Everyday journeys made interesting in ‘Carriers’

“Uncommon Carriers”

by John McPhee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $24)

We should be grateful that John McPhee has license to write whatever he wants, because (1) we would not otherwise have a brilliant, 30-page profile of the UPS sorting center in Louisville, Ky., and (2) that profile could not otherwise begin:

“In an all but windowless building beside the open ocean in Arichat, Nova Scotia, a million lobsters are generally in residence, each in a private apartment where temperatures are maintained just above the freeze point.”

McPhee does not rush the lobsters to Louisville. Only after nine pages at Clearwater Seafood (headquarters, Arichat) does he deliver them, and us, to the UPS Worldport, a 50-acre sea of conveyor belts where “your living lobster, checked in, goes off on a wild uphill and downhill looping circuitous ride and in eight or 10 minutes comes out at the right plane.”

The piece is one of seven that make up McPhee’s new book, which makes no grand argument but reveals a series of journeys – of a coal train, a river boat, an 18-wheeler, the lobsters of Arichat.

McPhee’s writing has been called the literature of fact (which also the name of a course he teaches at Princeton), but it would be more precise to call it a poetry of fact. Written without narrative or suspense, his books are built of rhythm, character, humor and declarative statements of unadorned fact.

There is sometimes a downside to this. “Annals of the Former World,” McPhee’s 704-page, Pulitzer-Prize winning omnibus on the rocks along Interstate 80 and the people who study them, is about as easy to finish as a poem of the same length and on the same subject.

But “Uncommon Carriers” is lighter lifting. The seven pieces, most of which originally appeared in the New Yorker, tend to move quickly.

The only exception is “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” in which McPhee paddles a canoe along a route described by Thoreau; the piece has about as much life in it as Thoreau does. McPhee may be up to something profound and wonderful here, but what that is remains opaque.

The rest of the book is animated by closely observed blue-collar men whose casual mastery would not often be remarked upon in McPhee’s absence.

Here is Mel Adams, a pilot steering a thousand-foot string of barges toward a narrow railroad bridge on the Illinois River: “Where is he? Fifty feet from the bridge, and his head corner on the port side is lined up so that it should miss the nearest pier by six feet. He is steering the Queen Mary up an undersized river and he is luxuriating in six feet of clearance.”

The boat is pushed crosswise by the current and floats to within five feet of the pier on the starboard side before sliding clear of the bridge. Then Adams lights a cigarette and says, “There are seven ways to run a river – 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 passage is textbook McPhee: two pages of narrative detail with no invocation of deeper meaning, only the implicit wonder of the facts themselves.