Great reads: Uncommon Carriers

After living in New York for a year and a half, I miss San Francisco’s excellent used bookstores. I feel lucky to work just half a block from The Strand, but there’s something about a small bookstore’s curated selection of used books that makes browsing more fun.

I was working in SF last week when I happened into Aardvark Books one night after dinner. Aardvark boasts a great “recent arrivals” section, just a few shelves long but brimming with excellent, inexpensive reads. I randomly picked up a hardcover copy of John McPhee’s Uncommon Carriers, based mostly on its excellent cover art and a vague recollection of having read some of his work in the New Yorker. (It helped that some bookstore employee wrote in pencil on the first page, “Pretty good!”)

It was a lucky find. Uncommon Carriers explores freight transport and the people who work America’s trucks, barges, ships, planes, and trains, day and night. This might sound boring at first glance, but McPhee’s writing is strangely hypnotic and enthralling.

One piece in particular, Out in the Sort, kept me up late last night. The piece begins with a detailed description of a lobster-catching operation in Newfoundland, and uses the lobster company’s transport needs as a segue into a deconstruction of how UPS operates. Describing their worldwide hub in Louisville, Kentucky, McPhee writes:

This labyrinth, which outthinks the people who employ it, is something like the interior of the computers that run it. Like printed circuitry, seven great loops, each a thousand feet around, are superposed at right angles above other loops… Unending sequences of letters and small packages zip around these loops, while the larger packages follow one another on the belts, each package tailgating the one in front of it but electronically forbidden to touch it… Collectively, the loops are like the circuits in the motherboards among the interface cards of a central processing unit wherein whole packages seeking specific airplanes are ones and zeroes moving through the chips.

There’s too much to glean from the piece (and from the book) for a short blog post, but I’ll pick a few tidbits. We learn that UPS employs college students to handle packages that require human intervention—cleverly referred to as “exceptions.” When the company found it difficult to hire enough students, they founded Metropolitan College in partnership with the University of Louisville. As a bonus, they maintain an on-site facility that services Toshiba laptops (and often receive repaired laptops back before the customer would have) and the company maintains the world’s largest supply of parts for Bentley automobiles.

More impressive still is that during the three to five hours when the international and domestic packages are sorted in Louisville each night, each sorter is expected to handle 1,124 packages per hour.

I highly recommend this book if the topic at all sounds interesting to you. Track down a used copy of Uncommon Carriers. I’m certainly going to stock up on McPhee the next time I’m in a used bookstore.

If you can’t get a hold of the book, you can read Out in the Sort via the New Yorker’s archive or Mediafire (while it lasts).