Getting it there, in ways we don't consider

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, transportation, commerce

Of the ways goods get to market, the most familiar that John McPhee describes is via "semi" or "18-wheeler". His book "Uncommon Carriers" begins and ends with notes on his travels with a long-haul trucker who is a bit unusual: Don Ainsworth owns his own truck, a non-foods chemical tanker, both tractor and trailer. A bigtruck driver who covers 100,000 or more miles yearly is not unusual, compared to his fellows, but lives a life few of us can conceive.

In an earlier post (Romance of the Open Road, revividus), I wrote of one man's story, learning to drive the big rigs. Here, an established driver, probably a veteran of two million miles, or more, offers us—through the author—a peek into his life.

We see big trucks all the time, and most places, most any time, by looking up we'll see at least one jet aircraft, or at least the contrails. Some of those big jets up there are carrying only freight; in one chapter, McPhee describes UPS Airline's Louisville sorting facility, some four million square feet (nearly 400,000 sq m) in size, having a plethora of automation and a minimum human presence. He traces the progress of live lobsters from Nova Scotia, express freighted almost everywhere, but all passing through "the sort".

Whether truck or jet, barge or train, I found most striking the very different thought patterns needed by those who perform these jobs. To retrain a coal train driver ("engineer" is falling out of use) as a towboat operator, or vice versa, would be an arduous undertaking. There is not only a new jargon to learn, but a new way of thinking, of planning, of deciding just how to get from point A to point B.

In one lyrical chapter, McPhee and a series of friends and relatives retrace by canoe a river-and-canal passage described in H.D. Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The canal system southeast of the Great Lakes is no longer used, and much broken up. In the early 1800s, through at least the early 1900s, it was heavily used. The economics of canal transport are similar to barge transport (platforms of 15-50 wired-together barges pushed by a "towboat") on major rivers today: one-third the cost of railroad, one-fifteenth the cost of trucking, and much, much less than air freight. The constraint is time. Time is money, more so in transport than any other endeavor.

Yet in his ride on a coal train, the author finds that technology also is money...you just gotta get over the sunk costs. In 2005, a million BTUs of heat cost $9 for fuel oil (such as I burn in my home), $6 for natural gas, $1.85 for coal, and $0.50 for nuclear. Current fears about nuclear energy (unreasonable, in my view) force the startup cost and lead time for nuclear power plant construction into infeasible regions; otherwise, we could replace a heap of coal the size of the Great Pyramid in Egypt with a ton or so of nuclear fuel...and the U.S. has lots and lots of Uranium.

Finally, the book made me feel a little like a scout on a field trip, or several field trips. The culture of each of the "common carrier" systems is largely unique, and as foreign to my life as a Persian bazaar.