Uncommon carriers john mcphee

Science I loved this book I actually read the sections when they appeared in The New Yorker I assume few changes were made McPhee must have the best job in the world getting to ride with an over the road trucker across the United States traveling down the Illinois River on a towboat and linked barges something I ve always really wanted to do down the Mississippi with a friend of mine and following freight trains from the cab Talk about your Walter Mitty His articles and books are filled with juicy little tidbits of detail that I just love reading about. Uncommon Carriers kindle direct I love going to locks on the Mississippi and watching the towboats shepherd their charges down the river and through the locks Another good site to watch is Starved Rock State Park along the Illinois river Here s my review on the towboat going down the Illinois section of McPhee s book The Illinois River is third in freight carried.

Uncommon carrierstats

Princeton University and Cambridge University educated John Angus McPhee His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association since 1965 with the New Yorker as a staff writer In the same year he published his first book A Sense of Where You Are with FSG and soon followed with The Headmaster 1966 Oranges 1967 The Pine Barrens 1968 A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles collection 1968 Levels of the Game 1968 The Crofter and the Laird 1970 Encounters with the Archdruid 1971 The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed 1973 The Curve of Binding Energy 1974 Pieces of the Frame collection 1975 and The Survival of the Bark Canoe 1975 Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were Princeton University and Cambridge Universityducated John Angus McPhee His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association since 1965 with the New Yorker as a staff writer In the same year he published his first book A Sense of Where You Are with FSG and soon followed with The Headmaster 1966 Oranges 1967 The Pine Barrens 1968 A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles collection 1968 Levels of the Game 1968 The Crofter and the Laird 1970 Encounters with the Archdruid 1971 The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed 1973 The Curve of Binding Energy 1974 Pieces of the Frame collection 1975 and The Survival of the Bark Canoe 1975 Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards Selections from these books make up The John McPhee Reader 1976. Science Uncommon carriers cargo Since 1977 the year in which McPhee received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the bestselling Coming into the Country appeared in print Farrar Straus and Giroux has published Giving Good Weight collection 1979 Basin and Range 1981 In Suspect Terrain 1983 La Place de la Concorde Suisse 1984 Table of Contents collection 1985 Rising from the Plains 1986 Heirs of General Practice in a paperback edition 1986 The Control of Nature 1989 Looking for a Ship 1990 Assembling California 1993 The Ransom of Russian Art 1994 The Second John McPhee Reader 1996 Irons in the Fire collection 1997 Annals of the Former World 1998 Annals of the Former World McPhee s tetralogy on geology was published in a single volume in 1998 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 The Founding Fish was published in 2002 site_link site_link Interesting stories about traditional and nontraditional transportation methods There are chapters on over the road long haul tankers a Mississippi River barge a coal train the Suez canal canoing the Concord Merrimack Rivers and others An informative and interesting read Nonfiction Outdoors Nature Science I enjoyed three of the chapters especially one about a miniature replica in Switzerland of ocean shipping to allow captains to practice maneuvers another about cross country trucking and a third about barge shipping on major American rivers This is all new information to me and I like the way John McPhee takes his inexpert eyes and mind into the experience and tells the story to an audience of inexperts He s pretty funny too Nonfiction Outdoors Nature following the Mississippi and the Ohio It s a relatively straight river except for some corkscrew bends near Pekin The barges that navigate the Illinois can be huge The Billy Joe Boling that McPhee is riding some people get all the fun is pushing a toe longer than the new Queen Mary 2 the longest ocean liner ever built Maneuvering such a vessel takes skill and sang froid At its widest point this collection of barges and towboat is four times longer than the river s 300 foot width The Illinois is an autocthonous river a word I learned from Founding Fish but will probably forget beginning not far from Chicago. Science Uncommon carriers 2009 This particular barge string has fifteen barges wired together carrying pig iron steel and fertilizer The ones with pig iron appearmpty but the iron is so heavy and the river channel only nine feet deep at its minimum that the barges can only be loaded to about 10 per cent of capacity The steel cable holding the barges together is about an inch thick and the deck hands need to constantly monitor the tension of the wire. Uncommon Carriers booker The barges and tug at the stern become almost a rigid unit The pilot has to steer this mass carefully between railroad bridge pilings and other obstructions The pilot is steering the Queen Mary up an undersized river and he is luxuriating in six feet of clearnace Meanwhile at the stern behind the stern rail of the towboat only ten feet away is the riverbank This assumes no unusual current changes. Kindle Uncommon carriers cargo On the Mississippi a tow can consists of as many as forty nine barges and be two hundred and fifty feet wide When they arrive at the Illinois the consist needs to be broken up into smaller groups Just by way of comparison a fifteen barge tow can carry as much as 870 eighteen wheelers on the highway. Uncommon Carriersbookers All captains have to start as deckhands and it s not unstressful One physician who had been asked to study how pilots and captains handled stress had to leave the boat because he couldn t handle the stress The river is rarely empty and you can count on being approached by another thousand foot tow coming at you down the river Downstream tows always have the right of way Hold spots where a tow can be headed into the bank to wait for a downstream tow to pass are plotted ahead of time and serve like railroad sidings There is no dispatcher and the captains call traffic themselves announcing their location. Uncommon Carriers booker A large tow will burn about one gallon each two hundred feet or twenty four hundred gallons of diesel fuel per day Measured by fuel consumed per ton mile barges are two and a half times efficient than a freight train nearly nine times fficient than a truck. EPub Uncommon carriers cargo There aren t too many locks on the Illinois as the river drops only about ninety feet but watching a tow go through one can provide hours of entertainment I remember sitting at the lock across from Starved Rock State Park as a long tow broke into two sections to get through the lock. Uncommon Carriers kindle direct Unfortunately pleasure boat operators being ignorant ignorant ignorant accidents happen Much like trainngineers towboat captains fear boaters who won t get out of the way It s impossible to steer around a small boat and the prop wash and propeller suction can be lethal to the unwary. Uncommon carrierstats login and the section on trains Driving a train would seem simple enough you push the lever forward and off you go Not so Coal trains of which just one power plant in Georgia requires 3 fully loaded trains per day to keep running are usually than one and one half miles long and weigh 34000 tons They are by far the heaviest trains on the rails The train is so long that the engine in front these trains must have engines in front and back and often in the middle as well to adjust the strain on the couplers will often be applying the brakes going down hill while the engines in back are pushing the cars still going up the other side of the rise They can t go up hills per se A slop of even 1. Outdoors Nature Uncommon carriers book Twenty three thousand coal trains leave the Powder River basin every year that s thirty four thousand miles of rolling coal in a never ending stream of coal for power plants The Powder River basin coal generates less heat i. Uncommon Carriers Outdoors nature vs e fewer BTU s than eastern coal but it has a much lower sulfur content so following stricter environmental regulations eastern mines have been dying while western ones are thriving That s where the railroads come in. Uncommon Carriers science fiction Plant Scherer in Georgia a large power plant usually has a one million ton pile of coal in reserve To understand the revived interest in nuclear power that pile generates the equivalent of one truckload of mined uranium To get a million BTUs fuel oil costs nine dollars before recent price increases natural gas six dollars coal one dollar eighty five and nuclear fifty cents. Book Uncommon carriers book Plant Scherer burns the contents of thirteen hundred coal trains per year two thousand miles of coal cars twelve million tons of the bedrock of Wyoming The plant requires twelve thousand acres to store process and burn the coal Think about that the next time you turn the lights on Nonfiction Outdoors Nature Science A major letdown after Coming into the Country the only other McPhee book I ve read and one of my all time favorites Nonfiction Outdoors Nature Science There is a growing branch of literature which consists of nonfiction How is that possible The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus for her work which consists primarily of interviews of people affected by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl or the Soviet War in Afghanistan As for Americans we have John McPhee who has written a series of nonfiction works of high literary quality. Science Uncommon carriers cargo I have just finished reading his Uncommon Carriers which deals in turn with long haul truckers a place in France where ships pilots are trained boats that tow barges on American rivers the parcel sorting services of UPS and mile and a half long coal trains In between there is a delightfulssay by the author about retracing the route of Henry David Thoreau and his brother John described in A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers which I had read when it was first published in the New Yorker. Uncommon Carriers Outdoors nature vs McPhee likes to take what looks like a boring subject that nobody would write about and turn it into a gem For instance there is that tetralogy he wrote about American geology beginning with Basin and Range and ending with Assembling California One would think that McPhee s books might be a tad boring but they never are Nonfiction Outdoors Nature Science On CD this book consists of eight discs and at the start of the eighth disc the foul language suddenly took a quantum leap so I stopped listening Was the author accurately quoting his sources No doubt Are there other ways to tell the story without actually quoting the profanity Of course Most authors did so routinely until oh the past 20 or 30 years or so I realize there are those who think writing is somehow better or honest because the actual repulsive language is used I quite disagree If you use foul language on a Duluth Transit Authority bus the driver will immediately inform you that you must stop using this language or you will have to leave the bus I think this is a good rule It applies to my car It applies to CDs I listen to on my car The common use of coarse language in our society has not improved society in any way it has just made it coarse. Uncommon carrierstats The first seven discs had some interesting material They contained the amount of coarse language that I have somehow come to find acceptable or at least tolerable Nonfiction Outdoors Nature Science McPhee rides on different carriers Did not enjoy the stories as much as I hoped I would have by such a fine author One of my favorite episodes The truckers all stare at him so he buys a cap with a gold visor an American flag and so on Now he fits right in Nice science fact worth remembering Bernoulli s Principle where the flow is fastest pressure is lowest holds airplanes in the sky He shows how lobsters are shipped around the world Lobsters are to Christmas dinners in France what turkeys are in America Shipping live lobsters around the world is just animal cruelty in my view At a public hearing Wyoming officials outline how they plan to sterilize coyotes One rancher says We don t want to fuck the coyotes we want to get rid of them There is an underlying failure of getting along with nature throughout the book T shirt on a fisherman UNION FISH STRIKE MORE Dick Eisfeller of Greenland NH films trains for a living He will film for 24 hours straight without sleeping at times Nonfiction Outdoors Nature Science On the horizon there were no trees Deer and antelope were everywhere at play much too young to care what had happened to the range John McPhee Uncommon CarriersMcPhee is one of my favorites I think his strongest form is the long essay and I love his collections that are thematic Uncommon carriers deliveredxactly what I wanted with a bunch of surprises Like always McPhee is able to mix together great characters fantastic observations and a real sense of space and place and tell a story that illuminates some place or time that you have probably driven past without noticing a hundred times before. Uncommon Carriers book McPhee has a a geologist s curiosity and patience and a poet s pen that allows him to spend an inordinate amount of time with a story to get that one detail that turns a good essay about boats into a fantastic essay about the craft of work the beauty of place the magnificence of the ordinary The magic of McPhee isn t just that he writes new journalism almost better than anyone else on the planet it is that he does of it than almost anyone else Up McPhee s other sleeve is his ability to make you want to follow him on his explorations He isn t going to chase down your interests rock stars movies money Instead McPhee is going to carefully let you follow him down his rabbit holes and help you onto his hobby horses. Book Uncommon carriers 2009 I would also be remiss if I didn t include a part of one of my favorite paragraphs A barge McPhee is on is flashed by a woman on a pleasure boat on the Missouri river Here is McPhee s response She has golden hair She has the sort of body you go to see in marble She holds her poise without retreat In her ample presentation there is a defiance of gravity There is no angle of repose She is a siren and these are her songs She is Henry Moore s Oval with Points Nonfiction Outdoors Nature Science Divided into six sections based on the mode of carrier McPhee is traveling with HAZMAT truck drivers Ocean going cargo ships Mississippi river barges Canals of the northeast UPS FedEx and deliveries Freight trains. Uncommon Carriers science fair Most scientifically fascinating was the cargo ship piece where McPhee attends training school for the captains and skippers of these massive vessels On a lake in Switzerland they train using life size yet scaled models One trainee is practicing a docking maneuver and parks an impressive 6 inches from the pier The teacher reminds him that at full scale he s something like 15 yards away If the birds on the shore of the lake were at full scale they would be 6 feet tall. Science Uncommon carriers 2009 My favorite of course was the truck driving chapter Not only is it charming and interesting it spoke to a deep longing to be a truck driver myself In hispilogue McPhee revisits truckers saying that the late night hum at hundreds of truck stops across America is a quintessential piece of our sonic landscape Indeed. Book Uncommon carriers Unfortunately this was a book on mp3 and McPhee is no voice actor I was actually stunned to hear a director listed in the credits since I had sort of assumed McPhee just decided to settle in with a cup of tea one afternoon and read his whole book quietly to himself Recommend to anyone interested in quirky engineering and or is consumed by a burning desire to drive a big piece of machinery Nonfiction Outdoors Nature Science For 35 years I did what I did fairlynjoying the first 34 John McPhee in this book lets me imagine a few other trades Tony in the cab of an 18 wheeler carrying hazmat Tony pushing a thousand feet of 15 barges up the tight assed Illinois River Tony sorting packages in a UPS center letting UPS pay for my college Tony in a coal train wearing a T shirt that says UNION FISH STRIKE MORE On my days off I d paddle a canoe one week with my brother on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers just like those Thoreau boys once did but with likely beer Forget that I d wreck crash get my head severed in a quick stop I m reading and I can do anything. Uncommon Carriers booking Like the hazmat driver who turns to McPhee and says Do you know of a writer named Joan Didion McPhee I was too shy to say Take the of out He s read McCarthy s The Border Trilogy three times because like Moby Dick you learn something new every time He shares an argot murdercycles speedo speeding ticket lollipop mile marker but also sprinkles in paucity and speaks of circadian rhythms McPhee tells us He said shit and fuck probably no than you do. Book Uncommon carriers I learned about the classic sound of locomotives As the clarinettist Skip Livingston mailed the tubist Tom Spain I ve been listening carefully The trains differ different locomotives have different pitches to their horns But I did hear one while I was moving snow on Sunday morning and I was able to get to the piano before I lost the notes They were A sharp E and F sharp below middle C which made it sound like an F sharp 7 chord minus the C sharp The instruments that would come closest to the sound would probably be trombones. Book Uncommon carriersedge I learned this about railroad grades The steepest mainline railroad grade in the United States is Saluda Hill coming off the Blue Ridge of North Carolina at five per cent a thousand vertical feet in four miles It is not presently used To get up it trains were cut into thirds To get down it Dick Eisfeller says they were extremely careful put it that way. Uncommon carriers john mcphee I learned that San Diego thinking itself pretty has few truck stops They have no support structure for trucks The closest real truck stopast is at a casino sixty miles away The closest to the north is Los Angeles County to the south in Mexico To the west nothing for obvious reasons. Book Uncommon carriersedge And I learned the difference between a Jehovah s Witness and the door of a Freightliner You can close the door on a Jehovah s Witness Nonfiction Outdoors Nature Science What John McPhee s books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places Here at his adventurous best he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation Over the past eight years John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth owner and operator of a sixty five footighteen wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats McPhee attends ship handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps where for a tuition of 15000 a week skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty foot scale models He goes up the tight assed Illinois River on atowboat pushing a triple string of barges the overall vessel being a good deal longer than the Titanic And he travels by canoe up the canal and lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother John in a homemade skiff in 1839 Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee in prose distinguished as always by its author s warm humor keen insight and rich sense of human character Uncommon Carriers.