Fleet+of+One+AN

Alex Nowicki

"A Fleet of One"

“A Fleet of One” is the story of Don Ainsworth, a chemical truck driver, who lets McPhee tag along for one of his cross country deliveries. Ainsworth owns and operates his own truck, selling his services as a freelance trucker. He delivers anything from food, to chemicals. The article covers everything from the trucks themselves, to the different cargos and drivers that are hauled and haul.

McPhee starts the article with three paragraphs explaining his bad driving skills and his experience in bad driver school. It works really well as an opener, I believe in the business it’s called a soft lead. The humour that McPhee infuses into his work is a great way to start a piece for the simple reason that it hooks readers, an essential component for a piece dealing with trucking (not everybody’s favourite subject) especially if you want people to read all the way through. McPhee’s humour is not simply superficial, it does fulfill a purpose. Sometimes it is used to emphasize irony and sometimes it’s used as an elaborate comparison. The following example shows the latter, where McPhee rants about his wife’s bad driving skills and then ties that into Don’s great driving skills.

“Ordinarily, I tend to be nervous if I am riding in a car driven by someone else. Like as not, the someone else is Yolanda Whitman, to whom I am married. On trips, we divide the driving time. I make her nervous and she makes me nervous. She was a student in bad-driver school in the same year that I was. While she is at the wheel, I sometimes write letters. I ask the recipients to "excuse my shaky penmanship," and explain that I am "riding in a badly driven car." Coast to coast with Don Ainsworth was as calm an experience as sitting in an armchair watching satellite pictures of the Earth. In only three moments did anxiety in any form make a bid for the surface.

One thing that stands out with all of McPhee’s articles is his brilliant similes and metaphors. He has an incredible knack for associating two things to transmit a clear image. One great example in this article is when he describes the police officer instructing him in bad driver school, he compares his voice to a gun, very effective.

“When I went to bad-driver school, the opening lecturer did not imply any such flaws in his students. He was a real bear. He wore blue-and-yellow trousers and a badge. In a voice he fired like a .45, he began by asking us, "How many of you people think you're good drivers?"

The emphasis McPhee places on himself as a character in this article makes me wonder if this is truly literary journalism, or if it is more akin to Creative Non-fiction, which is the creative selection of memories or events to tell a particular story. His older material seems more journalistic, for they are colder and more dispassionate compared to his more recent articles, which include him. He does, however, deliver a lot of pertinent information during the article, not just memories. So maybe this is article is somewhere between journalism and travel writing.

McPhee seems very interested in Jargon (specialized language). From his geological articles to the Fleet of One, McPhee absorbs the language and delivers to us the unfiltered story. This can either empower or alienate readers. Having read “Assembling California” I can say that the saturation of Jargon made reading it almost impossible, however, in “Fleet of One”, McPhee explains most of the terms letting the reader pick up on the subtleties of what he is describing to us.

“We crossed the Columbia River and went over the Horse Heaven Hills into the Yakima Valley, apples and grapes in the Horse Heaven Hills, gators in the valley. To avoid a gator he swung far right, over rumble bars along the shoulder. A gator is a strip of tire, dead on the road, nearly always a piece of a recap. "A gator can rip off your fuel-crossover line, punch in your bumper, bomb out a fender."

Just a passing note, McPhee seems to form friendships with most of his interviewers, which could explain the amount of information they divulge to him, but couldn’t relationship also cause favouritism? I know McPhee is no ordinary journalist, but he still carries the reliability given to the title. Does bias having anyplace in literary journalism? 