The Severed Cortex

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Uncommon-Carriers-John-McPhee/dp/0865477396/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-1514635-5264950?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176948997&sr=8-1

by John McPhee

There are very few books about towboats; so few that I feel compelled to write one. I really kick myself for not writing about my experiences more when I was out there. The problem is that the monotony of towboats is not enough to warrant a whole story or at least I've yet to come up with a novel length idea. Short stories or perhaps a chapter in a larger book seem to work however. It does occur to me that it would make a fine documentary subject though. Perhaps I should look into a grant.

I digress.

Uncommon Carriers is a book about the experiences of the author hitching rides on various types of transportation, towboats being one of those types. In the towboat chapter, the author rides on the Illinois River. I spent many a winter on the Illinois, otherwise known as The Shit Ditch, and all I have to say is that central Illinois is the coldest place on the planet. God must really hate those people for whatever they did. My guess is that God isn't a fan of corn. All that aside, the descriptions that McPhee gave were dead spot-on. The characters on the boat could have been any one of the hundreds of people I rode boats with. The locations he talked about brought back memories too. McPhee described the Pekin Wiggles and I had the mental picture in my head along with the god awful smell of the nearby corn sweetener plant. (John Esser can back me up on this one ... we were both on the Frederick B. Wells when a trip pilot missed the lower wiggle and knocked the port wheel off. Hell, John was on watch when it happened. It damn near knocked me out of my bunk.)

So, if McPhee's descriptions were that accurate about towboats, I have to assume all the other descriptions were as well. McPhee rides a tanker truck across the country, spends time behind scale model simulations of ships, rides a mile long coal train through Nebraska, retraces a paddling journey first documented by Thoreau, and traces the path of lobsters from Nova Scotia to your dinner table. The Thoreau chapter was probably my least favorite, followed closely by the ship chapter. I was actually on a ship at the time when I read it and it was only tolerably readable then. I learned quite a bit about each of the transportation modes (towboats aside), but the most intriguing fact to me was about traffic controllers for the railroad. Many of them quit from stress to become air traffic controllers. Sounds crazy but their argument is that in air traffic control you have another dimension to work with. I did learn another interesting tidbit: ship pilots think towboat pilots are crazy good and the ones McPhee talked to spoke in reverence when discussing what it takes to drive a towboat. That gave me a certain amount of pride.

Overall this was an enjoyable book, although I had the hardbound version and it suffered terribly from bad editing. The subject matter is the kind of stuff every male dreams of doing as a kid. Very few get to ever do it and I got to do one of the more obscure ones. While it sounds like a book that a kid would enjoy, you should be aware that there is the occasional f-bomb. Not surprisingly those occurances are pretty much isolated to the truck driving and towboat chapters.