Heavy mettle

THERE’S a moment in John McPhee’s “Uncommon Carriers” that captures the tension at the heart of his work. The scene is the pilothouse of a tugboat pushing a string of barges up the Illinois River. McPhee, the consummate watcher, has caught the eye of a deckhand named Rick Walker, who doesn’t like what he sees. “He takes note of my routines with unconcealed contempt,” the author explains, “in part because I don’t have any.... Since there is nowhere to go -- no long, Emersonian walks among the fifteen barges -- I sit or stand in the pilothouse sixteen hours a day, staring at the river with an open notebook. Rick Walker makes clear that he looks upon this as idling in the nth dimension. One morning, he said, ‘Why don’t you pick up a broom and do something useful?’ At the end of my sixteen hours, when I stir to go below, he will say with incredulity, ‘Don’t tell me you’re going off to bed,’ accenting the ‘bed’ as if it were a synonym for cowardice.”

What McPhee’s describing is a clash of cultures, the divide between action and observation, between deed and thought. And yet, in the telling, he blurs the boundaries, giving us a portrait of the witnessed and the witness, showing them both to be a certain kind of person -- self-directed, highly competent, contained. For McPhee, such qualities are the stuff of archetype, cropping up throughout his writing, from 1966’s “The Headmaster,” with its portrait of Deerfield Academy’s Frank Boyden, to “Annals of the Former World” (1998), which traces the lithic history of North America through the experience of five geologists, using their authority to establish his own.

Here we have McPhee’s worldview in a nutshell: that understanding is in the details and that we must be patient enough, careful enough, attentive enough to see. The connective fiber, of course, is work, which is his great subject no matter what he appears to be taking on. In “Uncommon Carriers,” the work in question is, for the most part, that of freight transportation, interstate commerce. (“Keep her coming,” a ferryman radios at one point. “I don’t want to slow down the economy.”) Featuring seven related essays, most of which originally appeared in the New Yorker, it is a taut book, if not always satisfying. At its best, however, it manages to collapse the distance between the physical and the intellectual, to let us enter a series of arcane worlds made more exotic by their commonness, by the fact that we interact with them, on an essential level, every day. Or, as McPhee suggests in a piece about long-distance trucking: “The hum of a truck stop in the dead of 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.”

“Uncommon Carriers” begins and ends with trucking, actually, with two linked efforts, “A Fleet of One” and “A Fleet of One -- II,” which recall a pair of journeys McPhee took with a driver named Don Ainsworth. Like Frank Boyden (or for that matter, Rick Walker), Ainsworth is the embodiment of the professional, a driver who knows his rig so well he rarely has to use the brakes, managing his speed by gears alone. A hazardous-materials hauler -- “It was a very dark and glistening, evil-looking blue,” McPhee describes one load. “If blood were blue, it would be like that monoethanolamine” -- Ainsworth owns his tractor and trailer, and this independence establishes a motif that resonates throughout the book.

In McPhee’s conception, the people about whom he writes -- even those who work for others -- are the last of a breed, American iconoclasts, men (they are all men here) who have made their own way, intersecting with the system while remaining, in some elusive fashion, fundamentally apart. “Out here is a pretty good job,” tug captain Tom Armstrong reflects in “Tight-Assed River,” the collection’s finest essay. “The money and the time off attract all of us. If we’re not out here, we’re not going to be no professor in a college, we’re going to be in a factory five, six days a week. A factory worker, if his job is to put this screw in that gun, that’s what he does all day every day for twenty years. Imagine how old that would get.”

It’s not hard to see the attraction in this, the connective fiber, the draw for someone like McPhee. After all, in a lot of ways (and despite the fact that he has taught for years at Princeton), Armstrong’s comment applies to him, as well. McPhee’s style of writing -- the details, the set pieces, the long periods of observation -- is no longer the vernacular of American journalism, as it was when he began his career four decades ago. As such, there’s a relationship here between subject and author that feels a bit more direct than in some of his other work.

The paradox, though, is that the more directly McPhee emerges, the more these essays lose their power. “Uncommon Carriers’ ” two weakest selections, “The Ships of Port Revel” (which recounts a visit to a training center in the Alps for pilots of oceangoing freighters) and “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (which self-consciously echoes Thoreau’s 1849 travelogue), both meander aimlessly amid a welter of details, personal and otherwise; at points, you want to throw your hands up and say, “Enough.” Perhaps the problem is that neither piece has a strong central figure around which to develop its narrative, or maybe it’s that the fascinations McPhee explores here are too insular and too arcane. But whatever the reason, we never quite engage with them as we do with the other writings in the collection, never quite immerse ourselves in their reality and understand them from the inside out.

Despite that, “Uncommon Carriers” is, in its own odd way, a bit of a McPhee primer, a sampler of his obsessions and concerns. There is the highly precise language, the metaphors that come rooted in the concrete world we have constructed -- boats queued up on the Illinois River “like a string of airliners on final in a long line to Newark”; a rail spur in Wyoming so congested that “[t]he Santa Monica Freeway between Sepulveda and La Cienega is more fluid than the Orin Line between Bill and Belle Ayr.” There is the accumulation of data, the use of terminology to establish context, the idea of putting us in the middle of a landscape we don’t understand and giving us the information to sort it out. More than anything, there is the absorption with infrastructure, with the mechanisms that sustain us, whether geologic or human-made.

What McPhee is after here, as he has been throughout his writing life, is a sense of order, of the way the world works, the means by which things get done. “There are seven different ways to run a river,” a river pilot tells him, “-- high water, low water, upriver with the current on your head, downriver, daytime, nighttime, and running it by radar. Once you learn those seven ways, you can run any river.” The same, you can imagine McPhee thinking, is true of writing, truck driving, railroad engineering -- anything, if only we would consider it deeply enough.