Uncommon carriers
By: by John McPhee.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2006
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 248
Subjects: Freight and freightage; Transportation
Description: McPhee's books are about real people in real places. Over the past eight years, McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. This 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-foot, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. He attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the Illinois River on a "towboat" 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.--From publisher description.
Table of contents: title: Fleet of one; title: The ships of Port Revel; title: Tight-assed river; title: Days on the Concord and Merrimack rivers; title: Out in the sort; title: Coal train; title: Fleet of one II.