cousin and try to steal something.”

Prior to boarding, they sleep in a motel room described as “darker than the inside of a football”. The perfect book for travel.

Tom Otley