Our little ship, a refurbished research vessel, had all the modern accouterments, but as the ice became thicker, the captain stepped to the wheel to guide us manually through the maze. We were already fascinated by the ice; soon we were rapt as well by the skill of this man. I learned much later that he was internationally known for his ability to “turn on a dime.”
There was little substance behind my admiration for the captain until last month when I read John McPhee’s “Uncommon Carriers.” McPhee, for many years a staff writer for The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, is famous for his “creative nonfiction,” or, more precisely, for his ability to make the commonplace interesting.
“Uncommon Carriers” is a look at the many ways that things are moved from one place to another. In the chapter, “The Ships of Port Revel,” he works with sailors practicing difficult maneuvers in scale-sized model ships on a lake in the French Alps.
This remarkable maritime school, described by McPhee as a “combination of a miniature golf course and Caltech,” is serious business. Those who view the model ships as toys will be hurt. Docking is especially tricky and in Port Revel’s meticulous recreation of actual conditions, even experienced sea captains make mistakes. Turning on a dime is not so easy.
McPhee says he is interested in “people who are expert at something” — ideally, people, like my Russian captain, who are so completely absorbed by their work that they are unaware of being watched.
His typical approach is total immersion. He serves as helmsman for a Swedish captain at Port Revel, and, as described in other chapters, traverses the country in a tanker truck, rides the rails on a mile-and-a-half long coal train, and inches his way up our very own Illinois River on a towboat hauling 15 barges.
Even scarier than navigating the Pekin Wiggles on the Illinois is McPhee’s venture into the UPS “sort.” Tracking the journey of lobsters on their way to Heartland restaurants, he finds himself in Louisville at the enormous UPS hub, where 1 million packages are sorted each night.
Largely automated, the sort takes place in a building with 4 million square feet of floor space and 5 miles of exterior walls. His depiction of the multi-armed, multi-level gargantuan machine with its inexorable conveyors and “de-skilled” human watchdogs has a Chaplinesque feel to it, but his interviews with those humans are entirely sobering.
My favorite uncommon carrier, and I think McPhee’s as well, was a polished chrome chemical tanker truck owned and driven by Don Ainsworth. In Ainsworth’s eyes, driving a truly beautiful truck is as close as a man can come to the experience of a “really gorgeous woman,” and he treats his precious jewel accordingly.
McPhee joins Ainsworth for a coast-to-coast trip in this beauty. Obviously, driving an 80,000-pound container filled with hazardous material requires knowledge, skill and precision. My reaction, though, to sharing the road with such a creature has, in the past, typically been annoyance. No longer! McPhee will change your view of 18-wheelers forever.
McPhee describes himself as nondescript and he likes that. He prefers to leave himself out of the picture. He has admitted to interviewers, though, that he inherited a love of words from his father:
“(F)rom the earliest time I can remember, I would hear him, especially when he was driving, kind of speaking to himself and mumbling words that he obviously thought were appealing. He liked the rhythm. He said words over and over to himself, half aloud. And I heard him doing this and completely understood what he was doing: my dad was full of affection for words, and it showed in these little quiet ways.”
McPhee also savors words and always reads a draft out loud, to make sure “it’s fitting together.” Not wanting to appear insane, he reads aloud to people, primarily his wife, Yolanda, and a friend he finds especially sensitive to the rhythm of words strung together. For McPhee, this step is “just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper.”
I’m not going to the Arctic Circle this spring. I’m thinking a trip along the Illinois will be adventurous enough.
Photo by C.P. Storm (Creative Commons)
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