Diesel+JG

Joanne Goodall Response to "Land of the Diesel Bear" by John McPhee I basically dub this article as a good story without a focus. Now, I understand that McPhee does not follow the usual conventional rules set in place for hard news journalists, or even feature writers for that matter. As a journalism student, I've learned how to form a hard news lead and how to structure a feature and neither shows up in "Land of the Diesel Bear" to my knowledge. After reading the title I assumed that McPhee's focus was a profile of a truck driver and the economics of diesel or environmental aspects of diesel- well something about diesel anyways. A drawing of a transport truck underneath the title also helped with my understanding. However, as I read, my mind began to wander away from my first focus idea. The sentence reads,"And always, in various ways, he is listening to and looking for bears." I then thought about bears, as in the animal, and how they could be abundant in the places this truck driver travels to and how dangerous it would be to hit one with a truck. Not only could it hurt you physically but also damage your truck, delaying your shipment, and costing you a pile of money in the long run. But, as I continued to read the very next sentence I became really confused. The second sentence read, "When I noticed a police car deep in a median like a beetle under a lead..." So does this mean police are watching out for bears too, OR, are the cops the bears McPhee is talking about? Turns out the latter is the correct answer and that Don Ainsworth, the truck driver McPhee drove in a truck with, nicknames the cops "bears". So, I would now assume that the article's focus is the relationship between truckers and the police. But the "bears" seem to be a separate side story to the article and that the true focus was a profile of a truck driver all along. At least when I had read it. I feel as though McPhee either went with Ainsworth without a story idea and hoped one would come along or he had an idea but it fell through or he found another story that he thought would be a better read for his audience. Either way, I feel as though he scrambled for a focus and not really delivering. However, even without a hard focus, McPhee's article wasn't bad. It didn't bore me and I could get a sense of Ainsworth as a character. Unlike Stiles in "The Virgin Forest", McPhee doesn't rely on the contrast of physical appearance and intelligence to show Ainsworth's personality but chose quotes that kept the reader interested in him and wanting to learn more. For example, I wonder if Ainsworth nicknames everything he meets or sees on the road because he calls the cops "bears" and the toll booths "hush money". I'm disappointed that McPhee doesn't elaborate on these names because I don't know why Ainsworth calls them these- especially if McPhee mentions bears in his title he must of thought the cops were an important element to his story. Why wouldn't he add an explanation to the nickname? Other nicknames included in the article are "elephant snot" and "lollipop 362". I also liked the little snippets McPhee added about Ainsworth's religious and political views because they are topics of a person's personality that is asked frequently and something a lot of people question each other. My favourite part of the article was the lists of chemicals Ainsworth hauls in his truck and the neat information about WD-40. After reading the list of chemicals, I believe McPhee was trying to get his readers to think about the dangers Ainsworth is in by driving thousands of miles with them in the backseat. I wonder what could happen if Ainsworth was to get into an accident? I thought it was really neat and helpful that McPhee added some information about WD-40. I think McPhee must have felt important to add this information because WD-40 is a well known chemical used on vehicles but we don't know the history about where it is made and why the name. I thought WD was the initials of the inventor but it stands for "water displacement" and I thought the 40 would have to do with something about the chemical levels or something to that effect. But the 40 represents how many trials it took to make the right brew of the substance. Who knew? Now I know. The information about the chemicals also gives weight and understanding to the sentence "The driver of an eighteen-wheel, eighty thousand pound chemical tanker needs to be thinking at least a mile..." This makes perfect sense to me now because it would obviously be dangerous for Ainsworth not to be always on the lookout for possible hazards while on the road hauling chemicals. The paragraphs that McPhee did mentioned the "bears" were pretty informative and helpful. Ainsworth has an unbelievable knowledge and knack to sniff out bears and to know where the cops are and what they are thinking during the day. It's neat to read about how a specific vehicle a cop is driving can determine what they are specifically looking out for and that their communication systems in their cars costs more than the vehicle itself. Ainsworth is able to give the cops "character" by studying what they do, how they act, and why they do it. For example, truck drivers are given time cards that are punched when they begin driving and they can only drive for 11 hours straight after being punched without stopping at a hotel or truck stop. I assume this is for rest and safety precautions which I agree with- you don't want half people falling asleep while driving a thousand pound trucks and chemicals on the highways. However, Ainsworth makes the cops sound irrational and that they are constantly looking for little screw ups to pull you over and hand you a ticket. I don't know if this is true or if Ainsworth is exaggerating or just simply hates the bears. I found it very odd that McPhee had left out parts which I thought would be important aspects of the story (i.e. the explanation for "hush money" meaning toll booths) but wrote in stories that really didn't do much for the story but add description. I like description in articles, don't get me wrong, but in this particular story I didn't need to know that Ainsworth has a wild variety of shoes ranging from mule boots to turtle boots. I think it's neat but it doesn't really tie in with the focus of the story- at all, unless the story is solely about Ainsworth. It's not until the very end of McPhee's piece that I realize the significance of "diesel bear" in his title. At the end it reads "Two million trucks times ten hours times three hundred days amounts to six billion gallons of diesel fuel per annum burned basically to keep truck drivers cool, to keep truck drivers warm, and to keep happy Presidents content." I laughed so hard after reading this because it was a bingo moment. Especially after reading McPhee's "Whiff", I have made a notion that McPhee is not a huge fan of George Bush's politics. He is making a sarcastic remark towards Bush by saying that he is an oil greedy person (which is one argument towards Bush's decision to invade Iraq). Now, I don't know if McPhee is for or against the war but by the sounds of this I can assume that he has made a connection between the importance of oil and gas and its relationship with politics.